Interview: Curtis Yarvin

A revisionist reading of the twentieth century

Photo: Jérôme Bonnet for Les Échos Week-End

Curtis Yarvin is a blogger and political theorist known for his writings under the pen name Mencius Moldbug. He also serves as CEO of Tlon, a San Francisco–based software company backed by Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Pantera Capital.

What follows is a transcript of our conversation, which took place on September 30, 2025. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

[Note: The opinions expressed by the interviewee are their own and do not necessarily represent those of the interviewer.]

The Aura Farming Controversy

CB: Recently, you did this interview on Japanese TV, and it went pretty viral on Twitter, on X. People were accusing you of aura farming. And I wanted to ask you to respond to that allegation.

CY: Yeah, I wasn’t, I mean, you know, I mean, what is this? I can’t imagine it being a legal charge, because then you’d have to define “aura farming,” right? Intentionally seeking to appeal to women on the internet? Is that the definition? You know, I’m an entertainer, what can I say? But, yeah, no, it was that they just shot me very well in a very Japanese fashion. Anything that kind of looks like an album cover with Japanese lettering on it, you know the Japanese import. You’re familiar, of course, with the Tom Waits song “Big in Japan.”

CB: I think the dubbing played a big role. And the lighting too, very cinematic.

CY: Kino, kino.

“America Invaded Europe”

CB: You gave another interview earlier this year to The Spectator, where you said that the definitive history of World War II has yet to be written. I thought that was a very interesting statement, because this has to be the most written-about subject in history.

CY: Sure, but history is, first and foremost, a narrative rather than a recitation of facts. You can arrange perfectly true facts all day long, but if the story is wrong, you’re just making a falsehood more compelling. Let me give you a specific example. Imagine you’re a historian in, say, the seventh millennium A.D., and you would like to explain World War II. But there’s a problem, you can only use three words.

CB: Global resource competition.

CY: I think I would probably go with “America invaded Europe.” And the narrative of America invaded Europe, that is coming at it from a slightly different direction than you might admit. So when you have descriptions of the future, predictions of the future, they’re always very interesting, because if they seem preternaturally accurate, they are likely to reflect some kind of thinking which is either predictive or illustrative in some sense.

About thirty years ago, I was up in Mendocino, California, at a very cool used bookstore in Boonville, might’ve been with my first girlfriend, or maybe my late wife, terrible confusion, I know, and I found a book called A Journey of a Jayhawker. The binding had been replaced, very obscure book. It was by a Midwestern newspaper editor from Kansas, clearly a descendant of those New Englanders who went to Kansas in the nineteenth century. Literate man, classic liberal Midwesterner type, like Henry Wallace, from like 1903, before any of this stuff had happened.

He decides to go to Europe, does the grand tour, and he’s gonna write letters home, and when he gets home, he’s gonna turn them into a book. And he does this. Somehow it fell into my hands in the 1990s. You’d think it wouldn’t be very interesting, but it’s boiling with hate. It’s a very, very hostile book. The feeling is, these Europeans think they’re better than us, these dukes and counts and princes, and one day we’ll invade and settle their hash. I was like, wait, did that happen? Because it feels like that happened.

The idea that that happened is not normally how we parse the world wars, it is not normally the narrative structure of the world wars, but in an important sense it did happen. I think of World War II as more of a global religious war. If we zoom in on that invasion of Europe, it’s basically factual. Now sure, Russia was invading Europe too, and that complicates things, but not hugely, because from the seventh millennium point of view, the difference between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. won’t seem that different. Two progressive superpowers and maybe they fall out later. But it’s clear Americans during World War II did not see the Soviets as a peer competitor, they saw it as a very difficult satellite. Alger Hiss didn’t feel he was betraying his country to a peer, he thought he was sharing with partners, with whom America would govern the world through the United Nations in San Francisco, specifically in or around UN Plaza.

So, when you alter the basic body plan of the story, any narrative that proceeds from that three-word history “America invaded Europe” is going to be a very different book from any of the books about World War II that have been written so far, at least on the Allied side. Zooming in from the seventh millenium perspective, the “view from Sirius,” as the French say, let’s consider the last two centuries as a kind of historical unity. So if we look at the world for the last 210 years, since Waterloo, has the world been a multipolar order with multiple competing peer great powers, or is it a unipolar order with a single primus inter pares? I would say it’s clear that the post-1815 world order has been a unipolar order, and I don’t think there is ever a peer competitor of what we more broadly describe as the Anglo-American era. France after 1815 is never seriously challenging England. Now, you have this interesting dynamic where power shifts between London and Washington, roughly after World War I. That is interesting, but you know, London and Washington are not, in any sense, unitary actors in this whole period. They are very complicated bags of forces, and the face they wear to the outside world is not necessarily the actual structure of the regime. Decisions are much more personal back then. They run through smaller groups of people. And so it’s much more possible, in a sense, for, you know, “conspiracy theories” to exist. Let me give you one example of this. Are you familiar with the name Colonel House?

CB: Yes, Woodrow Wilson’s emissary.

CY: Yeah, he was a Kentucky colonel, and he’s a weird fellow. It’s just like, it’s never really clear who he’s working for. Is he Wilson’s foreign policy assistant? Is he Wilson’s foreign policy handler? Like, he’s a very obscure figure. You know, he wrote this book. What was the book called? The weird novel, Philip Dru: Administrator, wonderful title, extremely balls to the wall, early proto–progressive fascism. You go far enough back and fascism and communism are one thing, and it’s amazing, right? So, in any case, Colonel House, weird fella. So, you probably know Christopher Clark’s book The Sleepwalkers, on World War I.

CB: Yeah.

CY: So, you know, the thesis of The Sleepwalkers is essentially that a number of powerful structures, but mainly the British Foreign Office, were sleepwalking. They didn’t really understand the reality that they were living in, and as a result, their sincere efforts to prevent war seem to have accidentally, in the manner of a sleepwalker, brought on this war. And so, basically, he documents this kind of incompetence and miscalculations. And it almost seems that every time they do something that is intended to create peace, it makes the war more inevitable. And what you notice is, if you know the Central Powers’ theory of the war, this is super interesting, because essentially, you’re saying once Clark’s work becomes the mainstream, you’re basically saying, all right, the Foreign Office caused the war. The only question is whether it was done through incompetence or malice. And, as you know, there’s Hanlon’s Razor that says when you’re choosing between incompetence and malice, you should always pick incompetence. And that’s true in certain contexts. And I don’t know about it from the perspective of the Foreign Office in 1914. My understanding is that these guys were maybe kind of at the top of their game, and they seem actually very, very competent compared to today’s diplomats. And so one has to wonder. And so then I came across this interesting cable from Colonel House, who is, you know, I think this is from The Intimate Papers of Colonel House. So, there’s a cable that House writes back to Wilson from Europe in May 1914, and Clark quotes this cable. Many people quote this cable, but he cuts the cable off at a certain point. Most people who quote the cable cut it off. And my question, if Clark was here in the room with us, which obviously he’s not, I would ask him whether he was the one who did this, in which case he was quoting a secondary source in a very irresponsible way, or he cut the quote off himself, which is basically far worse. But I will read this back to you, and you can guess where Clark cuts the quote off:

“The situation is extraordinary. It is militarism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you [meaning Wilson] can bring about a different understanding, there is someday to be an awful cataclysm [again, three months before Sarajevo. So that takes care of that theory]. No one in Europe can do it. There’s too much hatred, too many jealousies. Whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria. England does not want Germany wholly crushed, for she would then have to reckon alone with her ancient enemy, Russia. But if Germany insists upon an ever-increasing navy, then England will have no choice.”

So, Clark cuts that off before the word whenever. And the phrase “Whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria” is basically the simplest summary of World War I that I’ve ever seen, because that is essentially saying French foreign policy is occurring within the English orbit, as is Russian foreign policy ever since the Russo–Japanese War, in which, of course, the English are supporting the Japanese to basically kick the butt of the old autocracy and convince it that it has to side with, like, new liberalism for some crazy reason. And, of course, Russia is pulling the strings on Serbia. And we now know well that, if anything, Austria understated the case against Serbia, right? And so when you admit that, you basically, I would say, see again the true narrative of World War I, which was that basically what the Foreign Office was trying to do was start World War I with a very simple and effective tactic used by stronger powers of kicking the dog until it bites and then calling the dog a mad dog and then shooting it. So, the choice that England, as mistress of the world, gave the Austrians and Germans in the wake of Sarajevo was a very simple one. It said, all right, either you renounce your unilateral right to go to war and basically we form a kangaroo court that will decide on the result, which basically would mean that the Central Powers were really ceding their sovereignty to Lord Grey, or go to war, in which case we won’t tell you what we’re going to do. Well, probably if England had said what they were going to do, the trap would not have been effective at all. But if they’d said England won’t go to war, then Serbia just becomes part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire. If they say England will go to war, they would have backed down, as they did many times, but the ambiguity forced them to either be really humiliated by ambiguity, and therefore back down almost preemptively in a way, or being bold and then calling a bluff which did not turn out to be a bluff. What the Foreign Office thought, the mindset there was, they were in this kind of Great Game mindset. They’re like bureaucracies everywhere, they’re seeking to justify their own existence. You know, they’ve gotten into this, “Well, if Germany has too big a navy, then our connection to India would be threatened,” right? You know, like, thirty years later, you’re going to give away India without a fight. And, like, this is the whole thing of the Great Game, “Oh, we must gallivant around Afghanistan, because the Russians can take India,” right? You know. Well, you gave it back to the Indians. And, like, so there were all of these bureaucrats coming up with bullshit pretexts why they have to do their jobs. It’s really fun to play Great Games. And it was plausible. And at the same time, basically nobody, not even Parliament, not even a lot of the Cabinet, knew that this was going on. They didn’t know that there were the Anglo–French naval conversations. Suddenly, the French were like, we don’t need to defend the North Sea, England will do it for us. And Germany’s like, what? Actually, Germany, when they invade Belgium, Belgium is not de facto neutral. Belgium is engaged in joint military planning with the English and the French, right? It’s not neutral at all, right? And so, like, all of these things are sort of bullshit. Of course, the Foreign Office are not a bunch of serial killers, and they didn’t want to have the World War I that we had. What they felt was that they basically expected something much more like the Franco–Prussian War. They expected they’d set up a really strong imbalance of forces, like, we did all the chess game right, we broke the League of the Three Emperors. We got the Czar to fight against the Kaiser. They’d just done, they were expecting, they were just getting A’s on their papers, basically. And here is, in a way, one of the dirtiest things about World War I. Now, Sean McMeekin, who is a very good historian, at least on the continent, I think he has been, to date, a little too trusting of Anglo-American foreign policy. So, he writes this book that basically cites the responsibility for triggering World War I with the Russians, specifically with Sazonov and Izvolsky. It’s sort of the Russian liberals who are very involved with the French. He’s seeing the second half of Colonel House’s sentence, but not really the first, because England did indeed have to consent. But one of the most messed up things about the history of World War I is that basically there’s, of course, this Russian idea of Pan-Slavism, which says the Serbians are Slavic brothers. If they speak really slowly, we can understand them, they go to the same church as ours, they use the same stupid letters, we have to go and defend them. So, this feeling of Pan-Slavism was a Russian expansionist ideology. And obviously the great spectrum of Russian ideology in this period is right to left. You know, Rasputin is all the way on the right. He’s an ignorant Slavic mystic, and on the left, you have people like the prince who killed Rasputin, theater kid basically, right? And so basically, the theater kids kill Rasputin, right? And Rasputin is just like, you know, there’s no one who’s actually pro-German there, per se, but they’re constantly being accused of it. But, you know, Rasputin and the Russian right are just like, why are we even doing this? There’s something called the Durnovo Memorandum that’s written by Pyotr Durnovo, the Minister of the Interior, before the war, that’s like, “hey, your Highness, people are trying to get us into this war against Germany and Austria on the side of Britain and France, and just thought you should know that if this happens the monarchy will fall and Russia will be plunged into chaos,” right? So, you know, like, something scientific going on here, right? And what is truly messed up, however, is that Pan-Slavism, in the period before the war, switches from being a unilaterally held, radical, obscurantist, Dostoyevsky Russian cause, it suddenly becomes a liberal cause. “Oh, no, the liberals are all full of concern for their Serbian brothers.” Why do you suppose that would be? Do you suppose it might be because they wanted to get the Czar into a war against the two Kaisers and therefore bring about the fall of Russia and the triumph of democratic forces? Indeed, they did. And so, like, you don’t even have to think about it. That position suddenly became attractive to liberals because it was a position that offered power, and liberals have no principles.

So actually, basically, that’s your history of World War I.

The Rebellion of a Rising Power

CB: How do you view the conspiracy theory, which became quite popular in the 1930s, during the depression, that US intervention in World War I was mainly about keeping JP Morgan solvent?

CY: It’s complicated and really murky at that time, right? I mean, conspiracy theories take a different kind of form in the Edwardian era than they take in the era of FDR. What is the relationship between Wall Street and Woodrow Wilson? I have a clearer picture there for FDR maybe, but it just gets really murky and really shady. There’s certainly an element of radical ideology, an element of money, an element of rational national power. There’s all of these things. But the unity, the sort of goal of reunifying the British Empire in an Anglo-American world order, is definitely pre–World War I. It’s a Carnegie-Rhodes kind of thing. You’re looking at the world of Carnegie, Rhodes, Morgan, whatever. These are individuals who are pillars of this establishment. And certainly, to understand it, you can’t write history in terms of press releases. One of the things, when I met McMeekin at the start of the year, I said, “I love your work, but I think you’re too credulous of official motivations and official interpretations on this side of the Atlantic.” Whereas basically, if the Austrian Foreign Ministry says, “We’re doing X for Y reason,” you’re going to consider the possibility that Y isn’t true until proven false. You certainly should do that for Stalin, right? But for FDR or Wilson, you can’t just say, “Oh, they said what they were thinking.” Or Churchill, you can’t take their statements at face value and treat them as truth. That’s just stenography.

So all of this enormous corpus of World War I and World War II books rests on assumptions that are fundamentally stenographic in nature. They’re not going to lead you to the conclusion that, if you look at World War I, it was basically the rebellion of a rising power against the coming international order.

“World War II is a Global Progressive Jihad”

CB: It seems that from the US perspective, World War II is mainly about China.

CY: No. World War II is a global progressive jihad, really. And so the reason you’re seeing it as being very relevant to China at the time is that it’s a missionary jihad, a jihad of basically Protestant universalism. So, for example, the kind of organizational structures and people that, after the war, become the framework of the global foreign aid establishment were, before the war, the global mainline Protestant missionary movement. A missionary before 1940 was a mainline missionary, and a missionary after 1945 was only evangelical. The mainline Unitarian missionary movement secularizes itself. And in China, you see this very closely because you see this huge interaction of the Rockefeller-supported mainline missionary world that morphs seamlessly into being the “China Hands.” So you get the worldview of Pearl S. Buck, or whatever. Dreadful novel I had to read in high school.

And if you look at the course of Protestant jihad in China, you have this interesting sequence where first the missionaries come to teach Jesus, and they run up against the Boxers. And the Qing dynasty is still very active at that time, collaborates with the Boxers a little bit, in the manner of the PLO’s armed wing and non-armed wing. The Kaiser, for one, does not take that lying down. They sack the Summer Palace, something, something, something, but it’s bad vibes.

And this happens all over the world, especially in the Islamic world. You get a newer generation of missionaries in the very late nineteenth century who are like, “All right, we’re going to teach Western thought and Western values, and basically Unitarianism, rather than Jesus.” You notice how all around the world, you get these suspiciously identical nationalisms? Why do Chinese nationalists in the 1890s look so much like Arab nationalists in the 1890s? Because they’re not really nationalists, they’re globalists. They’re taught by the same people, they’re inspired by the same people. And the first thing all these “nationalists” want to do is throw out their indigenous culture and form of government and replace it with a carbon copy of the West. How that can be marketed as nationalism is somewhat beyond me because it’s clearly the opposite of nationalism. Many such cases.

And there was always an answer to this. For example, Sun Yat Sen would say, “Well, the Qing aren’t really Chinese, they’re Manchus, so we’re restoring China from the Qing.” The Arabs said the same thing about the Ottoman Empire, “We’re nationalists because…” it’s all bullshit.

One of the sources I found once really blew my mind. It was something in The Christian Century, or another mainline Protestant missionary magazine, from a missionary in China in the 1890s. All the missionaries were saying the same thing, which is that these people are perfect Christians, perfect modern Europeans. Essentially, all we need to do to bring them into the modern world and make them Yankees, because this is very much cultural imperialism, is to get rid of everything about them except their language and their ethnicity. If you compare Peking in 1875 to Beijing in 2025 to Philadelphia in 1875, Beijing in 2025 looks a lot more like Philadelphia in 2025. The clothes people are wearing, the English letters, the political form, it didn’t get there from Moscow. You’ve imported all this.

Basically, this writer goes on and on about all these “bad” Chinese traditions like foot binding. There’s a really old tradition in Western writing of hating on foot binding. Pearl Buck was hating on foot binding a hundred years ago. I guess it’s pretty hateful, I wouldn’t bind feet, my wife’s are already pretty small, but you know, even if they weren’t, I wouldn’t bind them. I’m not a foot guy.

Anyway, this guy’s hating on ancestor worship, pagodas, basically everything Chinese. And I’m like, wait a second, it’s the 1890s, but I know what he’s talking about. He’s talking about the “Four Olds.” So there’s obviously a thread running through this kind of missionary cultural imperialism to the destruction of Chinese cultural heritage by the Chinese themselves, like Mao, who was partly educated by missionaries.

You may ask, why does China destroy all of its culture in the 1960s? Well, maybe it was indoctrinated to do so. Preserving that experiment of the missionary China was a big deal. And when China was “lost,” of course, the China Hands did not see it as losing China. First of all, they were huge fans of the Communists to begin with. If you read Edgar Snow or anyone like that during World War II, all of the media is pro-Communist China. You have, basically with small exceptions, the same split you see in all imperialisms, the missionary imperialism of the teacher, the aid worker, the one who wants to capture their soul, and the practical imperialism of the soldier, the settler, the trader.

And the last exponents of practical American imperialism in that era are people like Douglas MacArthur and Claire Chennault. Douglas MacArthur is a hereditary Asia hand because his father is Arthur MacArthur, who was our proconsul in the Philippines. The Philippines were like his hereditary domain.

CB: He’s the second generation, hereditary king of the Philippines.

CY: Yeah, and so MacArthur greatly mitigates the occupation of Japan, so it’s not crazy and brutal like the occupation of Germany. And, of course, to him, the Kuomintang losing is losing China. In fact, objectively, I don’t know what you kept when you “kept” China, but the people running China’s foreign policy to this day, even though those ties have mostly dwindled, naturally, viscerally, expect their allies to be on the left. They basically do all this Global South stuff, which is clearly the remnant of the whole UN-UNESCO global left mission, right? Both China and Russia, in their foreign policy, behave as if they really don’t know that they’re right-wing powers. I think, in a very serious way, they do not understand their ideological position in history and in the world.

And so, when you’re looking at U.S. policy in China in World War II, you’re looking at this piece of this kind of global progressive jihad. But when you go back and read, it just jumps out at you when you go back and read the primary sources, or if you read books from the other direction, if you read Wyndham Lewis’s interwar books, I think they lay out the situation with marvelous clarity.

There’s a book called European Jungle by Francis Gates Brown, which is very, very good. Left Wings Over Europe, that’s the Wyndham Lewis book that’s really solid in terms of its prediction of World War II. I would say Left Wings Over Europe, which was written in 1936, is a better history of World War II, in some ways, than any history written after the war, because it actually explains the model.

So, for example, the standard model says the alliance of the U.S. and the Soviet Union was an alliance of convenience because they both needed to defend themselves against Hitler’s insane plan to conquer the world, right? All right, if you’re a fan of Marvel or DC movies, that’s probably the backbone you want to hang your history on. But that is certainly not the backbone that I hang my history on.

I think that U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations are tremendously complicated. From 1917 to 1989, I think there are many secrets that have not been divulged. Remember when it was disclosed after the fall of the Soviet Union, for example, that Ted Kennedy sent his main guy to Moscow to negotiate with Andropov as to what their shared strategy for the 1984 presidential election should be? I think it was John Tunney, not Gene Tunney. One of them was the prizefighter, and one of them was Kennedy’s guy, right? But, like, you know, if that had been disclosed at the time, people would have had a fit.

Another good example, that I always love, which was one of the inciting incidents for me to really want to rethink the twentieth century. I was reading some very scurrilous South African right-wing blog, the author made a claim that seemed not credible to me. The claim was that, in 1960, a young lady who was a researcher at the Carnegie Institute had composed a joint U.S.-Soviet plan for an invasion of South Africa. I was like, “That’s rad.” I’m like, “wow, you mean the Marine Corps and the Red Army joining hands on the Transvaal?” So I was like, okay, this is insane. So it’s either true or false. If it’s false, it would be very discrediting. So I’m going to find this. And I did indeed order this document called South Africa and United Nations Collective Measures, which was indeed from 1960 or thereabouts. And, yes, it’s true that the military plan was only the last chapter, the rest was about economic sanctions. Were those economic sanctions indeed applied? They were.

“The Twentieth Century’s History Hasn’t Been Written Yet.”

CB: Conflict with the Boer is relatively constant throughout Anglo-American imperial history.

CY: You know, we never liked the Boer. But if you read it in terms of South African history, it’s just a straight step from the defeat of the Boer republics to the final conquest of South Africa in 1994.

In any case, you’re basically like, “Oh, wait a second.” First of all, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. did both support Mandela. Secondly, Mandela was on the Politburo of the S.A.C.P. Thirdly, they did eventually conquer the country and give it over to the S.A.C.P. And fourth, they’re really just talking about getting the band back together fifteen years after World War II.

Moreover, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. also collaborate very effectively at Suez, where it was the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. against the British and the French. So if you see these things as anomalies that don’t make sense, that means your comic book history needs more epicycles to explain this vicious Cold War. Because, you know, most people who do Cold War studies don’t ask, “Why did we have this weird marriage at all?” They ask, “Why did the marriage break up?”

They’re implicitly assuming the broad plan of elite policy toward the U.S.S.R., toward the Bolsheviks, from 1917 to 1989, which is convergence theory. And they’re like, “Why did convergence theory fail?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, why did we have a convergence theory?” That’s the more interesting question here.

We never had a convergence theory with Nazi Germany. I mean, Lindbergh went over at some point, they gave him some beers and a medal. If you’re looking at the social links between the U.S.S.R., London, and New York versus the social links between Nazi Berlin and New York, if you’re doing a topography of those social connections, you get just massive biceps arcing out over the Arctic to Moscow. Whereas the connections with Berlin are like, “Oh yeah, somebody knew somebody,” or, you know, Ernst Hanfstaegl at Harvard or whatever, you know? There’s just no comparison.

And so any history that treats the alliance of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. as merely one of convenience, I don’t buy that. I actually think F.D.R. and Churchill had prior knowledge of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. I think it was a trap set by Stalin for Hitler, but I think Stalin was working with the West to set that trap and kick off the war.

The most salient evidence for this is that, if Washington and London had really thought that Stalin was throwing in his hat with Hitler, they would have flipped out. And instead, the reaction of their foreign policy to Stalin’s foreign policy in 1940 was, “We are going to be as quiet as a church mouse.” Yeah, okay, we’ll make some noise about Finland, we’ll plan some things that never happen. We’ll behave as if this is real, but we’re not making any serious commitments that this is real.

They even sent a competing delegation to negotiate with Stalin at the same time, but that delegation consisted of only lower-ranking people, and its mission was to fail and make it look like Stalin picked Hitler. But Stalin did not, in fact, pick Hitler. Hitler figured this out and invaded Russia.

The problem then was that Stalin thought he had everything worked out because he had roughly ten times as many tanks as Hitler. He’s like, “All right, we’re going to mass everybody.” There was no surprise attack. You can’t have a surprise attack at that scale. It was widely reported in the world press that armies were massing on the border, on both sides. How could you conceal that? Not even in a totalitarian state.

But basically, Stalin had much better intelligence than Hitler. Hitler’s intelligence was kind of shit, Stalin’s was the best ever. Hitler didn’t even know how many tanks Stalin had. You can hear Hitler saying this on the only tape of Hitler having a frank conversation, which is this discussion with Mannerheim, which was accidentally taped. The Finns taped it. That’s sincere Hitler, Hitler being Hitler. And Hitler’s like, “Jesus Christ, we had no idea.”

Stalin, however, not only had a clear idea of German military assets, he also knew how bad Hitler’s intelligence about him was. So he’s like, “All right, this is the perfect setup. Hitler’s going to attack, and he doesn’t realize how strong I am. He’s going to attack armies ten times as strong as his, and it will look like the mad dog attacked, and then we’re just going to sweep all the way to the Channel.” That was Stalin’s plan.

Stalin did not realize however how much more effective the Wehrmacht was than his forces, especially the tremendous advantage of being on the attack. He was basically not fortified for defense; he was fortified for attack. He was deployed for attack both because he intended to attack and because he thought he was so much stronger he didn’t need to worry about defense. And then he just got carved up and almost lost the war.

Moreover, one of the things about the geopolitics of World War II, this is something extremely obvious that’s almost never mentioned, even though it’s not a secret at all, is that, of course, the U.S. was supplying the Soviet Union during the war. And what was the route by which the U.S. was supplying the Soviet Union? There are three of them.

CB: Yeah, they’re going up through the Arctic, through Murmansk, they’re going through Iran, and they’re going across the Pacific, through Japanese imperial waters, right?

CY: That’s right. I mean, obviously, what they’re sending across the Pacific is not contraband of war, it is not munitions. It is merely trucks and butter and oil and coal and steel and aluminum and all the other things you need to win the war. So, you know, the puzzling question then is why Axis high command does not just snap its fingers and win the war. Because clearly the Eastern Front is close enough that without that source of supplies, the Russians have no chance.

CB: I mean, surely the Japanese thought the Russians might hit them from the flank in Manchuria, right?

CY: Well, yeah, but there was no actual possibility. The Russians were at the limits of their strength. They were neutral with respect to the Russians. They basically thought they were playing diplomacy and that they were in a world of independent great power actors. And so, you know, that’s why even at the end of the war they turned to Russia. They’re like, “All right, we’re messed up. Why doesn’t this neutral power intermediate?” They were playing basically the game of diplomacy according to Grotius in the seventeenth century.

What this shows you is that the Germans and Japanese did not even realize that they were in a world war. World War II is three independent rebellions against the incipient world order of what we now call the international community, which is clearly the sort of descendant of the British Empire.

And that is the context in which “America invaded Europe” suddenly makes sense. America invaded Europe because otherwise these rebellions would have succeeded, as would the German rebellion at the start of the century. To the Japanese, it’s like the relationship between China and Russia today, or China, Russia, and Iran. They’re not an “axis of evil.” They barely trust each other. There was no Axis high command. The Axis is a press release.

Of course, Americans are told that World War II is a war to defend themselves against an Axis plan for world domination. That’s all true, except for the fact that there is no Axis and no plan for world domination. And if there had been an Axis and a plan for world domination, the bad guys would have won.

So this is why I say that there hasn’t been a history of World War II, or even of the twentieth century, written that you could even take seriously. It’s like expecting to find a serious history of the Soviet Union that was published in the Soviet Union. You can read The Great Soviet Encyclopedia as long as you want, it’s a massive work, and I suppose “Great Soviet Encyclopedia” is a mistranslation. It’s probably just Big Soviet Encyclopedia or Large Soviet Encyclopedia, but I love the phrase Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

I’m sure there’s an English translation of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia. I’m sure its chemistry is, you know, etc., etc., etc. But you might as well get your history from Wikipedia, right? It’s basically true on many, many subjects and then just, well, it’s just not living in reality.

And that’s normal for historical periods. Some historian said that we know more about the Roman Empire than any Roman ever did. We understand it better because we’re living outside its lies. The problem is that we live in this world order that was created as a result of various military conflicts from 1815 through 1945, and to understand it from the outside, there’s no source we can really consult.

When I’m talking to European historians, especially European historians who study America, I always want to freak them out a little bit. So I say, “Well, here’s something that would be an interesting paper or thesis project or book. You can go and read all the books published in Germany between 1933 and 1945 about America, or England. Maybe just America. It’s a lot of books.”

And they’re like, “Oh…” Well, for a lot of reasons they don’t, but one of them is that, to get those books, they’d have to go to special collections that require special permission to access. Those books were actually illegal to possess in Germany after the war. They all had to be pulped, except for locked collections. You were not allowed to have any serious Nazi book as a private possession after the war. I don’t know if those laws are still on the books. They’re not enforced, in that you can buy and sell these books, you’ll probably not get in trouble, but yeah, this is like reading Western books on the Soviet Union.

And you’re going to find a lot of nonsense in these books, a lot of Nazi nonsense of various kinds, but I bet you’d also find some very trenchant and interesting observations that people don’t want to have.

So when you talk, for example, about Allied war crimes in World War II, Allied war crimes after World War II, and you talk about these subjects to Germans, they’re like, “We know about that. Yes, my uncle told me about that. Yes, we don’t talk about it.” Or sometimes they don’t know, but a lot of them are like, “Yeah, I know that happened,” if you’re talking to AfD people, right?

And so there’s this way in which you have this twentieth-century order that, you can study it ad nauseam, and you can write a zillion pages of various books, right? But the thing is, if you’re proceeding from the wrong historical plan, if you’re working within that tradition, it’s like evolving a six-legged animal into a four-legged animal. There’s just no way of evolving an ant into a dog.

The necessity is breaking those frames completely, rather than operating within the frame of international relations as studied in connection with twentieth-century history. If you’re viewing anything in terms of one or two illusions, if you have any illusions in the system that you haven’t debunked, your model could be as different from reality as the Copernican system is from the Ptolemaic system. That’s why I say the twentieth century’s history hasn’t been written yet.