Update 4.10.24 - made this episode free for all, removed paywall, read about predicting genocide. - D

Here’s the eleventh episode from Adjutants Lounge, all rights are Ben and Phil.

Half an hour transcript for everybody, the rest for paid subscribers. Might release for free to everybody in future, might not.

Full audio for free here:

Transcript

00:00:01 Ben Skipper

Hello and welcome to the entrance lounge.

00:00:05 Ben Skipper

We're continuing the the, the the series, the Russian man War and today is past 11. I'm joined by Co presenter, Doctor Philip Blood. Doctor Phil, how are you?

00:00:17 Philip Blood

I'm very well. Thank you, Ben. And how are you?

00:00:19 Ben Skipper

Living the dream, living the dream and also joined once again by Castle and Dustin Ducane Dustin, how are you?

00:00:30 Dustin Du Cane

Fine. Thank you.

00:00:33 Ben Skipper

We we, this, this, this sort of series of podcasts.

00:00:39 Ben Skipper

Has developed along several themes, obviously in line with with with the current war in Ukraine.

00:00:49 Ben Skipper

And we, we just had a had a had a sort of a pre recording chat and there's several things we'd like to discuss there. We had we hope to be joined by by somebody else before she technical issues prevent the the individual joining us.

00:01:03 Ben Skipper

We hope to have him back soon.

00:01:05 Ben Skipper

So.

00:01:08 Ben Skipper

We carry on with the genocide theme and I'm I'm not gonna sort of mince and we're just gonna launch straight into it. This is the questions being posed is that?

00:01:16 Ben Skipper

Genocidal intent is, is there genocidal intent on Russian special military operations?

00:01:26 Philip Blood

Who's starting me off dusting?

00:01:29 Ben Skipper

Either or, because this is, this is something sounds brittle. It it it's a ball that that fits nicely in both of your.

00:01:36 Ben Skipper

Your specialities?

00:01:36 Philip Blood

OK.

00:01:38 Philip Blood

OK, well.

00:01:39 Philip Blood

Let's just recap. We're dusting my art producing book, writing a book with a couple of colleagues, Chris Bellamy and Doctor Nick Terry from Exeter University, and it's about annihilation, warfare and the Russian way of war.

00:01:56 Philip Blood

I am I. I've been designated with putting together a chapter on.

00:02:03 Philip Blood

The Cold War.

00:02:05 Philip Blood

As a fighting period to open the.

00:02:09 Philip Blood

Book.

00:02:11 Philip Blood

Basically a series of interviews with uh U.S. Army Colonel talking about the question of how quickly was it expected to get to nuclear war.

00:02:23 Philip Blood

If.

00:02:25 Philip Blood

Conventional forces were used in the folder gap area.

00:02:30 Philip Blood

My own specific chapters, the one of them is on mechanised genocide.

00:02:38 Philip Blood

Built into the Russian Web War and the others on the war in in the European future.

00:02:45 Philip Blood

And obviously.

00:02:49 Philip Blood

One is military specific, one is political, civil military relations type.

00:02:56 Philip Blood

History.

00:02:58 Philip Blood

What?

00:02:59 Philip Blood

Happened in the last few weeks as the the discussions about artillery and genocide and the nature of the genocide in.

00:03:09 Philip Blood

This present war in Ukraine has raised a number of questions, and it was pretty clear to me.

00:03:17 Philip Blood

That one of the primary problems that academics have and military experts is how to predict genocide happening.

00:03:27 Philip Blood

How how do you predict it's gonna happen and how do you prevent it once you've made the correct prediction?

00:03:34 Philip Blood

Now if you look at most genocide or Holocaust research.

00:03:40 Philip Blood

Most of it is focused focused on a historical or sociological historical methodology which assumes the genocide has happened.

00:03:52 Philip Blood

It's much harder to look at the genocide before it started.

00:03:56 Philip Blood

Work out where it's gonna happen, how it's gonna happen, how it's gonna develop from a certain amount of information so.

00:04:05 Philip Blood

I set my mind to the task of working out how you would predict based on my research, how you would predict potential genocide.

00:04:17 Philip Blood

And my conclusions are.

00:04:20 Philip Blood

That they it, it would happen in phases, first of all.

00:04:25 Philip Blood

The military doctrines and by the way, I'm presuming at the moment we're not talking about a fascist state. We're talking about any state. So.

00:04:33 Philip Blood

Neutral politics here. We're just talking about the physicality of.

00:04:40 Philip Blood

Imposing a military policy that leads to.

00:04:45 Philip Blood

Genocide. OK, so.

00:04:47 Philip Blood

The first part is to have a doctrine or a mission.

00:04:52 Philip Blood

Which is open-ended a catch all without specific a non specific doctrine or mission which says something like attack in Ukraine.

00:05:06 Philip Blood

So we don't.

00:05:08 Philip Blood

We don't mention ******. You can mention Nazis, but the actual mission is to invade and attack. And I think if you go back.

00:05:18 Philip Blood

There was possibly that could a man against Zelenski government. There were the various lodgement points.

00:05:27 Philip Blood

Which I call the Anaconda plan then was the artillery.

00:05:31 Philip Blood

And so on and so forth.

00:05:34 Philip Blood

The point of all of that is there was a.

00:05:38 Philip Blood

Identifiable military mission based within the special mission doctrine. OK, so that's the first part. The second part of the Opera of of, of looking at this is the kind of forces that are put.

00:05:54 Philip Blood

Into this mix.

00:05:58 Philip Blood

On special military operation and for what purpose? So.

00:06:03 Philip Blood

If the if, if it was about speed of taking out the government hitting the the the the Ukrainian forces in such a way that caused devastation ripple effect all the way around as as I thought the plan was and I still think that was the case.

00:06:21 Philip Blood

Then they would quickly.

00:06:24 Philip Blood

Take out.

00:06:26 Philip Blood

The Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian government, rendering it fairly useless and winning the war.

00:06:32 Philip Blood

OK. So that's the units we saw to begin with were fast moving light, light equipments, light lighting equipment units like the paratroopers and so.

00:06:43 Philip Blood

Forth.

00:06:44 Philip Blood

The third area that I started to investigate is the target.

00:06:50 Philip Blood

And.

00:06:52 Philip Blood

Well, I mean the target here, it's not so much the target in the sense of what's Putin's plan, because Putin's plan is open-ended and it can be whatever he wants. Our explain that in a minute the target here is what actually is. He is his forces attacking.

00:07:12 Philip Blood

Cake. So when we first looked at the wall.

00:07:16 Philip Blood

There were attacks on cities, villages, military areas, strategic points.

00:07:23 Philip Blood

And then very quickly, we got to the point where there were just pound ground pounding total areas of civilian community. And if you remember very early on, I said.

00:07:35 Philip Blood

That's genocide.

00:07:38 Philip Blood

And I said that's genocide because the shells were being fired in such a way as to cause maximum destruction of the population.

00:07:49 Philip Blood

In those areas and forcing the refugees to leave in large numbers, which is what happened and destroying the social order and the way of life.

00:07:59 Philip Blood

So in effect, you've got a special military operation with special military forces specific to the task. But somewhere along the line the targeting has shifted from a special military operation to a more political operation.

00:08:18 Philip Blood

Now it's very difficult to know whether the first policy was smash all the civilian communities.

00:08:24 Philip Blood

I don't think we really know.

00:08:27 Philip Blood

But we do know that the pounding that has continued and continued against the cities and what they did to Mariupol and the other cities.

00:08:37 Philip Blood

Shows.

00:08:38 Philip Blood

That whether it was first stage, first level, first ladder of the escalation was.

00:08:47 Philip Blood

To attack those places, we certainly now know that not only was it to attack those places, but it was also to flatten.

00:08:55 Philip Blood

And destroyed the swathes of community.

00:09:02 Philip Blood

So let's all, let me just wrap all of that up and say, OK, So what do we have? Well, we have an open-ended doctrine or mission.

00:09:11 Philip Blood

With military forces.

00:09:14 Philip Blood

Which have been assigned somewhere along the line, deliberately or.

00:09:19 Philip Blood

Or as a matter of course 2.

00:09:23 Philip Blood

Destroying civilian targets.

00:09:25 Philip Blood

So in a sense.

00:09:29 Philip Blood

It's acceptable to have a military operation, but it's not acceptable to have a severe attack on civilians.

00:09:36 Philip Blood

Do you see the link?

00:09:37 Ben Skipper

Yeah.

00:09:38 Philip Blood

What? What's actually happened to the special military operation had continued focusing on tanks and infantry and reserves and all the good stuff.

00:09:48 Philip Blood

That would be a special military operation and to a certain extent, if they went out and assassinated.

00:09:54 Philip Blood

All the political leaders.

00:09:57 Philip Blood

I mean, it's not good, it's not good politics, but it would have within reason the scope of being a special military operation.

00:10:07 Philip Blood

When the military operation.

00:10:10 Philip Blood

Shifts in direction from the military to the civil.

00:10:15 Philip Blood

That then triggers a whole load of issues so straight away.

00:10:22 Philip Blood

Because it's gone to a no because it was an open-ended policy.

00:10:28 Philip Blood

It's immediately it's immediate number because it's not a declared war and therefore.

00:10:37 Philip Blood

As far as I'm aware, under the Presidents and laws of war.

00:10:42 Philip Blood

Putin's forces can be prosecuted for civilian crime of murder.

00:10:49 Philip Blood

So not only do you have the civilian crime of murder, but on top of that.

00:10:55 Philip Blood

Because of the.

00:10:58 Philip Blood

The the depth of the the crimes that are being committed, he's walked into genocide.

00:11:05 Philip Blood

Either walked in or deliberately caused genocide.

00:11:09 Philip Blood

So it's not military specific war crimes and genocide, it's crimes against civilians, civilian law.

00:11:23 Philip Blood

Which has genocidal consequences.

00:11:30 Philip Blood

Now to get to this in a historical perspective, I.

00:11:35 Philip Blood

Referred Dustin to Hitler's bandit hunters, which is about.

00:11:41 Philip Blood

A Nazi policy called bandemia conform.

00:11:45 Philip Blood

Now that policy was driven by.

00:11:50 Philip Blood

A legacy heritage of war committed by the German armed forces since the 1840s, again for security purposes. So, for example, 1848 revolution suppressed the revolution.

00:12:07 Philip Blood

1870s per counter the Fonterra in the Franco Prussian War.

00:12:14 Philip Blood

In the Herrera War, killing the native tribes and exterminating the Herrera tribe tribe.

00:12:22 Philip Blood

In Munich in 1919, killing the the Red Republic in Munich, killing the the communists in the Red Republic, executing them, assassinating them and fighting them without controls. So although they were Communist ex former First World War.

00:12:42 Philip Blood

Soldiers fighting ex First World War soldiers. There was no laws of war and what they did to each other was quite criminal.

00:12:51 Philip Blood

So you're not in in German security warfare. You're not in the zone of the normal laws of war, your insecurity.

00:13:05 Philip Blood

And that's a very dark place, because insecurity. You can do pretty much whatever you like. You can call it national security. You can call it self protection.

00:13:18 Philip Blood

But there's a there's.

00:13:19 Philip Blood

A huge range of ways you can go about how how you deploy for.

00:13:26 Philip Blood

Security warfare.

00:13:29 Philip Blood

Now if you look at what Putin has done with his special military operation, it kind of follows German security warfare.

00:13:39 Philip Blood

Of prosecuting war for security purposes.

00:13:45 Philip Blood

Now.

00:13:47 Philip Blood

Some people might think that, well, you know.

00:13:50 Philip Blood

That's not the way history works. It doesn't jump from 1945. Suddenly, we're here redoing all of this stuff. Well, that wouldn't be my argument. My argument would be that vanderby Kampung and elements of security warfare first went to Britain.

00:14:07 Philip Blood

In 1950, when Aubrey Dixon published a book using the band The McCann from Principles from 1944.

00:14:19 Philip Blood

And that methodology?

00:14:21 Philip Blood

Was taken into the British Army.

00:14:24 Philip Blood

Uh, the next time it turns up is during the.

00:14:29 Philip Blood

Department of Defence Studies, set by Robert McNamara in America in the 1960s and you see elements of Banda McCann, thongs, things like, UH, strategic Hamlets, body counts, hunting people as bandits. All of that.

00:14:49 Philip Blood

Found its way into the.

00:14:50 Philip Blood

Vietnam.

00:14:51 Philip Blood

War.

00:14:52 Philip Blood

Ohh, because when I spoke to an American general about this in 2006, he said everything you talked about today is recognisable from what I saw in Laos when he was the commander in Chief in Laos and in Vietnam.

00:15:09 Ben Skipper

Just just to interject there, that's this interesting. Sorry, you should say that.

00:15:13 Philip Blood

Let me just stay the last bit. So you've got the connectivity, so 911 happens.

00:15:18 Ben Skipper

Yeah.

00:15:22 Philip Blood

And Bush immediately says declares War on Terror.

00:15:28 Philip Blood

Now the problem with what he did when he declared War on Terror was not specific. Now, later on, it was Muslim fundamentalism, Taliban, blah, blah, blah. But the initial policy was.

00:15:43 Philip Blood

War on Terror.

00:15:45 Philip Blood

And we've known the period since 9:11 up until the the other year, when Afghanistan finally, uh, was lost was.

00:15:55 Philip Blood

Was what we would call the age of terror.

00:15:58 Philip Blood

The age of the War on Terror.

00:16:00 Philip Blood

And that was so suitably vague that strange and horrible things happened. And we know what happened. There was Abu Ghraib, and there was all the other crimes that went on. And there was civilian losses, bombardments and civilians now.

00:16:17 Philip Blood

That's a doctrinal process.

00:16:20 Philip Blood

You can see a doctrinal process.

00:16:23 Philip Blood

What happens at the next level, which is the use of the military that determines and how the how that policy is going to be implemented and what the losses are, and wherever you see large bombardment underpinning a vague operation?

00:16:44 Philip Blood

You are pretty much looking and expecting large numbers of civilian casualties.

00:16:55 Philip Blood

All of this concludes to me or raises A conclusion to my mind.

00:17:01 Philip Blood

That if you.

00:17:03 Philip Blood

News.

00:17:05 Philip Blood

An open-ended capsule doctrine like a special military operation and you use heavy artillery and you apply it against a large European conurbation.

00:17:19 Philip Blood

As soon as you open fire.

00:17:22 Philip Blood

You are committing genocide.

00:17:26 Philip Blood

I have no doubt about that, man. This isn't collateral damage, collateral damage.

00:17:33 Philip Blood

Is Ronald 7 Panther division scouting through France in 1944, hitting a few villages and killing a lot of civilians, but mostly the 1.3 million refugees that fled the German army in 1940 largely escaped. There was as, as I understand it, I could be wrong.

00:17:53 Philip Blood

That's about 123,000 civilians killed in 1940.

00:17:59 Philip Blood

And and that was in Holland. The people killed in Holland, especially those bombed in Rotterdam, the losses in Belgium, especially Hanoi, where the town was completely taken out before the civilians could escape.

00:18:15 Philip Blood

Events in Dunkirk and those people who were caught up in the fighting, that's always going to be a problem. But collateral damage was within the realms of.

00:18:25 Philip Blood

I suppose for the age acceptability, I mean I I'm, I'm against this idea that somehow you can just range more without any kind of control in a civilian community. But what you have now is dense populations in Europe.

00:18:41 Philip Blood

So when you start chucking ordinance around.

00:18:45 Philip Blood

This isn't Sennelager or Salisbury plain. This is a large city.

00:18:51 Philip Blood

And when Maria poll is being hit.

00:18:55 Philip Blood

Your targets are not only civilian communities, they are civilians themselves. They are defenceless civilians, concentrated in large pockets and large communities that.

00:19:07 Philip Blood

As soon as you do that in my mind now.

00:19:10 Philip Blood

We have, you know, that's genocide and we have to change the laws.

00:19:16 Philip Blood

Because we have to understand that when somebody fires 152 millimetre shell.

00:19:24 Philip Blood

Onto an apartment block it. It's almost going to destroy the whole building.

00:19:31 Philip Blood

I mean, we're seeing things like huge centres of massive apartment blocks just being rented out or ripped out of the central buildings.

00:19:42 Philip Blood

That's deliberate.

00:19:45 Philip Blood

That's a deliberate act.

00:19:49 Philip Blood

So.

00:19:51 Philip Blood

When I first came to the idea that this was genocide within the week of the war starting, I was simply pointing out that civilians were being caught in such a way through the traditional sense. So therefore we ever all not, not a Rwanda, but we have something like a Kosovo Sayo situation.

00:20:11 Philip Blood

But.

00:20:13 Philip Blood

That was my first indicate inkling, but what I hadn't realised without looking was the sheer density of these populations around these Ukrainian cities.

00:20:25 Philip Blood

Which means that when you flow ordinance on them.

00:20:29 Philip Blood

You are killing people.

00:20:33 Philip Blood

And then they went further. They started to hit the railway centres as people were leaving the refugees on the trains with rockets. And what have you.

00:20:45 Philip Blood

And the accumulation of all this rocketry heavy shelling pounding.

00:20:53 Philip Blood

Is that?

00:20:55 Philip Blood

We don't need to.

00:20:57 Philip Blood

Have ICC come in and do mega investigations? We have to say right straight away, that's genocide and if you continue doing it, you're just mounting the genocide against you.

00:21:11 Philip Blood

What we've allowed to happen.

00:21:14 Philip Blood

And now I'm talking a lot now, but I know I wanna know what's happened in the past, and especially since the war in former Yugoslavia with Bosnia and.

00:21:27 Philip Blood

Serbia and Croatia, when all the communities were were involved in a horrible civil war. Plus NATO was bombing cities.

00:21:36 Philip Blood

The genocide that was being investigated then was always being measured by military men coming up with collateral damage calculations.

00:21:48 Philip Blood

Civilians in Europe have to take back control and I don't mean NATO because they're useless. I'm talking about politicians, have to take control.

00:22:01 Philip Blood

And decide.

00:22:04 Philip Blood

Where the the genocide stands. So as soon as some city is hit.

00:22:11 Philip Blood

You can register that as a criminal act, and it's marked as genocide. Now, if it comes down as.

00:22:18 Philip Blood

OK, you might have a barrage which makes a mistake, in which case it's murder.

00:22:25 Philip Blood

However.

00:22:26 Philip Blood

However.

00:22:32 Philip Blood

What happens when we start chucking around nuclear missiles?

00:22:38 Philip Blood

And nobody has really thought about that.

00:22:42 Philip Blood

So some idiot decides because of what's happening with the with in Lithuania with Kaliningrad. So we're going to start chucking tactical nuclear missiles all over the place.

00:22:53 Philip Blood

I want to say straight away before anybody says otherwise, that the first strike of a nuclear missile is genocide.

00:23:06 Philip Blood

It's not escalation.

00:23:08 Philip Blood

It's genocide.

00:23:10 Philip Blood

When you're acting with genocidal purpose.

00:23:14 Philip Blood

Because you are trying to commit to master and that goes to the same with chemical and biological weapons.

00:23:23 Philip Blood

If you drop biological and chemical weapons in the European civilization zones.

00:23:33 Philip Blood

You are committing genocide.

00:23:37 Philip Blood

I'm saying now instead of allowing the military to determine what's genocide, we decide as civilians decide what's going to be genocide, and if you use those weapons, even in retaliation.

00:23:51 Philip Blood

You are committing genocide.

00:23:53 Philip Blood

You better win.

00:23:56 Philip Blood

Because at the end.

00:23:59 Philip Blood

You might just be in the court.

00:24:04 Philip Blood

There we are.

00:24:07 Philip Blood

Chewy stuff, eh?

00:24:10 Ben Skipper

Very, very, very yeah. I've been. I don't about you. Just. I've been making a series of notes that you've been speaking about this film, you know, this sort of shifting of definition away from and identifying this is, you know, we we've gone. We've progressed from.

00:24:13 Dustin Du Cane

Curious.

00:24:29 Ben Skipper

A special military operations, purely a one hour of of of genocide.

00:24:35 Ben Skipper

And sorry, when I sort of interrupted you something you said sparked a recollection of the behaviour of Kissinger in particular during the during that phase of Vienna war where he micromanaged everything, he micromanaged the destruction almost are of laws in particular.

00:24:57 Ben Skipper

You know, he wanting kill rates and and loss rates on a daily basis, he was fixated about the effect of mature operations of the more you know, sort of as an enormous particulate level.

00:25:12 Ben Skipper

I'm I'm wanting to know and then you know we we with with your sort of and and there are other you know your your your sort of reference to to Aubrey Dixon.

00:25:26 Ben Skipper

And looking at collateral damage and I think that's quite important to make, make that reference to that. Knowing is a war crime. We I think personally speaking, collateral damage. I've always been very uncomfortable with that face. I don't think it's one we should have ever. It should have never been allowed to proliferate because.

00:25:45 Ben Skipper

Yes, I I can appreciate. There are gonna be times and then any military operation if you're switching to build barrier, civilians will get killed. And there's very little you can do about it.

00:25:55 Ben Skipper

Well, we should. We should always very, very, very uncomfortable with that.

00:26:00 Ben Skipper

Especially when it comes to deliberate targeting because it's no longer, you know, as again as you said, it's no longer collateral damage, it's an, it's an act of genocide.

00:26:09 Ben Skipper

Miss you?

00:26:09 Philip Blood

Just can I just add something here which?

00:26:12 Ben Skipper

Yeah, of course, yeah.

00:26:13 Philip Blood

Which comes directly from from reach that I'm doing for the present book.

00:26:19 Philip Blood

But also comes from my time when I was studying Strategic Studies back in the 80s when we were doing Strategic Studies back in the 80s, there was something quite bizarre because we were.

00:26:36 Philip Blood

We'd obviously go on buses and discuss things like flexible response, you know, all the good, good NATO terminology was like flexible response forward defence.

00:26:48 Philip Blood

Which essentially meant there was a line down the centre of Germany where NATO forces would stand. They would be like an elastic band and when the elastic band broke.

00:27:00 Philip Blood

Off would go the nuclear missiles.

00:27:03 Philip Blood

OK.

00:27:04 Philip Blood

Now in that mix.

00:27:06 Philip Blood

And a lot of people didn't realise at the time.

00:27:09 Philip Blood

With things like.

00:27:13 Philip Blood

In Eastern Europe, 200,000 tonnes of chemical weapons.

00:27:20 Philip Blood

In Russian depots.

00:27:23 Philip Blood

In silos.

00:27:26 Philip Blood

And people don't realise. But in 19901991, when the Americans invaded the Gulf War and there was the war against the first war against Saddam.

00:27:37 Philip Blood

The Americans use that to help the Russians get rid of all of that nerve gas.

00:27:47 Philip Blood

Now I watched a programme that was created by a man called Gwyn Dyer in 1980 who was a foremost thinker about Warner loses.

00:27:57 Philip Blood

And he went over the same battleground back in 198081.

00:28:04 Philip Blood

And he discussed these subjects with military specialists at the time. And when you, when you look at that, it's not just looking at history, it's looking at confronting something which.

00:28:16 Philip Blood

Now, perhaps a lot older, unless.

00:28:22 Philip Blood

I'm a bit more sensitive to because I I kind of got the impression while the soldiers were suggesting OK, there was no defences against the nuclear and chemical weapons, there was this little thread which was the civilians are helpless.

00:28:41 Philip Blood

And it suddenly dawned on me that we've done all these calculations back in the day that we're like, you know, maybe a million dead here and a million dead there and a million dead everywhere else. And a lot of the Russian tanks that survive because they've been hardened to atomic weapons and sealed for this, that and the other.

00:28:59 Philip Blood

But nobody had actually.

00:29:00 Philip Blood

Sat down and thought. Hang on a minute.

00:29:03 Philip Blood

Populations like Cologne and Berlin and wherever we're just gonna disappear.

00:29:09 Philip Blood

Off the planet.

00:29:13 Philip Blood

I mean, with the shock of what's happened at Mariupol.

00:29:17 Philip Blood

Is the 100,000.

00:29:19 Philip Blood

People, I mean.

00:29:19 Philip Blood

You to lose Cologne, you're losing 4 or 5 million people.

00:29:25 Philip Blood

Those calculations were going through Strategic Studies.

00:29:31 Philip Blood

In a way that you would calculate collateral damage.

00:29:37 Philip Blood

And those calculations are forgotten.

00:29:41 Philip Blood

When we see this stuff going on about, you know, how much pounding's going on in the Ukraine with, you know, our experts from these various military institutes who sat there and say, well, you know, watch this shell or rest of it.

00:29:54 Philip Blood

We're not actually working out the collateral damage and the destruction that's being imposed, and I mean imposed on the civil.

00:30:04 Philip Blood

And when these things come down.

00:30:07 Philip Blood

As one of our colleagues told me advised me the other day because I never quite understood why these missiles alone. It's not just the explosive saw the exhaust and flying that they Chuck out.

00:30:20 Philip Blood

So.

00:30:22 Philip Blood

You know you're you're either blown up, you're either burnt to death or you're gassed.

00:30:28 Philip Blood

Well, OK.

00:30:32 Philip Blood

Malicious civilian defence? Well, there isn't any civilian defence.

00:30:37 Philip Blood

So.

00:30:37 Philip Blood

So we're back into this.

00:30:39 Philip Blood

Horror cycle, where we've allowed the military to create weapons of mass destruction.

00:30:46 Philip Blood

We're allowing them to play with this stuff.

00:30:49 Philip Blood

And the real victims in all of this are the civilians.

00:30:54 Philip Blood

My argument is we've got to get back to a scenario where civilians take control. These weapons have to go back into the control of the of the of the politicians and civilians and not just be allowed to be waged and thrown around by.

00:31:09 Philip Blood

By the military.

00:31:11 Philip Blood

Now I know we're in the middle of a war. I know we want Ukraine to win.

00:31:17

But.

00:31:18 Philip Blood

There's consequences to all of this stuff, and you know, we've gotta start thinking about what the post war words world is gonna be like once. Hopefully this war is resolved without us going to nuclear war.

00:31:32 Ben Skipper

It's it's interesting. You should raise raises of the, you know what? What control mechanisms exist, politically or otherwise, with these special weapons. Thank you know, I think we're in that stage where nuclear weapons in particular is is one of the the set of special weapons.

00:31:51 Ben Skipper

Their use is highly.

00:31:55 Ben Skipper

Restrictive and highly controlled by by both politically and by by politics and military, as well as by doctrine.

00:32:06 Ben Skipper

When when you mentioned the use of possible nuclear weapons, special weapons regarding the situation in callingwood.

00:32:16 Ben Skipper

That that for the Russians would be a legitimate use in terms of their doctrine, because they consider coming around Russian territory and, you know, Russian special weapons and the nuclear variety are have been, I think, since 1984, deemed as defensive only.

00:32:37 Ben Skipper

So there is that very real.

00:32:40 Ben Skipper

Or.

00:32:42 Ben Skipper

Possibility of its use of of their use.

00:32:46 Ben Skipper

Regardless of limitation or or or or whatever, should that particular corner.

00:32:57 Ben Skipper

Of this conflict, suddenly, you know, erupted, erupted into violence, and it's it's a very worrisome.

00:33:05 Philip Blood

OK, step back one second and let me ask you the question.

00:33:10 Philip Blood

Can any side afford to lose this war?

00:33:16 Ben Skipper

From a personal perspective, there are there are.

00:33:19 Ben Skipper

Two, you know.

00:33:20 Ben Skipper

Two sides to this the Ukrainians can't cannot because it is their homeland. Why should they afford to lose it? When you're fighting to live? It's OK to die, and as long as they have their will to fight, none that desire to to fall.

00:33:36 Ben Skipper

When they believe in national sovereignty, they will continue to do.

00:33:40 Ben Skipper

So the Russians, I think it's slightly different because this is an odd it's not fight to start from the onset because initially you had it as a special military operation to eradicate the the rise of narcism. Now that's their words, not mine and and that's that's compounded that's been proven. You know the Russians have already distanced themselves from that initial. They don't know what they're fighting for.

00:34:01 Ben Skipper

And that makes him very dangerous because they become unpredictable.

00:34:07 Ben Skipper

And so.

00:34:08 Ben Skipper

They're not gonna want to something withdraw. They've invested an awful lot in manpower. They've lost. You know, they've lost.

00:34:16 Ben Skipper

Both sides have lost heavily in terms of political prestige on the world stage. They've had a kicking there.

00:34:22 Ben Skipper

Financially, you know.

00:34:25 Philip Blood

Do you think this is a war between Ukraine and Russia, or do you? This is a war between Russia and the West.

00:34:32 Ben Skipper

I think this is escalated from we're going back to almost that that Cold War scenario, aren't we? Where we have two separate political ideologies.

00:34:43 Ben Skipper

Facing off in a third party, you know, just just as we had in Vietnam, just as we had in Korea, just as we had in sub-Saharan Africa. This is just a continuation of that, but this, but what what I'm noticing it's getting closer and it's getting bigger and there is the potential for it to be you know.

00:35:03 Ben Skipper

To say for it to, to progress westwards, that's worrisome because all of a sudden we can just, you know, the West has been in the past, been able to distance itself from proxy wars, literally, physically, by geography. We can no longer do that. This is on our doorstep. It's impacting us.

00:35:21 Ben Skipper

Socially, politically and economically.

00:35:25 Ben Skipper

So we're stuck almost in the middle of all of this, and the problem is the West doesn't know exactly what to do.

00:35:34 Ben Skipper

The the you know.

00:35:35 Ben Skipper

The the Americans seem to be very, you know, the Americans are.

00:35:41 Ben Skipper

Person speaking, I get the impression that they're sort of interested. It's a bit of a sideshow about actually what they're really doing. They're keeping an eye on what's happening in China and the Pacific Rim because the Chinese are the big part of the Americans right now. And the Europeans, we, we've taken our eye.

00:35:54 Ben Skipper

Off.

00:35:54 Ben Skipper

The ball and we don't we we're we're we're almost.

00:36:00 Ben Skipper

Stymied by our own inability?

00:36:04 Ben Skipper

To to actually address this as a collective.

00:36:09 Ben Skipper

And we we know that that's.

00:36:10 Ben Skipper

You.

00:36:10 Ben Skipper

Know you could break that down even further. Have you know the the 5th, the age of the 5th column is being a chap with a BlackBerry and and shooting out of on advancing columns from a deserted house and gone. The 5th column is now a lot more sophisticated it it's social media, it's.

00:36:28 Ben Skipper

In getting embedded in the political system, it's grace and favour. It's paying for games of tennis, it's supporting certain pressure groups, you know, and this has been happening over time. This isn't something that's happened in the past two or three years. This is something that's been taking that some Putin has been working on almost for two decades.

00:36:50 Philip Blood

I I I take a slightly different view because.

00:36:58 Philip Blood

You the beauty of doing writing when you're writing this. I mean, as you know, I've switched off all my involvements with the war publicly, so I'm just absorbing the wars. I'm writing the chapters and doing the work that I'm.

00:37:11 Philip Blood

Doing but looking back and thinking back, which is obviously what I have to do because I'm as I'm editing and re editing myself, I'm looking back at the thing at how the war has developed and the and the thing that comes to me is having now done so much of the chapter on the Cold War period back in the 80s when the two nations faced.

00:37:31 Philip Blood

You know when the West and the east faced off against each other, it struck me that what the Americans tried to do was to follow an old policy, which was to.

00:37:42 Philip Blood

Use containment with.

00:37:46 Philip Blood

The sense of sphere of influence.

00:37:51 Philip Blood

So initially when I first saw the war, and I know when we all talked talked on the podcast I we had this idea that maybe NATO would have no fly zone and all the rest of it to try and intervene and reduce the the destruction of the Ukraine.

00:38:10 Philip Blood

What I now saw.

00:38:11 Philip Blood

From what I've now seen from reviewing everything is you what Biden tried to do was old school containment with old school buffer zone control limitation trying to confine the conflict to the Ukraine.

00:38:29 Philip Blood

OK.

00:38:31 Philip Blood

Not a problem with that.

00:38:33 Philip Blood

Attitude in terms of military perspective was it was never containable.

00:38:43 Philip Blood

And what we saw was.

00:38:46 Philip Blood

The refugees flooding to the West.

00:38:50 Philip Blood

What we saw was the engagement with China supporting Russia. What we saw was the supplies going from America into Europe. What we saw was large discussions with all the various nations, how we how we can supply the Ukraine.

00:39:09 Philip Blood

What we saw was this huge surge in social media output backing Ukraine.

00:39:16 Philip Blood

And all the while.

00:39:19 Philip Blood

The containment and the buffer zone control that Biden tried to impose was failing.

00:39:30 Philip Blood

And the war quietly.

00:39:34 Philip Blood

Without anybody really picking up on, it has been escalating.

00:39:40 Philip Blood

And when I'm saying escalation, I'm not talking about.

00:39:44 Philip Blood

You know, massive, great big. You know, we're on the point of nuclear weapons. What I'm saying is the escalation has stretched now from Kaliningrad.

00:39:53 Philip Blood

To Belarus.

00:39:56 Philip Blood

To western Ukraine, with liberty receiving nuclear receiving calibre missiles. What have you? It then goes down all along the border from the capital right away, down to the Donbas. It involves Snake island.

00:40:14 Philip Blood

And.

00:40:16 Philip Blood

Regardless of whether it causes starvation or not, the Ukraine crops are not being received in Africa, which is the pressure because there's problems in African stuff with famine and all of that process. You've had the United Nations.

00:40:38 Philip Blood

Trying to step in.

00:40:40 Philip Blood

With as many nations backing Russia as there have been the West.

00:40:48 Philip Blood

There's been attempts to impose sanctions and the sanctions have failed miserably.

00:40:55 Philip Blood

And and I know guys like Arthur Snell who's on his podcast tried to, you know, go against my view that the sanctions weren't working. I know they're not working because I talked to guys who work in the banking industry, and I know the Russians are still doing business. Thank you very much. So.

00:41:16 Philip Blood

The whole the.

00:41:17 Philip Blood

Whole thing is not working and in the in in all of this.

00:41:23 Philip Blood

It's pretty clear that NATO has no strategic idea of what the hell is going on, because in the middle of this conflict, they the the NATO leaders, went to Spain and created.

00:41:37 Philip Blood

New mission statement and part of the mission statement. Absolutely nothing to do with Europe. They're all about China and Palestine. And and here we are, we're in a we're in a conflict and the the NATO.

00:41:50 Philip Blood

Secretary General says, well, we're here to back Ukraine. OK, now you're back in Ukraine. Well, we're gonna keep them in the fight by supplying them weapons.

00:41:59 Philip Blood

That's a good plan.

00:42:02 Philip Blood

If they could win.

00:42:04 Philip Blood

But it's not been going very well.

00:42:09 Philip Blood

And the losses that have been sustained in the last two weeks and the advances that the Russians have achieved.

00:42:16 Philip Blood

And there's grinding down process as many as meant what?

00:42:22 Philip Blood

So when I say, you know, can anybody afford to lose, can anybody afford to, you know, other than win?

00:42:30 Philip Blood

The the sides involved in this are America can't afford to lose.

00:42:35 Philip Blood

Because Biden's got a divided country, he's committed all of his military equipment from his fighting forces and is trying to resupply his own troops, never mind resupplying as giving supplies to Ukraine.

00:42:53 Philip Blood

Boris Johnson has clearly been using the conflict to sustain his.

00:42:58 Philip Blood

Position in the as Prime Minister in Britain and he's still using it in his resignation speech.

00:43:06 Philip Blood

The Germans are trying to avoid the situation because they're so dependent on energy and fuel. They don't want to commit. In any case, they're already overloaded with refugees and are suffering.

00:43:19 Philip Blood

And they don't want Russia to win. They don't want Ukraine to lose. They don't want America to win. They just don't want war.

00:43:31 Philip Blood

And then we've got to decide how is this.

00:43:33 Philip Blood

War ever going to end?

00:43:35 Philip Blood

Because nobody wants the Ukraine to lose, but at the same time.

00:43:41 Philip Blood

If what happens if Ukraine wins and there's only one person left standing?

00:43:48 Philip Blood

That's not victory.

00:43:53 Philip Blood

So we're we're in a poker game where nobody can afford to lose.

00:43:58 Ben Skipper

And that makes the situation even even more depressing and more dangerous.

00:44:04 Philip Blood

It's certainly more dangerous because when you, when you looked at Abel Archer in 1983 and as you can imagine, I've been looking at Abel Archer amongst other things. Abel Archer was just a mistake.

00:44:16 Philip Blood

One guy did one thing, another guy did another. They both misread what they were saying, and then there was the moment when they're all at it, and then it all calmed down when somebody told somebody.

00:44:26 Philip Blood

It was only an exercise, it wasn't real and it was being done on computer.

00:44:33 Philip Blood

What we've got now is an actual shooting match.

00:44:38 Philip Blood

And at anytime.

00:44:41 Philip Blood

I I honestly think if Putin starts to lose, he'll drop one.

00:44:51 Philip Blood

If if Ukraine lose.

00:44:57 Philip Blood

And we've got that horrendous situation which many, many military specialists are still talking about now more than before.

00:45:06 Philip Blood

Of the Russian army in Ukraine on the Polish border, we've got a serious problem.

00:45:14 Philip Blood

Because it's not like it was in the past. In the past, if the Russian aeroplane went over the wrong side, the pilot was almost dismissed. If an American soldier went over the wrong side, the poor guy was in prison.

00:45:30 Philip Blood

Don't have those controls anymore. That whole system of of.

00:45:36 Philip Blood

Rules between East and West of of maintaining a a confrontation without confrontation has all gone. They've dismantled the whole architecture. We don't know how to confront.

00:45:50 Philip Blood

The Russian.

00:45:52 Philip Blood

Face to face.

00:45:54 Philip Blood

And it's easy for NATO to suggest this is the eastern flank.

00:46:01 Philip Blood

You need a couple of mistakes and eastern flank is where on the Rhine.

00:46:07 Philip Blood

We are in a truly horrible place and on top of all the bat, as as we were discussing before.

00:46:14 Philip Blood

Rests military forces are so depleted. You know all this idea that somehow we're gonna put up a better fight?

00:46:22 Philip Blood

Against the Russians than anybody else. I'm not convinced. No, I'm certainly not convinced at all.

00:46:29 Philip Blood

I don't think that I don't think the power is there and more than that.

00:46:34 Philip Blood

I don't think there's the will to fight.

00:46:37 Ben Skipper

I mean it, it's interesting. You should sort of say about make the reference to to sort of size.

00:46:46 Ben Skipper

I was recently at something where member of the of the military said that the the British Army all sent 2000 of them.

00:46:56 Ben Skipper

We're fully capable as fully capable as the British Army or 1520 years ago, which I find.

00:47:04 Ben Skipper

I I I I.

00:47:05 Ben Skipper

Was actually astounded.

00:47:09 Ben Skipper

Because that can't be the case. You know, just simple maths.

00:47:12 Ben Skipper

If you have a restaurant and you start it with 2020 members of staff.

00:47:17 Ben Skipper

And you clear down and you're getting, say, 500 covers a day. You're you're you're you're there.

00:47:23 Ben Skipper

You can cover every opportunity and every possibility that happens.

00:47:28 Ben Skipper

If you still have 500 covers, then you decide that you know you want to make a bit bit more money or whatever, and cut your staff by 50% or 60%. Quite way well to to say 12 or to 10 members.

00:47:39 Ben Skipper

Of staff per.

00:47:39 Ben Skipper

Shift. You're not gonna have the same effective service. Things will suffer. As an analogy, it's in.

00:47:47 Ben Skipper

Perhaps not overly suitable, but it makes the point that you need the numbers and it is a numbers game.

00:47:55 Ben Skipper

I don't know how to answer. Justin made a remark the other day that I had a I had a rosy moment. I said that, you know, options to change your frontline.

00:48:02 Ben Skipper

First were mistakes.

00:48:04 Ben Skipper

We rushed in and we weren't learning this.

00:48:08 Ben Skipper

Yeah, you know, most NATO nations rushed in to to to get their pay off, pay back from the peace dividend and the collapse of the Soviet Union with the exception of France, who who really took their time, they they sat back.

00:48:24 Ben Skipper

So back in the in in the chair took us some of coffee and thought. Let's just see what happens over the next few years.

00:48:31 Ben Skipper

So that when the events of the Balkans and and the, you know, the the first Gulf War unfolded, they were in a far better position to be able to support any military operations as well as provide good personal, you know, internal security for their own.

00:48:47 Ben Skipper

They should as well as externally.

00:48:52 Ben Skipper

And we're now in this awful position where to build up.

00:48:56 Ben Skipper

The military to to those levels with the same experience. It's going to take a generation and that's quite scary because at the moment, like you say, we have a wolf at the door. We have the proverbial wolf at the door and he's barking, but he's not quite scratching it.

00:49:13 Ben Skipper

But he's scratching somebody else's door.

00:49:17 Ben Skipper

And that doesn't seem to bother us, particularly because it's a neighbour and it's not happening to us.

00:49:26 Ben Skipper

You know, and and then combined with the acts of genocide that are taking place, you know.

00:49:32 Philip Blood

You see the calculation you just told me? We.

00:49:36 Philip Blood

In Business School, we used to call that calculation of imposing a device for an organisation to eat itself.

00:49:45 Philip Blood

UM.

00:49:47 Philip Blood

The classic is the Beeching plan. I'm going to use it because it's the one I always use with operational research. The all the guys who have been in the operational researches of the British Army and the.

00:50:00 Philip Blood

Force ended up in places like British mining.

00:50:07 Philip Blood

Working on coral reproduction figures.

00:50:11 Philip Blood

Some of them also ended up on the sea oil system working out the calculations there. But on beaching there was all these specialists who worked on operational research.

00:50:23 Philip Blood

And they came up with these plans.

00:50:26 Philip Blood

To make British Railways more efficient.

00:50:28 Philip Blood

And what they actually did was create a system where the the railways started to reduce.

00:50:35 Philip Blood

At such a rate that the railway system started to heat itself.

00:50:40 Philip Blood

By they basically disappearing.

00:50:44 Philip Blood

And and before long.

00:50:46 Philip Blood

The system didn't work.

00:50:50 Philip Blood

And they had to rationalise the rationalisation, which is always a bad sign.

00:50:56 Philip Blood

Yeah.

00:50:58 Philip Blood

What you've actually had in the military forces is a similar rationalisation of the rationalisation, with a rationalisation on top of another rationalisation.

00:51:09 Philip Blood

And just to make sure they're being for a rationalisation process, they gave themselves another rationalisation process came up with the idea that tanks will never be necessary in war.

00:51:19 Philip Blood

And that everything was going to be counterinsurgency in the future.

00:51:23

Uh.

00:51:26 Philip Blood

It's got to be the craziest thing ever.

00:51:28 Philip Blood

I I mean of all.

00:51:31 Philip Blood

If Johnson actually said that to the British command that the next wars are not going to involve tanks and.

00:51:38 Philip Blood

There's no counter, there's only going to be counterinsurgency, then it just shows you what a complete Nutter idiot is because.

00:51:46 Philip Blood

There had already been wars going on since the beginning of the 21st century. Their heavy ordnance and artillery and tanks were very, very prominent.

00:51:58 Philip Blood

And the idea that somehow these kind of weapons were going to disappear was just.

00:52:03 Philip Blood

I mean, it's just really foolishness and.

00:52:09 Philip Blood

There was a war taking place already in the Ukraine in the Donbas, Don Netsky area.

00:52:16 Philip Blood

Were heavy weapons.

00:52:19 Philip Blood

Including.

00:52:22 Philip Blood

Heavy aircraft systems and anti aircraft systems and artillery and went to was pounding each other since 2014, if not before.

00:52:33 Philip Blood

So the idea that war in Europe had suddenly ended is, I mean, it's gonna be the most obscene idea ever.

00:52:42 Philip Blood

The problem is with with that notion that that Johnson was playing with and the calculations that people have played with is. It's not just happened in Britain, it's happened everywhere. It's been echoed in all these ridiculous amongst all these politicians like Merkel.

00:53:02 Philip Blood

Merkel presumed she could do business with Putin.

00:53:06 Philip Blood

And I maintain to this day, unless you've been to East Germany and have an understanding of it, you could never understand the relationship of Merkel to Putin.

00:53:18 Philip Blood

You had to see what it was like in the 70s and 80s.

00:53:25 Philip Blood

And how much E Germans were under the thumb of the Russians?

00:53:31 Philip Blood

And how much of that culture still exists in the in the mindset?

00:53:37 Philip Blood

And it's the same mindset, of course, affects Poland. I mean, I was in Poland during the martial law in 82 and 83 and it was just the worst thing I've ever seen in my life.

00:53:49 Philip Blood

So I I have a taste of what Soviet occupation is like when it tries.

00:53:54 Philip Blood

And it is the whole things, obscene and horrible to see. And the idea that.

00:54:01 Philip Blood

We gonna stop having military military forces?

00:54:05 Philip Blood

When the Russians have been twitching since 2008 in Europe.

00:54:11 Philip Blood

Is is utter madness. And yet all these nations have have have let all of this go.

00:54:19 Philip Blood

But I come back to this calculation.

00:54:23 Philip Blood

Who can afford to lose? And my view is nobody can afford to lose, and that's why we're very, very much on the lip on the very lip now.

00:54:33 Philip Blood

Of nuclear catastrophe.

00:54:38 Philip Blood

I think this I think this, this, this Lithuanian thing of closing the salki gap and then kicking up the railway tracks was about the most foolish thing I've ever seen.

00:54:51 Ben Skipper

Yeah, I I I must admit I thought, you know what? Don't leave the red rag at the ball when he's already charging.

00:54:56 Philip Blood

You've done the bear.

00:54:58 Ben Skipper

No, I I just.

00:54:59 Philip Blood

And what's that understand about this is the rule is in NATO is you do not poke the bear, you let the bear unprovoked attack you.

00:55:11 Philip Blood

Now, if the bear attacks Lithuania, I can tell you now if people go out, if if anybody wants to go to war with Russia over Lithuania, closing the railway line, they'll be utter anarchy in the streets of Europe.

00:55:25 Philip Blood

They won't have it.

00:55:29 Philip Blood

That little game was utterly stupid.

00:55:34 Philip Blood

Rank stupidity.

00:55:37 Philip Blood

And it's not helping the Ukrainians.

00:55:42 Philip Blood

All you're doing is.

00:55:45 Philip Blood

Well, you're poking the bear in his battle base.

00:55:51 Ben Skipper

She's not wise.

00:55:55 Ben Skipper

And I appreciate it sort of, it's been quite.

00:55:59 Ben Skipper

I'll have a discussion and and and dust instead of being sagely nodding and.

00:56:06 Ben Skipper

Considering what's being said.

00:56:11 Ben Skipper

Just going back to to Phil's earlier.

00:56:14 Ben Skipper

Comments about how he feels that the.

00:56:22 Ben Skipper

Collateral damage now definitely is. Is, is, is is becoming should be considered genocide along with any any attack on any Europe.

00:56:32 Ben Skipper

Ian to collaboration. You know, an automatic actual genocide. I mean, do do you feel the leak in terms of the legality of that? Could it be termed as such any act any you know you know something sorry.

00:56:51 Dustin Du Cane

You mean what's going on now or what?

00:56:56 Dustin Du Cane

What Phil was talking about.

00:57:00 Dustin Du Cane

Attacking cities naturally leads to genocide.

00:57:07 Ben Skipper

That's a good question.

00:57:09 Philip Blood

Did I say that?

00:57:12 Ben Skipper

Yeah, I like bloody, bloody lawyers, you know, coming out with, you know what? Actually, it would be the first of your two options rather than just, you know, in in the contemporary overall.

00:57:30 Dustin Du Cane

Because I was gonna ask, I was gonna ask Phil whether he's saying that the warfare between industrialised nations and that involves attacking urban centres, does that make genocide inevitable?

00:57:48 Dustin Du Cane

And if so, should carry the legal term genocide?

00:57:55 Dustin Du Cane

As a as a starting point to discussion on whether the law and genocide needs to be changed on the Genocide Convention.

00:58:07 Dustin Du Cane

Because there are intersecting parts of the Genocide Convention and on the of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Court, you've got the International Criminal Court deals with genocide deals with war crimes, it deals with.

00:58:26 Dustin Du Cane

Crimes against.

00:58:27 Dustin Du Cane

Humanity and at the 4th point, it's got the crime of aggression.

00:58:33 Dustin Du Cane

Wow, the old Nuremberg one.

00:58:41 Dustin Du Cane

A genocide requires.

00:58:44 Dustin Du Cane

Genocide and intent, you have to be out there to get the Ukrainians because they're Ukrainians.

00:58:50 Dustin Du Cane

Rather than having them being that civilians being wiped out.

00:58:58 Dustin Du Cane

As a consequence, you have to be. You have to really want to give it to them. You have to want to get rid of the of the cranes which the Russians do, and they've made their genocide of intense, absolutely clear.

00:59:13 Dustin Du Cane

And I think there can be no doubt about that. And I've written that.

00:59:20 Dustin Du Cane

But if they hadn't made it clear, then their actions, for instance in the in Mariupol, those who go under the heading of war crime.

00:59:31 Dustin Du Cane

Then intentionally.

00:59:36 Dustin Du Cane

Targeting civilians or just not taking enough care to avoid targeting, hitting civilians, hitting hospitals, etcetera, that will also that will be a war crime instead of genocide.

00:59:55 Dustin Du Cane

Illegally. But I'm thinking about whether we should start talking about.

01:00:01 Dustin Du Cane

Genocide as a consequence, as something that.

01:00:05 Dustin Du Cane

As a if you go to war, if you start using these weapons of mass destruction, if you use a nuclear weapon, you're committing genocide.

01:00:19 Dustin Du Cane

If you're bombing, if you're bombing the North Vietnamese back into the stone, aren't you committing genocide?

01:00:26 Dustin Du Cane

I wrote about her Kissinger.

01:00:31 Dustin Du Cane

I think on Sunday and I started comparing him to Lavrov to remember what what angered me and I started writing that. I think Kissinger was making one of his really clever real politic statements.

01:00:50 Dustin Du Cane

About the about Ukraine.

01:00:53 Dustin Du Cane

And he has.

01:00:56 Dustin Du Cane

He has international human the blood of international humanitarian law on his hands because because of him and people like him from the end of the 1940s, when we have the Genocide Convention, you had the Geneva Convention conventions, you had the declaration of Human Rights.

01:01:17 Dustin Du Cane

All those treaties, all those laws were dead.

01:01:21 Dustin Du Cane

Until Rwanda, until you Gaslamp via happened.

01:01:27 Dustin Du Cane

And then we have never again.

01:01:31 Dustin Du Cane

Never. Never again.

01:01:33 Dustin Du Cane

And then it went all dead.

01:01:36 Dustin Du Cane

Until by the end of the Millennium, we had the ICC International Criminal Court set up.

01:01:46 Dustin Du Cane

And the ICC?

01:01:50

Was.

01:01:50 Dustin Du Cane

Set up and it became a court for taking Africans.

01:01:57 Dustin Du Cane

To the head.

01:01:59 Dustin Du Cane

And charging Africans with atrocities.

01:02:05 Dustin Du Cane

And when Russia?

01:02:08 Dustin Du Cane

Kicked off in South Ossetia, ICC desperately tried for eight years to avoid getting involved legally in that conflict, they said. They said, Oh well, the Russians have a competent court system and so there are Georgians because both sides were doing nasty things.

01:02:31 Dustin Du Cane

And their local courts can handle the obviously, the Russian courts didn't do ****. Sorry, Ben and George in court didn't do anything. And.

01:02:45 Dustin Du Cane

We might think that the Georgians were were good because they're they're anti Russian and they are little better than Russians.

01:02:54 Dustin Du Cane

But they were very happy to muddle waters and pretend to be dealing with their own people who have committed atrocities. And ICC didn't want to deal with the Russians at that point and they didn't want to deal with the Georgians and said they were chasing around.

01:03:12 Dustin Du Cane

Minor level African warlord fi.

01:03:15 Dustin Du Cane

But nobody, apart from a couple of.

01:03:19 Dustin Du Cane

Real legal specialists or specialists on African conference can even pronounce the names of the people who have been convicted.

01:03:28 Dustin Du Cane

With.

01:03:30 Dustin Du Cane

In The Hague by the ICC.

01:03:32 Dustin Du Cane

Or.

01:03:35 Dustin Du Cane

As a reception from the trials lasting years, and I can't remember their names, the only person I can recognise from the list of people charged by ICR, the Gaddafi brothers and.

01:03:52 Dustin Du Cane

Colonel Gaddafi got killed before he ever turned up at The Hague, and that's the Connie guy.

01:03:58 Dustin Du Cane

Who hasn't been caught?

01:04:00 Dustin Du Cane

And that's a terrible record. And we have a situation now where after the first invasion by Russia, Ukraine in 2014, ISIS, you wake up and said ohh, there's a conflict in Ukraine, maybe we should have a look at it.

01:04:22 Dustin Du Cane

So dealing with these Africans.

01:04:24 Dustin Du Cane

By the way, the tribe tribunal and the tribunal did a great job and I'm sure thriller is going to disagree with me, though the Yugoslav tribunals, the great job because they actually tried and convicted and other people, but ISIS, he hasn't been doing anything.

01:04:43 Dustin Du Cane

And.

01:04:45 Dustin Du Cane

I see see something else as as the conflict in Ukraine and the centre of people over there.

01:04:51 Dustin Du Cane

Maybe they'll start charging people. I'm doubt that they'll be able to convict anyone.

01:05:00 Dustin Du Cane

And we have the major, major issue that Russia, Russians, generals, politicians can't really be taken to the ICC over the crime of aggression. They can't be for genocide and crimes against humanity and war crimes. But they can't go there for the crime of aggression. Because guess what?

01:05:22 Dustin Du Cane

Americans managed to.

01:05:24 Dustin Du Cane

Cut out those provisions to make sure that there was their soldiers will never, ever.

01:05:33 Dustin Du Cane

Be charged with the crime of aggression, and the US isn't even a party to the Rome Statute to then the part of the ICC, and that's another legacy of US.

01:05:47 Dustin Du Cane

Hegemony after the Cold War.

01:05:49 Dustin Du Cane

Oh.

01:05:50 Dustin Du Cane

And something we're going, we're going to have to do with down the line that's going to need to be changes in the Rome Statute. There's going to need to be changes in international law. And I'm asking, Phil whether we should consider that genocide.

01:06:06 Dustin Du Cane

Between industrial nations, is Ozark is a crime. That cuts stems from the crime.

01:06:13 Dustin Du Cane

Of attacking your neighbour, Ukraine goes to war with Russia. There's going to be genocide. Poland goes to war Germany. There's going to be genocide.

01:06:24 Dustin Du Cane

We can't wage a war nowadays without it becoming a genocide, at least between industrial states.

01:06:29 Philip Blood

He's.

01:06:32 Dustin Du Cane

Or or even if you got a semi industrial state, say like Saudi Arabia decides to kill all the brown neighbours in Yemen, which is more of a feudal society than an industrial state.

01:06:49 Dustin Du Cane

We're on top.

01:06:52 Ben Skipper

No, just before you answer, I mean you, you've recently that's been in the back of my mind.

01:06:57 Ben Skipper

And and you've said you've verbalised something that I've often thought around, you know, and this is issue around enforcement we we are we are you know we are identifying crimes against humanity. That's very clear that that there's there's huge amount of evidence now points to.

01:07:13

It.

01:07:13 Ben Skipper

But how do we enforce it?

01:07:18 Ben Skipper

And now you know he's been in the back and he was something I was gonna mention at some point. So I'm glad you raised it. And the fact that we really, essentially, you're gonna struggle to do that. It's making the ice you see a.

01:07:30 Ben Skipper

Little bit of a.

01:07:33 Ben Skipper

It it's making it almost.

01:07:37 Ben Skipper

Any relevance?

01:07:39 Ben Skipper

And therefore is that emboldening both the commanders on the ground and the politicians driving whatever this war has developed into for the Russians?

01:07:51 Ben Skipper

In into something that is grotesquely violent.

01:07:55 Dustin Du Cane

Well, the ICT Y for Yugoslavia, they did a good job because there was a brief period during which Russia was collapsing.

01:08:00 Ben Skipper

Uh.

01:08:07 Dustin Du Cane

America was all powerful, and the Serbians got on the wrong side of America and especially American media. And there was a window to go after everybody, including the last service. And unfortunately he died.

01:08:24 Dustin Du Cane

Trial of him or Gaddafi would have been wonderful.

01:08:32

Hmm.

01:08:34 Ben Skipper

I I think the the Americans, Gaddafi.

01:08:36 Ben Skipper

Would have been.

01:08:37 Ben Skipper

The proverbial icing on the cake for them, wouldn't he? You know his.

01:08:40 Ben Skipper

Trial would have been.

01:08:44 Ben Skipper

It it, it would have been, it would have vindicated the existence of the ICC in their eyes, at least.

01:08:53 Dustin Du Cane

If the ICC doesn't deal with Russia, it's not fit for purpose.

01:09:03 Dustin Du Cane

We we shouldn't be spending money or money, time, money and effort having a court for to try brown people or black people.

01:09:17 Dustin Du Cane

The ICC, where you should be going after the really, really powerful.

01:09:23 Dustin Du Cane

State level act as it was designed to do the.

01:09:27 Dustin Du Cane

And.

01:09:28 Dustin Du Cane

If it's not doing bad, then it's not critical purpose, and if there's a genocide, I'd say again around or Uganda or anywhere else we can always. We can always have a special tribunal again.

01:09:42 Dustin Du Cane

Instead of having an ICC hanging around acting as a super policeman in Africa.

01:09:52 Ben Skipper

Phil. Phil, what are your views on?

01:09:54 Ben Skipper

This.

01:10:01 Philip Blood

Sorry, baby.

01:10:05 Dustin Du Cane

He's not used to not talking uninterrupted.

01:10:16 Ben Skipper

Ohh, the amount of those. So sorry. Go on.

01:10:16 Philip Blood

Have sex, have sex and travel. Dustin so.

01:10:25 Philip Blood

So.

01:10:26 Philip Blood

You asked me what I thought which of the 25,000,000 questions am I answering?

01:10:34 Ben Skipper

This, this, this, this episode is. I think he's gonna have to carry on to another episode.

01:10:39 Ben Skipper

This is.

01:10:42 Philip Blood

Are you asking if I believe that industrial war between industrial relations now should be made illegal?

01:10:53 Philip Blood

Then yes.

01:11:00 Philip Blood

OK. But there's a big problem with that.

01:11:03 Ben Skipper

So I was waiting for the book.

01:11:06 Philip Blood

And the big problem is if you try and prevent it.

01:11:11 Philip Blood

There's always the problem because if you try and work it on the basis of arms limitation.

01:11:19 Philip Blood

A nation will want to defend itself, regardless of where.

01:11:25 Philip Blood

Federation. It belongs to like NATO or Warsaw Pact or.

01:11:28 Philip Blood

Something.

01:11:32 Philip Blood

It will always want its own defence.

01:11:36 Philip Blood

Capability. So security capability and all the all of their existence makes.

01:11:44 Philip Blood

The potential for war not not all. All the time high, but there is a potential for conflict.

01:11:52 Philip Blood

I do however, think that we need to have a better appreciation. What mod weapons have done now?

01:12:03 Philip Blood

I'm gonna put this back to to Dustin in a in a different way.

01:12:11 Philip Blood

When Lemkin wrote his work, it was before 1945.

01:12:18 Philip Blood

When menkins.

01:12:20 Philip Blood

Ideas were codified in law for United Nations. It was 1948.

01:12:28 Philip Blood

We've had a few independent increases and changes and amendments along the way, and the United Nations has done their thing. International courts bodied their buildings and what have you, but nobody's really considered the change.

01:12:44 Philip Blood

In weaponry and the impact of technology.

01:12:48 Philip Blood

And technology has changed the battlefield. I mean, if you just look now the the battlefield of that, the Ukrainians and the Russians are fighting on is heavily dominated by drones.

01:13:02 Philip Blood

And those drones can pinpoint.

01:13:05 Philip Blood

A target with lethal accuracy, but the amount of firepower that they bombard with.

01:13:14 Philip Blood

Can take out a whole area.

01:13:16 Philip Blood

So they're not just hitting their original target.

01:13:20 Philip Blood

They're causing.

01:13:22 Philip Blood

A spillover or a?

01:13:25 Philip Blood

We're back to that turn again. Collateral damage.

01:13:29 Philip Blood

Be on the target.

01:13:31 Philip Blood

And not none of that has been factored into the modern.

01:13:37 Philip Blood

Systems and thinkings about genocide.

01:13:43 Philip Blood

Because we're still arguing that genocide only occurs when we kill 6,000,000 Jews in Europe in 19 in the 1940s or in Rwanda with machetes in 1990s, it's all post hoc.

01:13:59 Philip Blood

Analysis And what we need to be doing is thinking about how you prevent that and the only way you can prevent it.

01:14:07 Philip Blood

Is by rationalising.

01:14:08 Philip Blood

What these modern weapons are capable of doing to civilian communities?

01:14:14 Philip Blood

And by the way, Dustin's making me dizzy. I'm gonna.

01:14:16 Philip Blood

Have to turn him off.

01:14:22 Ben Skipper

He's one of the he's one of these chaps who thinks best.

01:14:25 Ben Skipper

On his feet.

01:14:26 Ben Skipper

Like you know, on the, on the bright side, he's not his cycling machine or whatever.

01:14:31 Philip Blood

He's walking round his sofa.

01:14:35 Ben Skipper

He's he's trying to get his steps in.

01:14:38 Philip Blood

Yeah, he's just walking around his sofa trying to show that he's.

01:14:42 Dustin Du Cane

I'm get I'm getting my beach body ready.

01:14:44 Philip Blood

Yeah, like, yeah.

01:14:47 Ben Skipper

Which year? Yeah.

01:14:52 Philip Blood

So. So that's my it. It it's not just that industrial nations have to learn to stop fighting each other.

01:15:00 Philip Blood

And be.

01:15:03 Philip Blood

Legislated against when they do.

01:15:06 Philip Blood

But also we've got to start looking at these weapons again.

01:15:09 Philip Blood

I just don't think civilians understand how we.

01:15:11 Dustin Du Cane

So a revisit so.

01:15:14 Dustin Du Cane

So revisit to The Hague Conventions.

01:15:18 Dustin Du Cane

The Geneva Conventions have a look at them and start saying, well, if you're going to be using.

01:15:25 Dustin Du Cane

These type of weapons.

01:15:28 Dustin Du Cane

You've got you've got.

01:15:29 Dustin Du Cane

Weaponry good enough to avoid killing civilians.

01:15:33 Dustin Du Cane

So we're gonna raise.

01:15:36 Dustin Du Cane

Raise the burden standards that you must stick to appear to.

01:15:42 Philip Blood

Oh.

01:15:42 Dustin Du Cane

Tighten up the laws of conflict. We'll just say if you engage in war.

01:15:47 Dustin Du Cane

And you killed more than 100 civilians.

01:15:50 Dustin Du Cane

That's genocide.

01:15:52 Philip Blood

Look, let me give you an example.

01:15:55 Philip Blood

In 90 I'm going to use 1940 again in 1940, the Germans accused the British Army of using Dum Dum Bullets.

01:16:05 Philip Blood

It led to a couple of incidents where the SS shot a whole load of British soldiers.

01:16:12 Philip Blood

Now.

01:16:14 Philip Blood

If you took.

01:16:14 Dustin Du Cane

Know who?

01:16:15 Dustin Du Cane

Full popped up on. Do you know who?

01:16:16 Philip Blood

If you talk, if you if you spoke to British professional soldiers who served in 1940 in France.

01:16:25 Philip Blood

Especially those who worked in empire and you said to them.

01:16:31 Philip Blood

Were you aware of British soldiers using Dum Dum Bullets? They'd have said to you, yes.

01:16:40 Philip Blood

If you went to somebody like Richard Holmes and you said to him, was there any evidence of the British Army using Dum Dum Bullets in 1940, he would say yes.

01:16:58 Philip Blood

Now if you look at the conventions, the conventional rules are you mustn't cut the tips off of bullets and you mustn't flat nose them. And you mustn't put mercury in them and all the rest of it.

01:17:12 Philip Blood

When some analysis was done, it was shown that if a bullet if a bullet even only accidentally nicked in such a way.

01:17:21 Philip Blood

Hit the body. It could actually cause more damage than it would normally when it was penetrating.

01:17:29 Philip Blood

So you know, there's all kinds of stories about what bullets do in trajectory.

01:17:36 Philip Blood

Blah blah blah.

01:17:38 Philip Blood

The the point is, we've moved up far away from when the the Enfield rifle could or could not be a Dum dum bullet wound.

01:17:48 Philip Blood

When one of these calibre missiles is fired into a civilian community, it has the potential of killing many, many, many people, maybe hundreds, even, maybe even 1000 people if it lands in the wrong place at the right time.

01:18:05 Philip Blood

And so we've got to start thinking about how weapons are used. I mean, if if an anti if an anti ship or anti aircraft missile is fired into a block of flats with people resident there.

01:18:21 Philip Blood

And.

01:18:23 Philip Blood

It's done with malicious intent.

01:18:27 Philip Blood

Then that is a murderous act.

01:18:30 Philip Blood

Simple and you know that's the problem we've got now. We've got guys sitting on Twitter saying, well, you know, Putin's firing anti submarine missiles or anti aircraft missiles into the streets of Ukrainian cities.

01:18:49 Philip Blood

Nobody's turning around and saying, hang on a minute. Why would you do that if it?

01:18:53 Philip Blood

Wasn't.

01:18:54 Philip Blood

To cause deliberate mayhem on the civilian population.

01:19:01 Ben Skipper

I I think a lot of these claims, I'm I'm still very much on.

01:19:06 Ben Skipper

On the fence on this that you know, because there's such a a wide array of anti aircraft missiles out there from heat seeking to radar, I think they're used again in an urban environment.

01:19:19 Ben Skipper

It it's either as a result of, it's the the you know it's been used now to where combat and it's for out of fuel. So it is plummeted to Earth naturally. I don't think it would make sense to use such weapons against.

01:19:36 Ben Skipper

Tower blocks in particular because I would imagine they do give out a heat sink, but nowhere near as much as an aircraft and into, you know, they don't give anything out radiation wise for for an anti you know a radar seeking missile touch on to I think people are just a guest that he has such a stockpile.

01:19:57

Of.

01:19:59 Ben Skipper

You know, cruise missiles like the calibre and he's using them with free will and people you know, there were there was there was a guy saying the.

01:20:05 Ben Skipper

Other day that.

01:20:07 Ben Skipper

You know these things? People demanding stuff like.

01:20:12 Ben Skipper

Goalkeeper and and the like we it was it was almost, you know, and this paraphrase was La La land thinking because they don't defend against it. Well, you know actually false. You know this guy is general staff at the retired General Staff officer of the American Army and he doesn't even know the capacity and the capability of his own.

01:20:32 Ben Skipper

Hit.

01:20:34 Ben Skipper

This has been proven.

01:20:34 Dustin Du Cane

They forgot about hurtling or another one.

01:20:38 Ben Skipper

The other one I think it was, you know, I'm thinking, you know, they're the the empirical evidence. The goalkeeper works, the patriot, you know, eventually works. Sky works. Yeah. I got all this stuff works. It's just it doesn't fit your narrative because the idea that somebody could take this and take stuff.

01:20:54 Ben Skipper

And you say, apart from the Americans, or apart from Israelis, just doesn't sit right with them. And again, you know, there are other they're very.

01:21:01 Philip Blood

See one of the things I remember was I think it was a Patriot missile actually exploded.

01:21:08 Philip Blood

Amongst U.S. soldiers.

01:21:12 Ben Skipper

The the the Patriot system was rushed into service, though a lot of people said that, you know, because of the first Gulf War it it was.

01:21:20 Philip Blood

But didn't one of them land in a home or just explode somewhere and kill a whole Americans? I have these images, American soldiers.

01:21:25 Ben Skipper

I I.

01:21:27 Dustin Du Cane

Is there any?

01:21:28 Ben Skipper

I think he was an Israeli, one that landed in was in Israeli, one that landed in the suburb of Tel Aviv.

01:21:36 Philip Blood

And the point is, these things are infinitely more dangerous than than than should be permitted in civilian community.

01:21:47 Ben Skipper

And this goes back to your point. And when you, when you, when you bring the war into a conurbation, these things are gonna happen. If you have, you know, we we've seen those video clips and of the SU-25 losing off a missile from one of its pods over a village, these things are gonna happen increasingly because sure as eggs his eggs.

01:22:06 Ben Skipper

He was probably being chased by by Ukrainian Mig.

01:22:12 Ben Skipper

Where's that missile gonna go? If it hit, you know, doesn't hit are are we? Are we now sort of developing the conversation into a new realm of what is acceptable collateral damage, which is never acceptable? Is the overshot the misfire, the, you know, the malfunction?

01:22:28 Philip Blood

The crash helicopter coming down in a village, I mean the. Yeah, it it it.

01:22:33 Ben Skipper

It's, you know, the force, yeah.

01:22:33 Philip Blood

You see this picture out then the accidents on top of everything else just aggravate the situation further. My point is.

01:22:43 Philip Blood

Going back to Justins comment question.

01:22:47 Philip Blood

Was, you know, should Warren heavy heavily municipalized communities like in Europe? Should it be illegal? I think yes.

01:23:00 Ben Skipper

I think we've just argued for that for your.

01:23:04 Ben Skipper

For your assertion.

01:23:06 Ben Skipper

To be accepted, we we've actually argued our way around that have we? We've said, yeah.

01:23:07 Dustin Du Cane

Right.

01:23:10 Philip Blood

Well, it's it's it's to me. It's simple logic. The technology has outrun the capability of human beings to cope with the stuff.

01:23:20 Philip Blood

And societies have grown in such a way that.

01:23:26 Philip Blood

There isn't much room for them to be protected from these things. Even if you wanted to protect them from it. I mean the.

01:23:34 Philip Blood

200 metres down the road we had a an air raid bunker which was built in 1941.

01:23:41 Philip Blood

Which is fascinating, really, because it was the one where where the local people actually forced the Nazis to build it.

01:23:51 Philip Blood

Now it was got rid of because nobody in Arkham now remembers that protest. To make that building be built.

01:24:01 Philip Blood

But it was built because Arkham was being bombed almost every other day.

01:24:06 Philip Blood

For a period.

01:24:09 Philip Blood

And and the locals said enough is enough. We want protection.

01:24:15 Philip Blood

And they started to build bunkers. In the end, they built 21 bunkers around the city, which was so thick you they they could probably have survived nuclear weapons.

01:24:26 Philip Blood

Now, in 2014, when it was Charlamagne's birthday, they quietly, without anybody noticing, tried to pull these things down.

01:24:35 Philip Blood

Took six weeks, smashing each of these bunkers. The point is, they were there for a political reason.

01:24:42 Philip Blood

They had a history.

01:24:44 Philip Blood

And they were done because people wanted protection. What we're talking about now with the kind of weapons that we're we're dealing with one of these, one of these missiles where they, you know, I think they call them bunker bashes.

01:24:58 Philip Blood

Only has to hit a range of flats and it will bring down the whole apartment block.

01:25:05 Philip Blood

Well, there's no. There's no escape from that. And where am I going to run?

01:25:12 Philip Blood

You know, I've got no bunkers near me. We don't have. We don't have Cellars because the river is fairly just below our feet. Really. It's about 12 feet below the house.

01:25:24 Philip Blood

We don't have sellers.

01:25:27 Philip Blood

So where would we go? And I I think the same is much is similar in Ukraine and other European cities where there isn't many sellers, they're all, they're all the houses are fairly tall. We we're densely populated, roll on top of each other.

01:25:42 Philip Blood

And you only need one of these things to come cannoning into the street.

01:25:47 Philip Blood

And you've got serious casualties.

01:25:50 Dustin Du Cane

If I can.

01:25:50 Dustin Du Cane

Interrupt you. So I'll put the pin in there because I'm I want to define something so.

01:25:59 Dustin Du Cane

Should we be saying that if you don't take?

01:26:04 Dustin Du Cane

A lot more care, much more than the standards of war. Laws of war, lots of conflict. Nowadays we cry. You don't take a lot more care and and just Chuck around heavy weaponry.

01:26:20 Dustin Du Cane

And.

01:26:21 Dustin Du Cane

Hit her civilian targets by accident or deliberately, or by deliberate accident.

01:26:29 Dustin Du Cane

Then.

01:26:31 Dustin Du Cane

You should be.

01:26:34 Dustin Du Cane

Bumping your crime grade up to genocide with the legal consequences rather.

01:26:41 Dustin Du Cane

Then a a breach of laws of war, and that's an important distinction because the commander and we, we've seen that in, in conflicts in the past, commanders who are deemed to have been overly aggressive and and reach to the.

01:27:00 Dustin Du Cane

O.

01:27:01 Dustin Du Cane

The rules of war, because they bombed the hospital or they bombed the church because they felt.

01:27:07 Dustin Du Cane

There were terrorists there or it was a terrorist gathering.

01:27:12 Dustin Du Cane

They get smacked in the on the wrist and they get or they go to prison for a year to and write a book about it later on. That happens in our brown people wars and and it certainly happened after World War 2. I'm not going to even talk about the likely trials.

01:27:33 Dustin Du Cane

Instead, we should say if you don't, if you accidentally deliberately.

01:27:38 Dustin Du Cane

Trucker calibre missile after an apartment block. That's not an accident of war. You're going to have. You're going to.

01:27:48 Dustin Du Cane

Be 5 for genocide.

01:27:51 Dustin Du Cane

And you're going to go down for life.

01:27:56 Dustin Du Cane

And should we be tightening up the laws of conflict so that?

01:28:02 Dustin Du Cane

States who profess to be technologically involved.

01:28:07 Dustin Du Cane

Obviously, the United States is technology Advanced UK, France, Germany and Russia claims to be technology and just to have super weapons.

01:28:17 Dustin Du Cane

But you can't. They can't wage war, the type of thing they can't be blasting unguided artillery 152 millimetre artillery. What's the the 2S7 artillery at cities.

01:28:36 Dustin Du Cane

No can send in your Terminator assassin Ninja drones.

01:28:44 Dustin Du Cane

And you can drop a laser guided tiny missile.

01:28:50 Dustin Du Cane

Through a window, but you can't go blasting, blowing things up. Even if there is military necessity, because that's an exclusion.

01:28:59 Dustin Du Cane

For targeting civilians.

01:29:02 Dustin Du Cane

Even if you've got a really good reason to attack a civilian target, then you have to use your really expensive, really special weaponry that you're so proud of. You spend so much money on, you can't just hit it with a.

01:29:21 Dustin Du Cane

Ship killing missile.

01:29:27 Philip Blood

My argument is.

01:29:30 Philip Blood

If you point.

01:29:31 Philip Blood

A modern weapon.

01:29:33 Philip Blood

At the civilian community.

01:29:37 Philip Blood

Your first level of crime is murder.

01:29:43 Philip Blood

If you do it again, you're on the road to genocide.

01:29:52 Dustin Du Cane

And you asked me about Lemkin in 1948, was the convention that we got then has many, many flaws.

01:30:08 Philip Blood

But to be honest, I didn't ask you about Lemkin, I said.

01:30:13 Philip Blood

When?

01:30:15 Philip Blood

Lemkin was done. People took his ideas and implemented what suited them.

01:30:22 Philip Blood

I'm saying all I'm saying all of that now is over.

01:30:22

Yeah.

01:30:27 Philip Blood

I think those, I think those days of of existing genocidal laws and precedents are finished.

01:30:39 Philip Blood

We have to start again.

01:30:42 Philip Blood

And.

01:30:44 Philip Blood

I based that on the nature of Modern Warfare, the nature of what I call Real Creek, which is what Putin is waging.

01:30:54 Philip Blood

And I base that on the way this war has developed.

01:31:00 Dustin Du Cane

And could we go back to your definition of abandon account funk? I said it.

01:31:10 Dustin Du Cane

Would you agree with me that if you go to war without the fined?

01:31:17 Dustin Du Cane

Military and political objectives.

01:31:21 Dustin Du Cane

Really highly defined and perhaps stated publicly. Then you're just on the way to atrocity.

01:31:28 Dustin Du Cane

Because your soldiers don't know what you what you want them to do because you don't know what you want to do. We can see that in Russian media, but.

01:31:41 Dustin Du Cane

They're guessing the people screaming on Russian TV are guessing what Putin wants them to say, and then they're not able to say what the what Russian war aims are. The public aren't able to say, and the people who have the least idea of what Russian war aims are the poor 18 year old starving.

01:32:00 Dustin Du Cane

Constricts, who can only go to who only are in Ukraine for unknown reasons.

01:32:06 Dustin Du Cane

And just drink all out. Nicki, Telly and rape somebody while I'm here.

01:32:12 Philip Blood

Well, first of all.

01:32:14 Philip Blood

Standby camping is quite simple. I mean it's a catch all.

01:32:19 Philip Blood

It was very rough.

01:32:21 Philip Blood

And it was basically saying all partisans and resistance fighters were bandits.

01:32:29 Philip Blood

It was therefore a broad brush approach.

01:32:33 Philip Blood

To outlawing any form of resistance in occupied Europe.

01:32:38 Ben Skipper

It wasn't.

01:32:39 Dustin Du Cane

I'm comparing that.

01:32:39 Philip Blood

With, with, with, with Putin calling out with this it it was it, it was non specific within.

01:32:44 Dustin Du Cane

Nazis.

01:32:48 Philip Blood

A series of policies.

01:32:52 Philip Blood

Which included things like the Holocaust, hunger plans.

01:32:59 Philip Blood

Occupation policies, security zones, a whole heap of other stuff.

01:33:06 Philip Blood

So it was part of.

01:33:08 Philip Blood

It was.

01:33:10 Philip Blood

Part of a range, a menu if you like of or or an agenda of Nazi occupation and security.

01:33:19

But.

01:33:20 Philip Blood

It was not intended for politicians. It was meant for operatives.

01:33:27 Philip Blood

To interpret the situation and use their initiatives.

01:33:33 Dustin Du Cane

Because they because the ants were ill defined or.

01:33:38 Philip Blood

Yeah, because the only. Yeah.

01:33:39 Philip Blood

The only aim was to kill everybody now, right?

01:33:45 Dustin Du Cane

I'm I'm comparing that with Putin, calling Ukrainians Nazis and let's go denazified, which nobody knows what that means. And also with the War on Terror that you.

01:33:56 Dustin Du Cane

Started off with because I think there's a there's a Direct Line from declaring a War on Terror.

01:33:58

Well.

01:34:02 Dustin Du Cane

And having Abu Ghraib.

01:34:04 Philip Blood

Well, there was a period when the Soviet Union did actually conduct densification policy in Eastern Europe and its occupied zones.

01:34:15 Philip Blood

So there was a coherent policy of denotification.

01:34:21 Philip Blood

What?

01:34:22 Philip Blood

Putin is doing isn't denotification what Putin is doing is declaring they're Nazis there, and we're gonna kill them or we're gonna eradicate them or we're gonna remove them or we're gonna imprison them. Whatever, whatever the case.

01:34:37 Philip Blood

He's not. He's not doing denotification in the Soviet Union sense of the word, which was partly.

01:34:37 Dustin Du Cane

And then you can voucher.

01:34:45 Philip Blood

To bring retribution against war criminals, it was also to educate the German people or the East German people. And a lot of the east.

01:34:57 Philip Blood

Into quote being correct, decent communists in the regime.

01:35:05 Dustin Du Cane

Working trying to make make Ukrainians into good little Russians.

01:35:11 Philip Blood

I don't know what he's trying to do because in some places he seems to be either taking them all out and replacing them with Russians.

01:35:20 Philip Blood

In other places it seems to be trying to educate them and in other places he tries.

01:35:24 Philip Blood

To be killing them.

01:35:27 Philip Blood

The range of confusion is as confused and as open-ended as all of his doctrine so far and and this is the point.

01:35:37 Philip Blood

He's not saying.

01:35:40 Philip Blood

There is one class of Ukrainians that need to be dealt with because they are identifiable within the Ukrainian community. He is saying there are Nazis in this state.

01:35:54 Philip Blood

He doesn't know how many. He doesn't declare how many. He doesn't say where they are and he doesn't say how he's gonna get rid of them. He just says I'm gonna get rid of all of these Ukrainian Nazis.

01:36:06 Philip Blood

The problem with that is it's open-ended.

01:36:10 Philip Blood

Ohh and it means any soldier down on the ground level decides that that person is a.

01:36:19 Philip Blood

A Nazi.

01:36:21 Philip Blood

Then that soldier is technically empowered to either arrest or kill that Nazi.

01:36:28 Dustin Du Cane

Philip, thank you. You just crystallised the force. I I had germinating in my mind because.

01:36:35 Dustin Du Cane

Now something has come become clear to me.

01:36:39 Dustin Du Cane

And I was thinking about.

01:36:40 Dustin Du Cane

This.

01:36:41 Dustin Du Cane

And I didn't realise it.

01:36:44 Dustin Du Cane

You know why?

01:36:46 Dustin Du Cane

Putin is saying we're going to denazified Ukraine and we're fighting the Nazis.

01:36:53 Dustin Du Cane

Because he knows.

01:36:55 Dustin Du Cane

Thinks that that way he can avoid getting called genocidal and you know why?

01:37:03 Dustin Du Cane

Because of the definition in the Genocide Convention.

01:37:09 Dustin Du Cane

Lampkin.

01:37:10 Dustin Du Cane

Drew attention to this.

01:37:13 Dustin Du Cane

Thing about the Genocide Convention is that.

01:37:19 Dustin Du Cane

Because political groups aren't contained.

01:37:28

Ohh.

01:37:30 Ben Skipper

Now we seem to have lost.

01:37:33 Philip Blood

He's walked away from the sofa.

01:37:36 Ben Skipper

This. Yeah. Unfortunately, we lost dust in mid flow.

01:37:42 Ben Skipper

Give him a second.

01:37:44 Ben Skipper

I I am aware though of the time that this this conversation has really ballooned, which is quite quite you know.

01:37:52 Ben Skipper

And then there's been a lot of discussion or developing the theme of themes around genocide today.

01:38:04 Ben Skipper

Yeah. No, son. Justin. What we'll do we, I I think this is we we this is the thing we need to come back to and continue the discussion.

01:38:13 Philip Blood

He hasn't left the room.

01:38:15 Ben Skipper

Where is he then?

01:38:17 Ben Skipper

No, he's still there. I don't know what he's doing.

01:38:19

We.

01:38:20 Ben Skipper

We've we've lost Dustin Duquesne in a in in a.

01:38:23 Dustin Du Cane

Ohh my phone. Sorry my phone died.

01:38:27 Ben Skipper

It's because you're walking around with it.

01:38:28

Where did I?

01:38:29 Dustin Du Cane

Where did I get up to on my?

01:38:30 Dustin Du Cane

Rant.

01:38:32 Philip Blood

You got halfway.

01:38:33 Philip Blood

Around the sofa. And then you walked away from the sofa.

01:38:36 Ben Skipper

Yeah, the the, the, the cypher cypher of power wasn't. I think he was recharging it through motion recharging.

01:38:41 Philip Blood

To be honest, I'd fallen asleep because it was really ******* boring.

01:38:47 Ben Skipper

You, you, you, you've. You've got that point, you've got the.

01:38:51 Ben Skipper

Point and and that.

01:38:52 Dustin Du Cane

Yeah, all your, you know, you know where Amazon has filed all your books.

01:39:03 Ben Skipper

You've got to the point where you you'd identify.

01:39:05 Ben Skipper

So that Putin has probably rationalised that by saying that he was fighting an anti Nazi action, he was there for almost to skewing any any responsibility for war crimes and then.

01:39:15 Ben Skipper

He won.

01:39:15 Philip Blood

It was the legislative awareness of the identification of Nazis.

01:39:23 Dustin Du Cane

OK, OK. So Putin is drawing directly on or using directly the loophole that the Soviet Union put into the Genocide Convention.

01:39:23 Philip Blood

That's.

01:39:39 Dustin Du Cane

To avoid accusation of accusations of when it went after political groups as that being defined as genocide, so under the Genocide Convention, if Stalin was killing.

01:39:55 Dustin Du Cane

Kulaks in Ukraine.

01:39:58 Dustin Du Cane

That that was supposed to Google.

01:40:00 Dustin Du Cane

That's not genocide. If Stalin was killing Ukrainians because they're Ukrainian, that's genocide under the Genocide Convention. And so Putin deliberately labelled Ukrainians who opposed him as Nazis, not as Ukrainians. So he can say it's not genocide. They're Nazis.

01:40:21 Dustin Du Cane

I'm going after the National Socialists.

01:40:26 Dustin Du Cane

Thanks.

01:40:31 Ben Skipper

I was just saying I I think this has been quite it's been one of those actually lounge episodes which which I think we have covered a huge amount of ground on today.

01:40:42 Dustin Du Cane

And we've still got topics open.

01:40:44 Ben Skipper

Yeah, we. And we've, we've got a lot of topics still to discuss.

01:40:45

Are.

01:40:47 Ben Skipper

And I'm mindful that this is this is now turning to a feature length episode, so respectfully, chaps, I'd like to carry on this discussion into.

01:40:56 Ben Skipper

Part 12.

01:40:59 Ben Skipper

And use this opportunity now just to say.

01:41:03 Ben Skipper

Thanks for all. Thanks for your your input and your thoughts today. It's been actually it's been a really engaging conversation and certainly got me thinking which is always very dangerous so.

01:41:16 Ben Skipper

Justin, thank you as always for your for your insight, your thoughts and most importantly your your, your legal sort of knowledge which has helped explain a few things. And doctor Phil thank you so much again.

01:41:30 Ben Skipper

For raising new new subjects which?

01:41:33 Ben Skipper

And areas of contemplation and consideration that I haven't even struck my mind because, like, a lot of people, I'm still in the mindset of military operations in the military field, so to speak, and these very rarely slipping over into abnormally civilian atmosphere, civilian environment, which he still lived in and has been evacuated.

01:41:56 Ben Skipper

The the, the, the, the the destruction of of of such occupy we are sort of occupied areas being so wholesale by artillery, Holocaust by artillery so.

01:42:08 Philip Blood

We tried out with yeah.

01:42:10 Ben Skipper

You did? That's yours. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And and.

01:42:12 Dustin Du Cane

I can trade mark it for you.

01:42:14 Dustin Du Cane

If you want.

01:42:15 Ben Skipper

Yeah, 22 cause it it it it's quite important. So chaps, thank you so much today.

01:42:21 Ben Skipper

We'll definitely catch up in the next week. So listener, thank you so much for listening to today's episode.

01:42:28 Dustin Du Cane

And follow General Hodge on Twitter.

01:42:33 Ben Skipper

I I know, I know they're one or two of them. They've been listening cause they've picked because they, they've, they've they know they say things don't they think hang.

01:42:39 Dustin Du Cane

On a minute, mate. Yeah. General House is a good. It's it's a good one.

01:42:41 Ben Skipper

Can we show you?

01:42:45 Ben Skipper

Be sure your sins will find you out. So chaps, thanks. Thank you both once again and listen, thank you wherever you are. And do take care and we'll be back with the essence lounge rush where we'll part 12.

01:43:01 Ben Skipper

In the very near future. Alright until then, goodbye.

01:43:04 Philip Blood

Cheers. Bye bye.