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.

This is the last episode of season one.

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.