 This is Think Tech Hawaii, the immunity matters here. No kidding. There's enough stuff to get stressed out about, but we're going to stress you out today. This is History Lens with John David Ann, he's a history professor. No, we're not going to stress them out, Jay. Our viewers are going to really enjoy this. Yeah, if you like stress. This is interesting stuff. Come on. Stress-free. He's a history professor, which gives him a certain cachet in dealing with, you know, history. History today, the making, but history years ago, to try to get a pipeline on where it's all been, where it's all going. And today we're talking about the history, I love this topic, of crisis manufacturing. Manufacturing. Because we have seen that only a few days ago in the wall, but there's a long history of it. Well, so yeah, so Trump has been accused of manufacturing a crisis at the border, a national security crisis, in order to build his wall. And so I thought, you know, it might be interesting to study this backwards by putting, essentially, what we do at History Lens is we put contemporary affairs into historical perspective. So we're going to go back to it. In the process we learn history. Right, exactly. No, that's right. So we're going to go back and we're going to learn about the history of crisis manufacturing, which some of the characteristics, it does involve lying. There has to be, there's definitely some untruths in there. It also involves something about the situation which is true, a little thing about the situation which is true, which then is turned into this massive lie, a very big lie in fact. Hitler thought, the bigger the lie, the better the lie. You know, this reminds me of some of the points in that New York Times article about Vladimir Putin. About his disinformation campaign. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. All the things you just mentioned are in that protocol. Right, right. So yeah, I mean this playbook is old, but really Hitler was the one who perfected this playbook. And sometimes these, in the military, these operations are called false flag operations. And we'll look at a couple of false flag operations. But I think it's important to understand crisis manufacturing in historical perspective. So we're going to do it. So excited. Right, right. Okay, so start at, I wouldn't say start at the beginning, but start at something memorable in American history. Well, okay, so there's been so many of these that you can't actually cover all of them in 30 minutes. So what I did was really pick some kind of important ones and several in the 20th century. But we're going to start with the crisis over the National Bank, which took place in the late 1820s and especially in 1832. And this crisis, the so-called crisis over the National Bank, was something that Andrew Jackson used to get re-elected in 1832. And then he turned around and began withdrawing deposits from the National Bank and eventually destroyed it. So what was... It's called scapegoating. Isn't that right? Yes, in a way it's scapegoating. So Jackson hated the National Bank. The National Bank was a bank chartered by the U.S. government, but it was designed to provide capital to private individuals for projects, for various projects. You could go to your local branch of the National Bank and get a loan to buy land or to build a railroad, to build a canal, et cetera. But so Jackson did not like the bank. He didn't like paper money. He didn't like states and the national government having some kind of play in the national economy. He thought this did not represent limited government. And so he began to attack the bank, and especially in 1832, during the election of 1832, the Congress, which was controlled by the Whigs, tried to pass a recharter of the bank, because the bank had to be rechartered by the federal government every 20 years. And so the Congress had to... They had to get this bank rechartered, right? So they passed a bill rechartering the bank and Jackson vetoed it. And then he used his vetoing of this recharter to attack the bank. And then in his campaign, he attacked the bank again and again as a corrupt institution, an institution that didn't represent the common people, an institution that violated the values of the country. So there was no crisis with the bank. I mean, the bank actually was quite successful. That's why the Whigs wanted to recharter it. Erie Canal. Yes, the Erie Canal, railroads throughout the country. This was all built with money loaned out by the national bank. So there was no crisis. So in a sense, Jackson manufactured a crisis to get rid of the bank. He was a very aggressive politician, wasn't he? He was. He was the guy who did the Trail of Tears. That's correct. Yes. The Indians out of Georgia. That's right. That's for another session, actually. Absolutely. Another black eye for him. No, that's true. It's another black eye for him. And so he manufactures this crisis. Now the truth in this, there was a truth that the bank did serve more elite entrepreneurs and institutions. That's true because it tended to loan out larger amounts of money and the bank branches tended to be in big cities, not in small towns. But Jackson, saying that the bank was destroying the American economy, was actually just the opposite. The national bank was considered to have really raised the American economy between about 1810 and 1830. So it was actually a big boon to the American economy. So the attack was for bad purpose. The attack involved lies. He doubled down on the attack. Yes, that's true. He did. And he got away with it. And he won, actually. He won re-election. He systematically removed deposits from the bank, and eventually the bank, the bank. It's complicated, but eventually the bank failed. There's a whole bunch of things in there that are really scary in terms of history in recent times. It's a decent comparison in terms of crisis manufacturing. So I think it actually fits in there. So along an infamous history of crisis manufacturing and in the modern era, then we can talk about the national bank. But actually, most of the major incidents of crisis manufacturing have taken place in the 20th century. So if it's all right, I'd like to move to the 20th century. Yeah, I'd like you to do that. And I'd like you to connect it up with propaganda, with the fact that media was much more mature in the 20th century, and that we had a growing realization, everybody had a growing realization that you could get away with a lie using the media, the same formula, double down on the media and nobody would ever know and you'd get away with it. So the interesting question about the media, so the early 19th century, the early 1800s provides a moment where there are lots more newspapers and printing presses become much more efficient and everything, so that's one moment. In the early 20th century, then you have new media mediums, new forms of communication including film and then eventually radio. And these new forms of communication allow those who would manufacture crises more forums to do their business. Can I add a point? Yeah. In the 19th century, with all those newspapers around, in Andrew Jackson's day, people had face-to-face discussions about the news. Yeah. They had more newspapers, there was more engagement about the news. More than face-to-face discussion, they had fistfights about the news. Right on. So there's a point there. When you get into the 20th century, certainly in 21st, news is on a radio basis. In other words, it is thrown at you, you're alone, you're reading the newspaper, watching the TV or the radio, and you don't have the face-to-face experience. Your family is not necessarily going to talk to you about it. Your friends are not necessarily going to talk to you about it. And so you get it, and it can stick, because you never have a chance to test it out in an engagement. No, that's true. That's true. I mean, in the 19th century, the newspaper business was a business where there was tremendous disagreement in the newspapers, and particular newspapers would go for particular groups of people, and so yeah, there was a lot of diversity. That's true, especially with radio, then there was maybe less way to rebut a particular argument or to discredit a particular argument. That's true. So the next major incident of crisis manufacturing took place after the end of World War I. And this was actually a time, of course, when Germany was in a crisis, actually. They didn't manufacture that particular crisis. The crisis was that they lost the war, and the Kaiser was forced, their leader was forced to abdicate, and then there was actually an attempted socialist revolution, a Putsch in Germany in 1919, and of course, Hitler tried his own, who later on I think in 1922. But so behind the scenes, the question is, who was to blame for the end, for the German failure in World War I? Whose fault was it that Germany lost this war, that they had put so much blood and treasure into? And so Hitler writes a book, Adolf Hitler's a young man, there it is, Mein Kampf, yes, ah yes, there he is, with his funny looking mustache and all. So this is a later publication. This looking at him is chilling, this is the first class psychopath, and there you have it. There's also really par excellence, he is a crisis manufacturer. So what he does in Mein Kampf is he describes a situation where he believes a big lie has been perpetrated on the German people by Jewish bankers and financiers, and he says they blame General Ludendorff for the failure of the Germans in World War I, and then he goes on to say, but the real big lie is, or the real truth, which is Hitler's own big lie, okay, there's two big lies here. There's the big lie that Hitler identifies, and then there's the one with the Jews blaming Ludendorff. And then there's a second big lie that actually Hitler doesn't identify but perpetrates against the Jews in Germany and says that actually the people who were to blame for the German failure was Jewish bankers and financiers themselves. Not only should they stop blaming Ludendorff, it was their fault that Germany lost. So this eventually becomes a crisis, it becomes a situation in which Jews are put under a lot of pressure in Germany and eventually detained, and then of course the Holocaust. But so the big lie here is one in which Hitler uses to accuse the Jews of undermining the German state and leading to the failure in World War I, and there's absolutely no truth in that particular. He knew how to play the press. He knew how to play the press. He knew how to do propaganda. He knew how to do a lie and hit people in their weaknesses. That's right. They were vulnerable. That's right. It was an act of war. They were feeling unhappy. Let them blame somebody. No, that's right. This is scapegoating again, and so you have that situation of the big line. We'll come back to Hitler in a minute because Hitler, of course, is a very important guy in this. He is, like I said before, he is somebody who really knows how to create these crises in order to achieve his goals. But really the next incident of a crisis that was manufactured in order to achieve a kind of nefarious goal happened actually not in Europe, not in the United States, but in East Asia in 1931. So if we go to East Asia- I love traveling around the world with you, John. That's John David and history professor at HPU. We won't take a break because this is so interesting. Oh, okay. No break. Okay. So in 1931 the Japanese had an army stationed in Manchuria, which was a part of China, which was really controlled and run by a Chinese warlord who, you know, he was supposed to be connected to. He was being paid off by the Japanese army, but he wasn't really cooperating very much. And so the Japanese army, and this was the Japanese army in Manchuria, not the Japanese government back in Tokyo, the Japanese army decides, you know what, we're going to take matters into our own hands and we're going to produce something which will lead to the takeover of Manchuria. And by the way, this is the picture that we have in our background is the Manchurian incident. So there's the Manchurian incident. What happens is the Japanese high command in the army in Manchuria creates an incident. And the incident is they blow up a piece of this railroad. This railroad was actually controlled by the Japanese government. And they blow up a piece of the railroad themselves, and then they blame Chinese bandits for blowing up this piece of railroad, and they use this as a justification to invade all of Manchuria. It creates a war, a justification for war. Eventually leads to the Sino-Japanese war in China. And that sounds so much like what happened in Odessa not too long ago with the Russians. And in Poland and Ukraine, Ukraine, not too long ago. Putin is a very good crisis manufacturer. That's true. It's a Russian thing. A short story. When I was in the service of involvement and investigation of a defector that jumped off a Russian ship and tried to get on a Coast Guard ship off Martha's Vineyard. And when he jumped off, the Russians wanted him back, obviously. So they fabricated this whole affair about how he was really a thief, and he had stole money from the ship's safe on the Soviet sky on Lipov. And ultimately they got him back on that basis. It was a complete fabrication. So there are some situations and some cultures where this kind of thing leading to a war or otherwise achieving a nefarious purpose is based on a complete and utter lie. Yeah, I mean, I don't know about culture, but certainly there are certain regimes that have had a kind of loose relationship to the truth. Okay, regimes. And once you have that loose relationship to the truth, then there are all kinds of opportunities that open up. I mean, this is bad. This is, you know, nefarious opportunities open up. So Hitler was a proponent of the big lie. So back to the Manchurian incident. So the Japanese invade Manchuria and the Japanese government back in Tokyo doesn't know what to do because the army's acting on its own. And they keep telling the army, well, back into the barracks and then the army doesn't go back into the barracks and then they say, okay, hold your positions right there and then the army goes forward and invades more. It spins out of the control of the Japanese government. You essentially have a rogue army in Manchuria. This is referred to by military historians as a false flag operation. This is crisis manufacturing. Yeah, sure. So you have that crisis and then in the same decade you have another crisis which leads to another war. So Manchurian incident leads to the Sino-Japanese war and then in 1939 you have another crisis that's manufactured that leads to World War II. So this crisis manufacturing stuff is really serious. So of course this second crisis manufacturing was done by Hitler and by the Nazis and it was a pretext to invade Poland in September 1939. So here's what happens. So in August 1939, Hitler and his high command including Goebbels create all of these incidents and they create them and then they make it look like the Polish are doing this. And they burn down a house in Germany and blame it on the Polish and then this culminates on August 31, 1939 in an incident in which Goebbels sends some German nationals across the border into Poland, dresses them up in Polish military uniforms, sends them back across the border. That's right, sends them back across the border to attack a radio station. The name of the radio station is the Gliwitz radio station. So there's the radio station right there. This is known as the Gliwitz Incident and because of this, Hitler blames this on the Polish of course and the next day declares war on Poland. Perfect. What a scenario. Yeah, yeah. And it's all phony like a $3 bill. All of it. People believe it. It's manufactured. They want to believe it. There are tensions of course between Poland and Germany but it's blown up into this big crisis in order for Hitler to use his military and invade Poland and of course that begins, kind of begins World War II. It was in Blitzkrieg. Yeah. Yeah. It starts. But he had all the armaments lined up on the border. No, that's right. This was well planned. It was a step transaction. It was not actually a reaction to the attack on the radio station. So we begin to see this repeating in the 19th century and the 20th century where politicians, regimes as you say, used this as a technique to get what they wanted. And that often included war or other fristacuffs. That's right. And I mean it's really sad that's the human condition and you have to do that in order to, you know. It's a bad activity. It's really, it's dangerous actually. The lying is bad. But lying for a purpose like creating a war, that's even much worse. And it's, you know, it's outside the norms of the governments that are, you know, being attacked. But people don't know. And in some cases, outside of the norms of the governments that are perpetrating it. And, you know, it's so, yeah, so crisis manufacturing has the potentially very dangerous. I wouldn't say it's always very dangerous, but it has that potential. And so there's another example. And this example is much closer in time to our own time and it's actually in the United States once again. So we've had the national bank crisis in the United States and now the crisis over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. That's right. So, so this is a crisis that was created by top Bush administration officials who had some evidence, they had some evidence that Saddam Hussein in Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. Now they didn't have any evidence that he had actually succeeded in developing weapons of mass destruction. So in, in some cases they actually created the evidence. So if we can look at the, this is a, this is a, it's called an aluminum tube for uranium enrichment. And this is actually from a slideshow that Colin Powell did at the United Nations to justify the Bush administration planning and then executing an invasion of Iraq. Yeah. I told you before, I thought it came from Costco, maybe Lowe's hardware, hardware, Hawaii, whatever. Yeah. It's definitely, unfortunately it's definitely fiction because they never found any evidence that Saddam had actually produced. We've had, we haven't had many years now since that time to look at more than 20 years. Yeah. They never found any weapons of mass destruction. So, so it started with, with something, there was a little bit of truth there that Saddam did have a program to develop weapons of mass destruction. He just never had the resources to do it because he was under sanctions by NATO and, and the, and the United States in, in the late 1990s. And so, so what, what happens out of this is that the crisis is created by blowing up this program into actual weapons of mass destruction. Now the result of this, of course, was the invasion of Iraq and so. What year was that now? It was 2003. And one could argue, well, the invasion got rid of Saddam Hussein, yes it did, but it also destabilized a good portion of the Middle East. Saddam had, had his own population on lockdown. He had a substantial military capability. And so people around him, countries around him had to respect that capability. After Saddam went down, it actually strengthened Iran. And, you know, the, the border situation with Iraq and Syria, you know, that became much more porous and it, it opened up the, the invasion actually destabilized Saddam, the, the control in Iraq. Then it, then it opened up Northern Iraq to, to kind of no government at all, which eventually led to ISIS. Yeah. The development of this terrorist organization that actually set up shop in Northern Iraq. Yeah. And, and in Syria as well, it helped to destabilize Syria and along with several other things. And see what happens, dominoes, dominoes. So it was, it was devastating for the Middle East. And I think if one evaluates it fairly, I think one would have to say that, that, you know, on the unbalance, it was just a disaster for, for the world. And the irony, the irony is Colin Powell, who had advised Herbert Walker Bush not to, not to take over, not to topple Saddam Hussein back in the, in the 90s. That's right. The very same guy who was so wise about that, now is party to the law. Right. And the speech in the United Nations, I'm sure he loses sleep every day. Yeah, I'm, I'm, you know, he's, he's, he of course has backtracked since that time. And, you know, regrets that. But nonetheless, I mean, this is what can happen. So, so crisis manufacturing has the potential to be quite dangerous. And I think that leads us, of course, back to the current crisis that Trump is trying to manufacture at the southern border with Mexico. Yes. Trying to argue that there are terrorists and, you know, that, that, this is a national security issue, and that's why we have to build a wall. And, and it's interesting to watch it play out. I mean, it's tragic because of course you have workers, a friend, a good friend of mine works for the Coast Guard. And he hasn't, he hasn't received a paycheck in a while. This is terrible, actually. It's a terrible way to do policy. But so the, the idea that there are terrorists coming over the border is, of course, nonsense. And what's interesting about this is that Trump has, has kind of stayed true to the crisis manufacturing playbook. You, you make the lie big, and then you stick with it, and you double down on the lie. And this has created problems for him. Because people believe it. Yes. Some people, his base believes it. Yes. But actually when you look at polling numbers, after he went on national television and he went down to the border, was it last week that he did that? Then, you know, then actually his, because he had no, there was no there, there, there was actually no, there was no way that he could actually, with evidence, show that there was terrorism at the border. And, and the picture from Trump at the border was surrounded by ICE agents, right? Was him looking out on the Rio Grande, and there was nothing there. There were no terrorists. There were no people. It was like a frog hopping in the weeds. Imagination. So, so this is, that's I think is really, I think it's actually damaged Trump pretty seriously. So he walked back on that. So can we talk about his reasons and the circumstances of walking back? So, so he made this big play last week to try to convince the American people, and it was thoroughly unconvincing his polling numbers since that time have steadily tracked downward from about 43% to now he's at 40% and continuing to decline. And that limp speech he made. Yeah, so I think this has all created more problems for him than it's actually helped him politically. And the other thing that's interesting is that Trump had been talking recently about invoking a national security crisis, saying that, that the southern border is a national emergency. And then in under a national emergency declaration forcing the American military to build the wall. And, and this raised questions about whether the president had the constitutional authority to do this given that there was so little, little evidence of an actual crisis. And he, he just all of a sudden just kind of back down and said, no, I don't think I can do that. And so that's an interesting thing. I think the days before he backed down. There was an article by Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor in the New York Times where he made the legal case. It was like a brief with authority and saying there's no way that he could justify building the wall on the basis of a national emergency here. And it goes way back in American history and jurisprudence. So I think cooler heads talk Trump out of this. And what, to me, what it suggests about Trump is, is he's willing to try to manufacture crises. But honestly, he's not very good at it. He's not like Hitler. He's just not that effective. I mean, he chose an issue which had so little traction. It was, we always thought that the wall was political theater, right? And, and there's nothing there. You know, needed. We don't want it. It's a complete fiction. So that's part of his problem. He chose the wrong issue if he was going to manufacture a crisis. And, and I think he's, he's what, what this, what this backing down suggests is that he's not willing to contravene the Constitution. Okay. In a significant way. Let me, let me throw, let me throw another factor. Throw it, throw it. So he, here, I'll catch it. Ackerman and his friends at Yale and various other places, other media in the country, repeated that story. Right. And I guess even, even second, second, second best lawyers who may have advised Trump about it. Right. Came to the conclusion that Ackerman was right and there was no mileage and, and it would go into the courts and the courts would stop him from doing it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Okay. So that's because the law. Thank goodness. Yeah. Yeah. It was going strictly, strictly on a lie. Yeah. The way Hitler did. Right. You know, and, you know, maybe, maybe having the press would reveal the lie. I mean, our press now is pretty good at revealing lies. But there was no free press in Germany. Well, that's true. That's true. No, there was no free press. There was no legislature. So the Reichstag had burned down in 1933. And he owned all the judges. You know, six years before that and, and never met again. No, it was not a democracy. It was, it was a, it was a totalitarian dictatorship. Yeah. So it's. So, but if it's not a good comparison to our issue. Yeah. If we have only a factual issue and, and Trump has some justification factually for the lie, not, not a legal, you know, justification, but a factual justification, then I suggest to you that what he may have learned, you know, we're talking about going forward. No. What he may have learned in this debate is that don't, don't wrestle with the law, wrestle with the facts. Well, yeah. Maybe he's going to get better at this. I don't, I don't. Jay, the thing is, Trump has been wrestling with the facts ever since he took office. He's been, he's been, actually, I would say he's been a stranger to the facts for quite some time. So I'm not sure that anything is changing. Everybody's watching him like a hawk now. Yeah. So, you know, so crisis manufacturing is a dangerous business and we've seen from our study of the history of it that it can result in very bad things, war, mayhem, enhanced political power. So I think it's best to tell the truth. You heard it here. I mean, I don't know why that's so astonishing, but there it is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me suggest see what you think. Right. You know, the other thing hasn't ended. It hasn't ended with the war. Well, of course not. Of course not. Hasn't ended, you know, in history. Right. And human condition, the way things evolve on the planet. Yeah. We're going to see this again. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Because, you know, strong men who would like to gain more traction will always use these kind of tactics if they're not stopped by a free press, by constitutional limits, by a public that denounces it. So fortunately, we have those three things. We have a free press. We have a constitution. And we have a public that is in about 55% opposed to this guy and even more than that opposed to a wall. So I think we're OK. I enjoy your optimism, John. As long as those things stay in place, we'll be OK. I think we're going to be OK. But we have to watch and be sure they do stay in place. Absolutely. We have to be vigilant. Yes. Thank you, John. Sure. You're welcome, John. Great to talk to you. Have a lot.