New Warhorn Media post by Tim Bayly:
The distinction I would make here is non-interventionism vs isolationism.
Without getting into specific conflicts, the non-interventionist position as I see it is that we should be involved where we have a direct threat to or attack on our national security interests. Just because someone is a non-interventionist in this or that conflict does not make him an isolationist. It is not a binary choice.
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Thank you, Pastor Bayly. Great episode. Your take on Christian Nationalism was concise and accurate. It’s ironic how much ink is spilled on the topic with no mention of Cromwell.
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Was that a book you referenced about Oliver Cromwell and John Owen?
Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England By Charles Harding Firth; G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1908.
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Couple excerpts:
Cromwell: “We are very apt, all of us, to call that Faith, that perhaps may be but carnal imagination.”
Firth: Once [Cromwell] warned the Scottish clergy that there was "a carnal confidence upon misunderstood and misapplied precepts " which might be termed “spiritual drunkenness.”
Cromwell: “I did out of necessity undertake that business which place I undertook, not so much out of a hope of doing any good, as out of a desire to prevent mischief and evil which I did see was imminent in the nation.”
Firth: Cromwell trusted that the real benefits his government conferred would reconcile the majority of the nation to the rule of the minority and “win the people to the interest of Jesus Christ.” Thus the long hostility between the people and " the people of God " would end at last in reconciliation. It was a fallacious hope. Puritanism was spending its strength in the vain endeavour to make England Puritan by force.
Firth: So the Protector’s institutions perished with him and his work ended in apparent failure.
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Thank you.
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Man. Gotta read that book.
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I’m appreciative that my objections were brought up to Rev. Dr Von Hagen. and for his responses (and Rev. Baley’s). He seems like a very pleasant fellow but regarding his economic and political stances I’m afraid he has falls on the same side as the global elite; the very same elite who push war, abortion, homosexuality, genderfluidity, etc. on us and insist on doing so to the entirety of the world!
RVDH never says a word about the negative impacts that the importation of millions of foreigners into a nation has on the cultural cohesion of its native inhabitants (and yet laments in this podcast that Germans are not allowed to have a national identity). He says he is not an advocate for the German Welfare State because it incentivizes native Germans to avoid work and then, in the next sentence, repeats the argument for importing unskilled labor to fill the void of unskilled labor the welfare system creates! I see a much simpler solution that doesn’t involve destroying a Nation’s cultural cohesion: make the native population work!
He also states that the immigrants who have come to Germany do not participate in the Welfare State, except to “help them when they are sick”. I find this hard to believe but I will take his word for it. I do have vivid memories from 2015 and 2016 of interviews with the Africans who were marching through southern Europe asking them why they were bypassing Italy and the other Southern European states, and they were very blunt in their answer: Germany would give them free stuff! They were apparently under a serious misapprehension!
Now regarding his response to whether WW2 was worth it RDVH poses the question “what is human life worth?” WW2 cost approximately 80 million lives. Nearly 3% of the total world population at the time! The European continent was completely ravaged! RDVH says many more millions than that would have died if Germany would have been allowed to remain unchecked. That is just ridiculous. There is a major underappreciation for just how horrible WW2 was. Let me amend this to say I am highly skeptical that this is the case based on how Vichy France was run while under German authority.
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You need to check your math. 80M is approximately 3.5% of the estimated world population of 2.3B in 1940, not nearly one third.
Furthermore, with the number of millions of people the Nazis killed outside of battle and were continuing to kill as the war drew to an end, and the likelihood of that continuing with their expansion, I have a hard time seeing things ending up any less than 10s of millions at the least. And no trouble imagining it being many more than that if Hitler decided Europe wasn’t enough (which I think likely). I’m not sure what you think the countries being invaded should have done if not fight. Yes, war is horrible. But is it to be avoided at any cost?
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Then I’m not sure why you would believe the war killed so many people. If the numbers are made up, then the numbers are made up.
It is true that it is very hard to discern what is truth from fiction when it comes to world history. All I know, is that when honest scholars are barred from asking basic questions under threat of having their livelihoods removed, one begins to question things. From the primary source reading I’ve done on WW2, things were a great deal more complicated than the good guy/bad guy paradigm we’ve been presented in the Hollywood films. Sin abounds on all sides!
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Dear John, I can see the respect we paid you by responding to your words was misplaced. A number of the things you said here could be exposed, but I’ll leave it at the fact that Juergen was one of the co-authors of our book, Abortion and the Church, which begins with a careful numerical detailing of the casualties of the First and Second World Wars. But then, you haven’t read the book, so there you have it. It grieves me to say this, but your lack of respect for a father in the faith is embarrassing. Seriously yours,
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I’m sorry. I’ll take this to heart and review what I’ve written. It is not my intention to be disrespectful. Thank you.
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Good podcast. Good to hear both of you walk through things.
Well, thank you dear brother. Love,
Thank you both for the podcasts. I listened to both and appreciate your points of view.
One thing that went unaddressed by Rev. Prof. Dr. von Hagen was what a Western victory in Ukraine looks like. It strikes me that the best time for a negotiated settlement was right when it became clear that Russia was not going to take Kiev. The second-best time was probably at the end of 2023’s spring offensive.
It seems fantastic to me in the extreme to think that Ukraine can go back to 2013 borders. So what borders can it live with? And is throwing more money into the charnel house likely to get it a better deal? I have my doubts.
I am very skeptical that a Ukrainian people will exist in a Ukrainian country in 50 years. Rev. von Hagen mentioned the serious problems that Russia has with demography, but it seems like this war has been absolutely catastrophic to Ukraine’s demography. In what way could continuing the war improve that picture?
Given that the eminences grises running this show brought us such disasters as the Iraq quagmire, the Afghanistan quagmire and the Syria quagmire, I think we should be very skeptical that further money will result in anything other than a quagmire. And in what way does that benefit Ukraine?
Dear John, thank you for your comments. Your first point is right on the mark: What would a “Western victory” in Ukraine look like? Well, what does Western mean here? Western Ukraine? Western Europe (including, of course, Europe’s south, north, and east.)? Western as is NATO, including the US? What is clear is that the rhetoric about this among the leaders of Europe and the US is quite vague. Some speak of the “Ukraine winning the war,” some say “Russia must not win,” others that “Russia must lose the war.” No-one seems to have a clear idea of what outcome of the war they have in mind. Having said that, it seems to me that Germany, France, and the US had already tacitly agreed in 2014 that Russia would own the Crimea and the occupied parts of Eastern Ukraine. The “Minsk process” pretty much confirmed that as did the fact that they all did business as usual with Russia after 2014. But then, Russia’s invasion in 2022 showed that this tacit agreement only encouraged them to go for more. So now, the question is, where will they stop. After all, Russia clearly rejected the idea of negotiating a settlement ever since February 2022.
At this point, providing money (or, rather, arms and ammunition) to the Ukraine is mainly about defending Western Europe (in the larger sense mentioned above) by helping the Ukraine defend herself. That said, the fact that US support for the Ukraine, and Germany’s support with it, slowed down so much since the summer of 2023 has made the situation unnecessarily tense for the Ukraine. Regarding Ukraine’s chances to exist as a nation 50 years from now, I recommend listening to Timothy Snyder’s series of podcasts on the history of the Ukraine and Russia, available at Yale University where Snyder teaches. Regarding Ukraine’s demography compared to Russia’s: Ukrainian refugees will have good reasons to return to a free and democratic Ukraine when the war is over, especially if the Ukraine is then credibly on the path to EU membership. That will help Ukrainian demographics. Young Russians who fled the country to escape the draft have no such reasons to return to Russia.
Finally, I don’t know what to make of “eminences grises running this show.” Perhaps you want to be more specific on what you have in mind.
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What irks me about the Neo-Liberal position is that they are willing to risk nuclear war over defending the outer territory of Western Europe, but seem to have no care if Western European Culture is dissolved in the name of inclusivity or economics. In fact this dissolution is encouraged.
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Likewise, Rev. Prof. Dr. von Hagen, thank you for your consideration and comments.
I agree and this is deeply concerning to me. We are shoveling billions of dollars that we don’t have (the US government is broke) into a conflict zone without so much as a plan?
Angela Merkel said that the purpose of the Minsk process was to buy Ukraine time. There are probably multiple ways to interpret that, but perhaps Russia wasn’t the only party operating in bad faith there.
Naftali Bennet said that Russia and Ukraine were close to a negotiated settlement in the spring of ‘22 until Boris Johnson came in and ruined the talks at the behest of the Biden Administration. Putin has stated that they withdrew their troops from the region around Kiev as a good-faith gesture as a part of these talks. I don’t know if any or all of this is true, but I’ve never seen any of it credibly refuted. Certainly it seems that Putin’s aims in the war have been clearly stated and if the West is interested in any kind of bargain, his stated positions would make a jumping-off point for negotiations. I’ve seen no indication that anyone in the West wants to negotiate, just to prolong the war. Western leaders are still talking about Ukraine joining NATO!
Perhaps it is Ukraine’s position vis à vis her very large and belligerent neighbor that has made the situation tense.
Russia has stated that NATO expansion to Ukraine is an existential issue for them. This doesn’t seem unreasonable to me: America would have invaded Mexico or Canada if either had flirted with joining the Warsaw Pact. We brought the world to the brink of nuclear war over Russian missiles in Cuba. Why does America get a sphere of influence but Russia doesn’t?
Thank you for the tip on this. I am a few lectures in, and Snyder is very knowledgeable and I’m hoping to learn more about the region. Overall he strikes me as a propagandist for one side, but it’s healthy for me to listen to different viewpoints. His comments about interpreting the US Constitution were way off base, which didn’t endear him or his position to me.
This would be the free and democratic Ukraine that’s currently never scheduled to have elections ever again? (See Sec. Blinken’s comments from last week.) Color me doubtful that Ukraine will be anything other than a corrupt basket case as long as America’s and the West’s corrupt ruling class dominates it. Look how they responded when Trump started making phone calls around their gravy train.
But that’s all opinion and speculation. Time will tell.
Oh, sure. America’s foreign policy establishment (the eminences grises in question) hasn’t won a war since Kuwait. In the meantime there have been the Somalia disaster, the Afghanistan disaster, the Iraq disaster, the Libya disaster and the Syria disaster. As far as I can tell, nobody has so much as resigned in disgrace over any of those disasters. Given that the people in charge have an unbroken record of failure—Kuwait was 33 years ago!—why should anyone expect Ukraine to turn into anything other than a disaster for American and Western interests if we continue to let America’s foreign policy establishment call the shots? It certainly looks to me like Ukraine would have been a lot better off to have made peace in the spring of 2022. Why should I expect American interests to be bettered by a continuation of the charnel house?
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