← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining 20th Century East Europe
02:34:57
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- [00:03]
A
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in. Hi, everybody. Welcome for another episode of History 102 with me, Rudyard lynch and my co host, Austin Padgett. We're currently filming in my main room, not my office, because the construction sounds in my office are too annoying. That means we won't have the normal microphone, but that's not a disaster because I don't use it when I'm traveling and so happy to do another show. And I want to compliment you on your sweater as well.
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B
Oh, thank you. My brother Fielding got it for me for Christmas.
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A
What brand is that?
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B
I think it's Banana Republic. But yeah, he was. He worked out too much and then he put it through the dryer by accident. So it's mine now.
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A
Yeah, I collect sweaters. I have a few sort of cable knit or like Aran ones. And then I have different sweaters for different climates. It's one of the things I do.
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B
Because it's all about animal fabrics.
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A
You need wool because so like a certain sweater can work for 60 degrees and then other sweaters you need to wear for like 20 degrees.
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B
Right.
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A
And then you have sort of like dress sweaters that are more fancy and then sweaters you'll wear in your house when you're bored.
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B
And these are complicated business, folks.
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A
Exactly. Yeah.
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B
I wouldn't understand if you're from the.
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A
South, Southerners, Southerners can wear sweaters more than Northerners because they. Southerners tend to not hit a tipping point where. Where they need to wear winter coats. And so I find a lot of Southerners wear hunting jackets as winter coats because it's never really cold enough that they need to progress beyond hunting jacket.
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B
If you do enough layers, you can get away with that in the north too. Yeah, but the layers, man.
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A
I've driven across upstate New York so many times, the winters there are so.
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B
Miserable unless it snows. And that's the same for the animals. The winters where there's lots of snow or where the animals do the best because they can make little igloos, use it for shelter, really? Igloos.
- [02:15]
A
So Today's topic is 20th century Eastern Europe. And there's a handful of prisms through which I want to analyze this topic before we get into the actual sort of historic meat. And what I'll start with is that although there are competitors like the Mongols or the Spanish conquest of the New World and several others who I can't think of now. I think this is the greatest tragedy ever in human history, and it's been written out of our core history, where I think what happened to Eastern Europe over the 20th century is a historic tragedy and failure equivalent to the fall of Rome or the Bronze Age collapse, because it knocked out an entire area of the world. And this is something where our current era of history needs to write this into our curriculum now, or we will face the consequences. Where America's inability to introspect about what has caused Europe stagnation will cause our stagnation if we don't sort of think through the implications. Because we've been able to coast off the Europeans having a comfortable standard of living to say that things are okay there. But the fact is that Europe has stagnated by nearly every single other metric besides a comfortable standard of living. And even today, Europeans are sliding into poverty, where Europe has declined economically, politically, culturally, spiritually, artistically, militarily. Where you look at a lot of European countries and think, what is this place doing? This is the national equivalent of a toy soldier military. A toy soldier military is a military that looks really nice, has good drills and all that stuff. And there's many European countries that feel like that. And that's not the same failing as East Europe versus West Europe. East and West Europe were consumed by different sort of cultural. Cultural cancers. One of the Oedipal variety, where in West Europe it was sort of Oedipal quiet socialism, and in East Europe it was authoritarian tyranny or totalitarian tyranny. It's the division between the Western Left basing its principles off Rousseau and the Eastern Left basing its principles off Marx, where Marx built a hierarchical, structured organization, while Rousseau said we should just listen to our innermost feelings and remove social traditions. But when you look at 20th century Eastern Europe, this is probably the greatest tragedy ever in human history. And the ways that we have written about this topic don't really give that justice. Because you saw World War I, Stalin, the Russian Civil War, World War II, the Holocaust and other stuff. I mean, you have tyrannies in Albania or Romania that were often as bad or nearly as bad as the bigger countries. And a difference between something like this or the Mongols or the Bronze Age collapse is Eastern Central Europe were profoundly intelligent and sentient during this time period. They knew exactly what they were doing. And one of the things that the 20th century that people sort of don't get is they were smart enough to know what they were doing was morally wrong. It's just that we've retroactively sort of lobotomized ourselves. So we today do not have the mental horsepower that they had back then to comprehend what they were doing.
- [06:05]
B
Did they develop some sort of consequentialist or utilitarian rationalization for this? And how was it different from, for example, the actions of a king before? That you may think is tyrannical. Like, how did a king see himself different? What were the different justifications are. Were kings ever utilitarian like that, or. Yeah, what's the difference?
- [06:31]
A
Bertrand de Juvenal is one of the most famous libertarian authors. He was a French libertarian author, like a century ago, and he writes about the transition from monarchy to populist totalitarian states. And he's writing from France's perspective in a lot of French anthropology and by extension German anthropology. Although they're different. They talk about very interesting societal trends that you see in Europe, but not the Anglo Saxon world. And so when you're looking at Eastern Europe, you have to remember that the Anglo Saxon countries are really a historic outlier. And Marx likes to say that the merchant business classes have dominated the modern world. And that's true in the Anglo Saxon countries and the Netherlands and then practically nowhere else. It's actually a very good sign. I know that I am showing my bourgeois class bias here. It's a very good sign if the merchant class is at least capable of running your country, because it means that you actually have rule of law and fairness. Because if the merchant class has significant power, it means that the people with guns have stepped back and allowed a free market to emerge. And that is historically very rare. And, and it normally emerges due to a weird confluence of variables where the nobility and the merchants have enough social authority to entrench sort of the free market system. But most areas. But that was a unique circumstance stemming from the European High Middle Ages. And so when you're looking at Eastern Europe and even Western Europe, where we look at a lot of these modernist trends in the English speaking world, and you don't realize that in Spain or Italy or France it was wildly different. And so in Eastern Europe it's even more so where they, they did a litany of things which we spent six hours explaining in previous videos. So I will not explain where the monarchies established the tools that the later totalitarian governments used. And yes, they did use a utilitarian philosophy. And one of the points both de Tocqueville and Bertrand de Juvenal make It's quite convenient that these materialist, utilitarian ideologies pop up at the exact moment the bureaucracy realizes it doesn't need the king anymore. And I keep on quoting this because it's so perfect. But Tocqueville says that the year there was a bureaucratic agency that had power parallel to the king in France, the French Revolution happened because the second you create a bureaucratic office that is power parallel to the king, the bureaucracy realizes it's the one in charge and kills the king. And it's useful to read French and German authors where if you go through McNeill, who's a great historian who speaks a lot to east and Central Europe, I was reading through his bibliography because when I really respect a historian, I read through their bibliography and figure out which authors they're pulling from so I can get those authors too. And he's pulling entirely from French and German authors because those countries have close enough histories to east and Central Europe. Well, for English speaking countries. And the Anglo Saxons tend to make quite bad anthropologists by and large, because we Anglo Saxon countries have a sort of autistic materialist bent that you don't see anywhere else in the world. Utilitarianism could only emerge in England because the. So for example, Anglo Saxons don't philosophically don't really have concepts for group organization, for mysticism, for sort of long term ethnic feuds, although they probably should because the British Isles has lots of those. And so when Anglo Saxons analyze the world, they can sort of make intellectual jumps because they're not culturally forced to deal with other cultures in a way that. Where they're genuinely competitive.
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B
Because they're on an island.
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A
Yes, they're on an island. And they're also quite insular. One of the traits of the English speakers that have historians have said, or one of the traits English speakers have that other cultures have commented on for a very long time is the insularity of English speakers versus other cultures. And also secondarily, they perceive Anglo Saxons as hypocritical because they don't see the politeness as a social game where Anglo Saxons will be incredibly aggressive but also polite. And they don't seem to realize that this is an evolutionary strategy. The politeness is not a sign of sort of innate friendliness. It's sort of an aristocratic mutual respect. Does that make sense?
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B
Yes. Well, I actually saw a meme about this recently where it was like the civilized man is allowed can be rude because I forget exactly how it goes. It's kind of the opposite of what you're saying with the English being politeness. But I feel like it relates in some way. Like if you're civilized, you can be rude without people thinking it's a conflict. Or maybe it's. Yeah.
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A
When I was a teenager and I was learning to drive, my father said, I am allowed to drive faster than you because I'm a better driver than you.
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B
Oh, right.
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A
And that's a sort of attitude where it's true. And the degree of emotional expression you have is in direct proportion to your degree of emotional self control. Because complex emotions are only cultivated through. Through self control.
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B
Right. So it's like a responsibility and really ties to an individual lens rather than kind of like a group behavioral lens.
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A
Because caring about individual emotions is originally aristocratic. Because when you have an aristocratic society, the functioning of your entire country is dependent on the psychology and traits of a given individual. And so the culture has an incentive to care about their individual quirks. And so when you look at these individualistic societies, individualist societies emerge when an aristocratic elite tries to percolate those traits through the general public to increase aristocratic, like traits to give that society a military advantage.
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B
Well, it's funny you say military because I was thinking of stuff like the knights code propaganda where it's like, everybody should act like a knight. These are the virtues of a knight, et cetera. And trying to instill that in a population, which I think was kind of part of the Arthurian theme. But regardless, can you can see how that would work?
- [13:32]
A
Yeah. So there's several other lenses throughout which I'd like to present. 20th century Eastern Europe, one of which is I have this board game called Scythe Today, just my day to be an unapologetic nerd. I have my cornflakes warhammer T shirt.
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B
Nice.
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A
But this is a board game. It's by a Polish studio. A lot of the best board games are by Polish studios. And it's set in a World War I era Europe where each country has a battle mix and genetically engineered animals. So the Scandinavians ride oryx, the Germans ride wolves, the Russians ride panthers. The. So the. Sorry. The Ukrainians ride panthers, the Russians have fought. The Russians have bears and the Poles have falcons. I believe that is. And the thing I find sort of mythically true, and mythically true means this is sort of a symbolic representation for how that era of history felt to the people involved is I frequently think about, imagine you're a Ukrainian peasant born in like the year 1903. Actually, no, you have to be born like 1897. Let's say you're born in 1897, you're drafted for World War I. And much of Eastern Europe lived in medieval conditions where they did not have the industrial revolution in all of Eastern Europe, although it had gotten to plenty by World War I. And so you had peasants who lived lives that would not be out of place 3,000 years ago. Because keep in mind that without the commercial revolution or with the earlier medieval agricultural revolution that didn't spread everywhere, European agricultural life did not change markedly from the Neolithic until the Industrial revolution. And then you get shoved into these wars with these huge industrialized militaries, with tanks, with airplanes, with modernist ideologies. And Arthur Kessler, who's one of the authors we'll reference, he has a story of this Communist who is in. He was a former trusted member of the party and then he was sent to the gulag in one of Stalin's purges. And his warden is this peasant who. Who joined the Communist Party and became one of their sort of thugs. And he said, in my town, no one knew how to read a clock. And so when we would need to go to the train station, we would get there a day early and then finally wait for the train to arrive, because none of us could read the clock for when the time was for the train. And most of Eastern Europe, it depends, country by country, was illiterate at the start of the 20th century. And I think of the staggering sort of jump for the people involved, many of whom were peasants. And this is sort of the core thesis of Eastern Europe in this time period, that they were not able to make this transition. And think of just the staggering degree of psychological alienation that your largest interaction with the modern world, after coming out from being a sort of pre modern peasant, is these horrifying totalitarian regimes which are the most evil things ever in history. And these huge.
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B
All because they couldn't read a clock.
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A
I'm just. I'm mentally parceling if that's accurate, but please continue.
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B
No, yeah, you were saying something.
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A
So, because keep in mind, the British, the British went to the tank, the French invent, the Americans went to the airplane. So Eastern Europe was taking this technology from Western Europe. And one of my friends has said the English speakers invented the industrial modern world. In every other society in the world has tried to reject it. But the Industrial Revolutions created this huge hermetic pressure that you can't reject and you have to sort of ride it and sort of dominate it. Where the French and the Russians and the Chinese or these societies with large bureaucracies. They went for leftism to reject the Industrial Revolution. And then the Germans and the Japanese and the Spanish went for right wing authoritarianism to reject the Industrial Revolution. And there's an author called Cudahy who talks about how the Jews and the Irish both had to go through their own process of adapting to modernity that was informed by their culture. And this occurred within the 20th century. And that made me realize, because I personally know that story, this happened in my family. But it made me think about, wait, the entire world had to modernize in the 20th century at the same time, including the countries that made the Industrial Revolution. And this creates a really weird hermetic pressure. And I think it's useful to use the Hermetica as a frame to understand Eastern Europe in this time period, because the Hermetica has access to philosophic concepts that we've sort of cut down with the Industrial Revolution, one of which is that there's a concept in all of pre modern philosophy as well, but especially in the Hermetica of lived history. And lived history is the rate of cultural change in a given place, in a given era of history. And so in that philosophy, there's a huge amount of lived history in classical Athens because the things going on there generated an enormous amount of sort of psychological energy or cultural energy that percolated across the entire world. Same thing as Victorian Britain. You could argue that America has more than the rest of the world combined today.
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B
Right. Just like in someone's personal life where they're like, I lived a lot on, on that day or that week versus this other week goes by, where it's not really. You're not. You don't really think about it.
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A
And you have. Exactly. And you have other eras of history which don't create lots of historic pressures that influence the rest of the. And that's the first thing. And secondly, for every reaction, it's a counter reaction. And so the 20th century was an era of a profound staggering increase in prosperity around the world. It's numerically nearly impossible. The world's population went from a little over a billion in the year 1900, maybe, maybe like 2 billion, to 8 billion in the early 21st century, which is a quadruple increase. And those four times as many people were wealthier, they had less disease, we had effectively got ridden of infant mortality. Most of them lived in pretty good conditions. And the entire industrial world gained near complete literacy. Where the only countries in the year 1900 that had majority literacy, or maybe a little bit earlier in the 19th century, late 19th century were the Protestant countries, and then France, where Protestantism had the Industrial Revolution because everyone was expected to read the Bible for their own spiritual salvation. But that was a quirk of Protestantism. And in most of Eastern Europe they were illiterate. And what you saw with the 20th century was all of this wealth was balanced by radical cultural and political degeneration. And you see that in Eastern Europe, where at the start of the century, Eastern Europe firstly had significantly more sort of like living history than at the end of it. And this is a point that it's very easy to forget, where I read a lot of philosophy from the 20th and 19th centuries. And there were so many staggeringly brilliant thinkers in east and Central Europe in that time period. And there isn't really a parallel today. If there are intelligent thinkers in Eastern Europe like Samo Bergia, they'll often move to America, same thing as Slavo Zizek. And he's. I don't think he lives in America, but he's become sort of an international Western figure. And so it started 20th century. You have figures just across the continent in every given field, where Russia was one of the great intellectual powerhouses of the world, so was Austro Hungary, so was Germany. And even scattered across like Hungary or Poland, you had incredibly intelligent figures. And it's, it, there's, there's a heartbreaking element to the 20th century in Eastern Europe that you'll read a person like Solzhenitsyn, who is basically as sentient as can be, and he's writing about the agonizing pain of the Russian Gulag. And I'm thinking there is a degree of, there's a degree of moral crime in of itself to sort of put a population that aware through something that bad. And it's comparable to how I say it's a great tragedy when a free people are put into slavery, because the same event to different people often creates radically different psychological consequences. And this was actually something that was studied in World War I. The different ethnicities on the front lines in World War I had radically different reactions to trench warfare. And this is what.
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B
It's not that this person is better than that person, it's that there's more of an opportunity cost and more pain for to put, yeah, a free society in slavery versus a non free.
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A
And also keep in mind that the vast majority of humans across history and even around the world today do not have an abstract concept of freedom. And so for sure you don't have an abstract concept that there could even be a concept of freedom, you'll have a radically different attitude to it than someone where freedom is the dominant value of their culture.
- [23:54]
B
That comes back to, like, it's hard to understand how someone couldn't read a clock. I looked it up and, like, 63% of Americans under 50 struggle to read a clock. I don't know. I don't know if that means they can't actually read it, but it's one of those examples. It's hard to imagine how someone could not have this concept in their mind. And it's similar to freedom where, like I said, in. In Thailand, my friend who went to Australia for an exchange, he's like, yeah, I didn't know I didn't have a concept of freedom or individual rights. I went there, I learned it, I figured out what it was, what they're talking about. But that doesn't. Like, there is no conception of that. And everyone else I know back home, so I do.
- [24:33]
A
Because it was a recent enough process for the Irish assimilating because my grandpa grew up adjacent to the Irish ghetto. And so my dad would talk about, we have ancestors within a little bit further back than living memory who could not read a clock, because that was a big thing where the Irish didn't know how to read clocks. They couldn't tell directions. They would live in sort of like ghettos with like 10 people in the same room. And so you'll hear family lore of when we moved to America, you can eat beef every single day here. And that's why we chose to stay, because in Ireland, you rarely eat meat. So when they came to America and they thought, wait, you can eat meat in the highest quality of meat daily here. And that's what I find so disturbing at the collapse of food quality, because I have an ethnic memory of my Irish ancestors in, like, 1860 coming to America and saying, holy crap, we are. We're poor, but we can still afford to eat good meat every day. And then today, the quality of meat is degenerating to the point where I don't want to eat it.
- [25:39]
B
Right. Which is a reverse of that. And it reminds me of Europe and European food, how they have a lot of good, like, refined cheeses and sausages, but not as much meat. Kind of more poor people food. And gets back to that hermetic pressure thing, which is. It's funny how it's come back on us because it's almost like Western Europe is trying to give up on industrialization now, like after it happened. But we can't, because the genie we've let out of the bottle is now putting pressure on us from China or wherever else. So it's kind of funny that even we tried to reject industrial industrialization. We're still trying to, but we can't.
- [26:21]
A
Whoa, man. There was a hermetic author of a century ago called Garcia who spoke of this point where he said that due to the radical increase of wealth, it meant that the average upper to middle class urban population never experienced friction in their life. So they'd create a political system in which they would have no friction, which would then create a mass society totally cut off from reality, which would then spiral into total spiritual sterility.
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B
And they blame that on industrialization, even though that society they created with all the fragility, buildup mechanisms like welfare, etc has nothing to do with industrialization.
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A
No, it's mouse utopia. However, this is not Rudyard's inchoate rants. We have hit the Hermetica, Irish culture, sweaters, board games and. And the thing we're currently discussing. Oh yeah, and mouse utopia and the Age of the Last Men. This is not. We must actually engage with the material.
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B
Well, this is pretty much the perfect episode for that, right? Because we're talking about the formation of states out of the collapse of empires and the communist background of Eastern Europe.
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A
So look, I have a Celtic broadsword, it's super cool. I also have. This is a. I don't know about.
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B
The handguard, but this is a plate.
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A
I bought in Egypt too. So now that I got that out of my system. So you see Eastern Europe trying to sort of make up this gap. And Barrington Moore, who I read a staggeringly brilliant book by recently. The book is about how different regimes transferred their peasant and noble social structures from a pre modern to a modern political structure. And the thing that makes it so brilliant is he studies like 10 different countries around the world and he looks at their pre modern agricultural system and then he compares their development through modernity. And he said that the variable that creates democracy is capitalism. If a society has a capitalist agricultural structure, when it makes the move to modernity, it will become a democracy. And he said if the government is the force that the peasants interface with, not a sort of other type of landlord, the society will become Marxist or leftist, which is what occurred in France during the French Revolution. It's what happened in Russia and in China where the nobility had become state servants. One of the interesting things is that France had its industrial capitalist revolution over the early 19th century. And so when France had another revolution in the mid 19th century. Century. It became a capitalist, it became a democracy. So you can see the transition in action. And then for Japan and Germany, because their nobilities were the process that got them to modernize. When they made the transition to a mass society, they went for fascism. And I'm going to make a video soon about sort of my analysis on Nazism or fascism as sort of religious ideologies in the manner I've already done for Marxism in the Western left. And when you're seeing these autocracies, you have to keep in mind that these were societies that never went through the bourgeois capitalist phase in the same way that Western Europe did. And to pull from Marxist historiography in one of the few places that they are accurate, you can't get sort of the communist welfare state that you see in Western Europe without the capitalist bourgeois phase to produce the wealth. And so you see these societies face a crisis where East Europe's Lyncien regime or the old nobility actually did a very good job, which is why they governed until World War I. If they had made less mistakes, they would have lost in 1848 or in the French Revolution. But in some ways that was disastrous. As you said in an earlier video, where if you have a Revolution in 1850, classical liberals and nationalists will seize power. That puts you on a track like France or Germany or America. If you have that crisis in the 1910s or early 20th century, in between modernization and the death of God has occurred. So you're suddenly having socialists and totalitarians fill the void. And when you're looking at East Central Europe in this time period, these were societies dominated by the nobility, with ethnically foreign merchant classes, with no sizable middle class. And so when World War I hits, they are not in a position to be able to make the adjustments without using the state to do so through military structures, because that's what they have. Because the government relied on the military to control the population. So when you lose faith in the nobility, you have to use a militaristic structure with a modernist delusional ideology to unify people. Because people. People don't believe in abstract concepts anymore. They believe in tangible benefit. But you can't actually make a political ideology about giving people tangible benefit because reality is innately scarce.
- [31:59]
B
That's why there's such a thin line between communism and military juntas. Yes, like communist dictatorships. And yeah, it's. It's basically when it goes to the junta, it's like the veneer is gone. And then they have to go back to some figure out a new veneer, like you said, because you need some sort of explanation outside of a material force.
- [32:20]
A
Yes. And I was reading this book about fascism by Paxson, who's one of the big authors about fascism, and he said that fascism emerged, which it did in multiple East European countries, but not just Germany, although it was often under German influence when the threat of communism was great enough that the conservative leaning populations, because the shift from an agricultural to an industrial sort of lifestyle had occurred within living memory. So these were people who grew up in the countryside, who moved to the cities, who saw the moral degeneracy, the city's bread. And so they said, we are going to use this system to enforce our traditional conservative values on the population. And so that was what happened in the right leaning countries. And he said in almost every case, picking a right authoritarian government which was not fascist was better for everyone. Fascism emerged when they needed to form an ideology parallel to communism to get the right to unify. And so in Poland, as an example, under Pilchicki, they were a military dictatorship. And military dictatorships are significantly more tolerant and better than fascist states. Franco is an example where Franco, according to Paxson, is not a true fascist leader. He supported the Catholic Church and the nobility and traditional Spanish culture. Where fascism is a political ideology that's modernist, based around a central party, a military dictator and his buddies will seize power and they'll govern it much like a medieval king would. They'll maintain the coherent society without meddling. And so.
- [34:10]
B
Right, right, Like a dictator, like the C.S. lewis quote. So someone who wants to rule you out of with permission of their own conscience is much worse than the robber baron or et cetera, who's satisfied, stops when he's satisfied.
- [34:22]
A
And I don't want to make these, these dictators sound totally cuddly. Pilchi was highly anti Semitic. He would crush communists, he would discriminate against ethnic minorities. I can tell that the comments for the alt right guys will go based.
- [34:38]
B
On you can take crush communists at least out of there.
- [34:41]
A
But so I do not condone those things. And when you go to Germany, which had an internal Marxist threat that Poland didn't, because Pilchick rose to power in Poland because he was the one man who could fight off the Russian invasion. And so Poland went for a military dictator because they did not have to internalize the Marxist threat in Germany, the Marxists were operating at mass politics on a level that the conservatives could not. So they generated Nazism and fascism to be the conservative opponent to Marxism because The nobility were not good at mass politics. And for a frame of reference, mass politics was a concept I want to make many videos about because I think it speaks to our era in a way almost nothing else does. But mass politics is a society where everyone watches the same TV shows, integrated food structure, where there's a singular sort of national or international culture that people are involved in and things are mass produced for everyone. The top sign for a mass society is do the wealthiest people and the poorest people eat the same food, watch the same TV shows, use the same software? And so East Europe did not create a pluralistic society in the way West Europe did, so that when West Europe did the modernity transition, they had a pluralist society that could govern, while in East Europe, it was the elites. The old nobility did not know how to manage a mass society. And so the fascists were the people that the conservative aligned could agree knew how to manipulate the mass society. And when you look at sort of fascism or Nazism, it's not a global ideology like Marxism. It's the flowering of sort of the ethnic spirit of that individual society where, by and large, fascists do not support international fascism. When the Nazis conquered Europe, they would put their stooges in charge, not the local fascist movements, because the local fascist movements were nationalists, so they'd resist the Nazis. And it's interesting to study the 20th century and fascism, especially through the lens of ethnic archetypes, where the Latin peoples have the Caesar switch, they pick a Caesarist strongman, the Germanic peoples have the Wotan switch, the Japanese have the Amaterasu switch, the Chinese have the Emperor switch, where they pick an emperor strongman, the Semites have the prophet switch. So different ethnicities have these different archetypal switches that when they get put under pressure, they revert back to their earlier evolutionary strategy. And so when you're looking at fascism, it's the attempt to create this unified identity around the ethnos, or treating the nation as a sort of corporate organism under the state's governance. And fascism, its competitor, sorry, Marxism, its competitor, is trying to do that for the global working classes through the ideology.
- [37:59]
B
And you describe those both as mass societies. Like these are the things that happen within, quote, unquote, mass society. And I guess what kind of mass society you get or how it runs, it matters. But it's not as central of a question of mass society versus other kind of society, which you get a lot of confusion in, because the way the terms right and left work is basically like sides, and there's some there's some transcending qualities of right and left. And you can always map one side more onto that than the other and make your right and left depending on the 50, 50 sides. And then. So then you get that kind of perception of that's what right and left are, when in reality it's like you could put a box around all of that and then draw a line to another box. And that's your real paradigm.
- [38:55]
A
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. It's. Whoa, man. It's more important to see this through the lens of spiral dynamics of which ideologies belong to which era of history that they were trying to evolve through. Where left and right are two sides of the same spiral. But that does not fundamentally mean that they're all the same. Where.
- [39:15]
B
That's kind of the tragedy you talk about with why it's worse for a slave population to be taken into a free population, to be taken into slavery than a slave population. Because you're like deconstructing progress along spiral dynamics.
- [39:29]
A
Yeah. It's very difficult to make individual cultural traits for a certain people because people's wire in certain cultural traits over the course course of thousands of years. And part of the reason that the wealthiest societies are on coasts or islands is that they're sort of able to keep their culture brewing in isolation without other people messing it up. That's why sort of the British and the Japanese or the West Europeans or all of these sort of island or coastal peoples often are the most advanced.
- [40:02]
B
Hmm. It's like when you're trying to focus on something and you don't want to the end. It's like when you making more mistakes is harder than not making a mistake at all because it's harder to unlearn stuff. So it's like maybe it's like what I said about forming a mental view and like being wary of authors narrative. Right. So you want to control the information that goes into your head and it's. It can be less information than like a total opening up, but it can help you keep track of like an orderly, clear, coherent structure that's like a better foundation to build off of. I'm just trying to think of a justification for why that's good for development because traditionally like hermetic pressure and all that stuff also has positives for kind of intellectual thought.
- [40:50]
A
I'm going to say this first and then I'll ask you to clarify what you just said. But if you want to look at this from spiral dynamics and spiral dynamics is that history is Partly cyclical, but it's also directional. So you see patterns repeat over history, but then the game also changes and gets bigger. And so in the 19th century, the correct evolutionary strategy was to liberalize with the free market and that allowed you to industrialize through the bourgeois revolution. In the 20th century, the variable that was rewarded was having a large centralized government and military you could use to wage the world wars. The issue was that that became a trap where in the 20th century you were heavily rewarded for that. And then in the 21st century, it turned out the societies that had done that more in the 20th faced significantly more cultural and demographic issues in the 21st century.
- [41:47]
B
So you're like a short term.
- [41:49]
A
Yeah, you're seeing sort of an oscillating spiral we're doing over sort of categorizing in the incentives of one century can really screw you up in the next century.
- [42:04]
B
It's funny with China because people always talk about, oh wow, China's are so smart. They think a hundred year in terms of 100 years, we think in terms of 10 years. But they're doing the same thing as we did in the 30s, which is actually a short term strategy like Keynesianism or something.
- [42:21]
A
Yeah, totalitarian regimes are often short sighted. Authoritarian ones can be long sighted. So say the thing you said earlier in a different way, please.
- [42:35]
B
It starts with the basic concept of it's harder to unlearn than to just learn. Like if you learn something wrong, it takes 10 times as long to fix that than it does to learn it in the first place. And so on an individual level it relates to being careful about what information you put in your brain as you're building a worldview from a foundation. And so I was thinking maybe, and that relates to like openness and closeness. So maybe if you take that on a national level and you open it up to other ideas, like right. China's always afraid of other ideas, like Japan afraid of other ideas. Then does it undermine that kind of foundation? And that's why it's a negative because you were saying that these people on the coasts or in islands were able to develop, that were successful, had their own cultural engines, separate. But also obviously there's advantages to like Japan clearly learned some stuff from Europe and etc. And then there's the challenge of integrating that. I don't know exactly how it relates to information overload, but yeah, that's even.
- [43:42]
A
More accurate for societies than people. The childhood a society developed in will have very profound effects in the entire rest of its history. Because once people get into these social rhythms, they become biological patterns that are very hard to change. And Latin America is the easiest example of that. We're over like a, a 100 year period. The Spanish set up all of these.
- [44:08]
B
Wrong.
- [44:10]
A
Incentive structures so that in the 19th and the 20th centuries, even in the 18th and the Spanish, whenever they try to change these incentive structures, they've become a biological feedback loop that eats the person trying to change them. And this is true in societies around the world where you have to see the culture as this living thing. And so once you set it out, it's like you're trying to gradually edit a living person. Which is why totalitarianism is so evil. Because when the Marxists, who are the most guilty of, of this, of anyone ever go through a society to break it and to rip it up, it's, you have to see it as like they're cutting apart an actual animal. They, they see it as they're doing the gears for a bike or a car. But when the communists under Stalin killed Russia's nobility, their artists, their intellectuals, many of their ethnic minorities, the military, doctors and many, many others, those were actual people. And so he was basically blowing off toes of the Russian nation that had taken centuries to develop. And there was zero respect for this in 20th century Eastern Europe, that their elites and the nobility had been on this lengthy project of creating cultural institutions on top of these peasant societies. And so when the nobility got wiped out, where, for example, practically all of Poland's nobility were killed at the battle with Stalin at Katyn Forest or under the Nazis, it destroyed these centuries of process of making Eastern Europe a pluralist society.
- [45:57]
B
Right. So the nobility was trying to basically build this kind of new software. And the peasants came in and then they just took the existing software and then just started kind of patching it infinitely until the demand for patches exceeded the capability to patch it. And they didn't even recognize or understand the value of the new software or infrastructure that was being worked on.
- [46:22]
A
I'll clarify this. It wasn't the peasants that were doing this, it was Caesarist handlers. And this is one of the things that they knew at the time. Sorry, peasants, it's not your fault. It's a fairly sort of fine distinction that it would be unreasonable for me to expect someone to know this, but. So all educated people at the time were very familiar with the Greco Roman Classics, and this is one of the core theories of their political philosophy, that when you destroy an organic society, the force that emerges once you lose the social structures that would generate Natural elites, which is a concept Aristotle developed that was the norm in all pre modern Western political philosophy is that in a functioning society that has set social rules that people agree are fair, you will see these people emerge from the society that are widely respected, dead.
- [47:16]
B
And then this even relates to like in the west you had way more freedom over choosing your mate. So there's even like a hierarchical meritocratic component within the breeding layer.
- [47:29]
A
And so, and you see this, you see more sort of natural elites in America than the rest of the world because we've maintained more of the sort of pluralist society. But what happens when you remove that structure is the rise of Caesar as handler who manipulate the mob. And these. And there's a sort of meme in pre modern political philosophy of cunning and manipulative political actors of people who know how to manipulate the mob and these sort of currents.
- [47:57]
B
And those people often should know. It's like they should know the value of that software or even maybe they do know the value of it, but they have these like cynical motives and power games.
- [48:09]
A
That's something I've become more sort of harsh about. Not harsh, it's fair. In the last year as I read more of these sort of 20th century authors where these were people. If you're writing political philosophy, if you're a political, if you're a politician, especially back then, you were familiar with these concepts. The public was not, but it was part of your cultural training and you.
- [48:34]
B
Knew they weren't familiar with it. And you take advantage of that. Yes, to destroy.
- [48:39]
A
When you're looking at a figure like Marx or a lot of these other ones where Mussolini read Vico and Spengler and all of these authors I talk about, and Spengler was a huge writer in East Central Europe at the time. We forget how influential he was. And it's crazy that authors like Spengler or Will Durant were part of the sort of collective discourse at the time. And these are authors that are basically impossible for modern people to read unless they try really hard. And so Marx definitely knew all this stuff because he was writing opposition to it. Because I'll see these people's writings in their leftist materialist sort of narrative. It's written in direct opposition to the old premodern narrative. So that means they definitely know what the alternative was, was and Right.
- [49:30]
B
And.
- [49:31]
A
And they're coming about manipulating it too.
- [49:33]
B
So that, so that's why I really hate this pro post truth stuff. Right. Where people take the correct insight that not everybody's rational and even rational People are crazy. So you're not going to be able to just like talk and convince people just with dialogue and people don't change their mind etc. And so there's an element of that that's true, but it doesn't mean you have to just convince everybody. You could like try to create social norms that reflect the insights that you're trying to transmit downwards. Right. So there's still ways to pursue these positive structures even though not everybody is perfectly rational. Right. And then so you have some like post truth black pilling that's used to actually serve destructive self interested ends when we could be improving social norms even if everybody doesn't understand.
- [50:30]
A
Yeah. Keep in mind that the core theme of all of this sort of modernist cynicism is people do not want to have a structure that they can be judged against. And they don't want that structure to be anything because people will often say we don't live long enough. And my reply to this is, okay, give a reason for why you should be given more time to live. What do you actually want out of life? If you structured, what do I as an individual want to attain, truly? And you categorize the amount of years you had, you could actually reach that goal. Instead people just waste their lives, never think about this, and they think, oh, I didn't do it in the day I died. Because I'm like, if you want to attain happiness, you could do that, you could cultivate relationships, you could meditate, you could, I don't know, like leave bad places where if you want to write a book, you could write a book where you have a set amount of time, you could attain certain goals. And so when you're dealing with the, when you're dealing with the idea of the creation of natural elite and you assess, okay, what do we value as a society? Do we value intelligence? Do we value wealth? Do we value integrity? Do we value courage? Do we value blank? And so every single cynical modernist thing is an idea that you can say that stops someone from making a list of the traits they value. Because these people fundamentally know that if there was any structure to this, that they would lose. So they create the absence of a structure which then forces the rise of these sort of totalitarian Caesarist handlers. Because when the public has no structure to perceive the world through, they panic and they demand the total state.
- [52:20]
B
Right? Because these are people who don't want a structure because they see an opportunity to be higher up in the hierarchy by leveraging populist discontent or whatever than they do through Establishing a positive structure and how they would fare in it.
- [52:38]
A
Yes. And it's a sign of a lack of agency among populations, which was something that people said in both Russia and in France before their revolutions. They said that these utopian ideals were a resentment at the government already taking agency away from people through the big government and the bureaucracy. And then they seized power and exacerbated those trends.
- [53:04]
B
Right.
- [53:05]
A
Ted Kaczynski wrote the Unabomber's manifesto partly because he was Polish. And as a Pole, he saw the end point of the Industrial Revolution. So I don't know this. I would heavily suspect it because Poles talk to other Poles. They think about Polish things. And if you are Polish with writing the things the Unabomber did, the reality of what the 20th century did to your people through bureaucratic totalitarianism would be so horrible that you would not be able to avoid it.
- [53:37]
B
You're telling me that it takes 20 Polish people to screw in a light bulb, but only one to make a pipe bomb and write a manifesto?
- [53:44]
A
Yeah. That fits with their ethnic character.
- [53:46]
B
Far fetched.
- [53:47]
A
It's funny. I feel like this conversation was genuinely worthwhile. I think we covered a lot of useful philosophic points. It just annoys me. We're an hour in and we have not yet laid out the map.
- [54:00]
B
Let's speedrun some map.
- [54:03]
A
So whenever someone says map, I think of the acronym minor attracted person, which is like a pedo. And so when I think of that, I think, you guys, my culture is not your costume. You can't take the map things from me. I have been sitting on the map lore forever. And these Peters are trying to take the term map from me.
- [54:21]
B
Oh, yeah, because their term, they ruined it. Yeah.
- [54:24]
A
Yes.
- [54:25]
B
Cartography is better.
- [54:27]
A
Yeah. So in the year 1914, you had three great empires in Eastern Europe. Russia, Prussia, Austria, and the Balkans. And we talk about the formation of these distinct countries in the earlier video on the Age of Empires. And they sat on top of a huge multi ethnic region. And it's hard to estimate how ethnically diverse Eastern Europe was at this point. And if you look at the map of Eastern Europe today, it is some of the most ethnically homogenous places on earth. If you look at the sort of. Look at the ethnic breakdown of Bratislava, Slovakia, look at the ethnic breakdown of Krakow, Moscow or Kiev, it's going to be 100% Polish, 100% Slovak, 100% Ukrainian. However, in 1910, that was very much not true. Where you had the merchant ethnicities like the Germans, the Armenians, the Jews, and The Greeks who were spread across the region. You had a lack of formation for what was really an ethnic identity. So it was arguable if the Ukrainians were the same as ethnic religion Russians. And it was arguable if the Belarusians and Ukrainians were the same ethnicity called Ruthenian, or if the Ruthenians were a distinct ethnicity from the Ukrainians, or if the Ruthenians were also Rusan, who was a broader ethnicity that went back a thousand years. And there was the division between Russia the state and Rus the people. In everything I said, all of these debates have killed thousands of people at the least. And that's.
- [56:14]
B
I'm just picturing a conference of people from those different nations together, like feeling each other's noses and ears and looking and like, is it the same size? And that's a little different.
- [56:23]
A
Yeah, it's there. Eastern Europe's fairly genetically homogeneous. The Slavic peoples are genetically closer to each other than a lot of, like, West European peoples, like Germans versus English, French versus Italians. And I am profoundly grateful that I do not have to explain the ethnic lore in this video, because we have done so in the earlier ones, but know that there is ethnic diversity. And the great country that lost out due to this tripartite division of East Europe was Poland. You had many other lesser countries that lost out, but Poland was a formerly great nation that held Ukraine and Belarus. They had their own liberal tradition of freedom. They had their own higher culture where at many points the Russian imperial government was dependent on the Poles because there were points when there were more literate Poles in the Russian Empire than the illiterate Russians. But then the Russians went out trying to crush Polish culture later on because it was a threat. And so of these two great powers, Austria and Germany, they were German speaking, the Russian Empire was Russian speaking. But they had a highly Western philic elite with like a quarter of the Russian imperial bureaucracy being German. Similar for the military. Their elite spoke French as their first language in many cases. And these were great empires. And this was the highest degree of culture and cultivation and freedom that these societies ever had. Where if you were to go back to Austro Hungary, and this is a society people don't really respect, but the Austrian Empire, besides the areas owned by the Hungarians, has widely been remembered as the best time these places have had in Poland or Galicia or Czechia, Slovenia. And I was reading Theodore Dalrymple, who has a few interesting points about this one. He's an incredible author, a genius. I ordered like four of his books because I read one of them it was so brilliant. He talks about, he said it takes a staggering hubris to say that evil doesn't exist within the same lifetime of Hitler and Stalin. But another quote that he makes is he talks about. He has a chapter talking about what. There was this son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist from I believe Kiev who was part of. Not from Kiev, he would have to be from Ruthenia, which was an Austrian possession. No, he was from Vienna. George Friedman was from Hungary. Both of them talk about what Austro Hungary was like, where Austro Hungary was quite tolerant to the Jews, it was quite tolerant to everyone in the empire as long as you engaged with the majority German culture. Although there were, there were weird neuroses. The ordeal of civility talks about this, which we'll probably get to where the Jews tried to assimilate into Austrian culture. But then they realized that they were fundamentally different and they felt social rejection of this, which was a big part of Freud and the various neuroses he talks about. But these two people were talking about what life for a Jew was like in the Austrian Empire. And the Vienna based author, he moved to Brazil and during the world wars because he said Brazil was one of the places in the world that at least somewhat simulated what the Austrian Empire was like. Whereas this very lax civilized culture where they had near freedom, they basically had freedom of speech. And he would talk about these stories of, for example, a guy hanging out in a cafe in Vienna. He would just sit in the cafe and read all day and he would talk to people and he was their local intellectual. And the guy who kept the cafe let him stay there because he said this guy is actively generating culture. He's a local icon. And what happened when the Nazis took over Austria as well as before in World War I, is that due to the chaos, the shop owner changed. The shop owner wasn't able to keep the property. And then the new owner was beholden to the government who forced him to kick out this guy because he was a social disturbance. And I see that as a microcosm of everything. Because if you're like a normal human being, you can look at that and think this guy isn't generating profit, but he's like a social, socially good thing to have. And George Friedman, who's one of the big geopolitical analysts, he was talking about his own Hungarian Jewish ancestors in greater, Greater Hungary. And he said, we were grateful to Austria. They were the best people who we governed, where he said, who govern us, where he said there was a passive degree of civility and human decency. And just social fluidity that was gone where it used to be for a lot of these brilliant thinkers in East Central Europe. They would sort of wander around the continent and have adventures and see interesting stuff. And by the time you get to the Iron Curtain, that style of life was just completely impossible.
- [61:45]
B
It you made my brain go full and ran there where, where I was like, there is no such thing as charity. You know, like the person who gives, feels good about themselves and then benefits. The guy who lets the guy hang out at his coffee shop gets more customers because they're interested and it stimulates conversation. I just went and ran for a second. But it's funny with. Because Hitler was in Austria during like a lot of the intellectual scene, right? So when he came back in charge of Germany shutting down, you know, his cafe intellectualism, I wonder if some of his old like drinking buddies were like, yo, what the hell, man?
- [62:23]
A
So Hitler was kind of a vagabond type. He would hang. So he. Hitler. Hitler did not like holding a steady job. And so he would work these sort of crappy partial jobs and he lived in poverty because he wanted to have control over his own mind and schedule, which is something that I respect and. No, I mean that's, that's.
- [62:46]
B
No, no, it's true. It's just funny. I was also thinking about how wasn't he like living in like some Jewish charity or something that was apparently part of Epstein's family, which was just in the emails last week.
- [63:00]
A
I am.
- [63:01]
B
I don't know if you know about that.
- [63:02]
A
I am inclined to highly doubt that. However, it is technically possible. There's so much sort of Hitler mythic lore about him and the Jews. That's not true. People sort of generate this like, he's Robin Hood. Robin Hood has all these extra legends attached onto him. But Hitler lived in these crappy boarding houses. And his radicalism was partly an outgrowth of both the degeneracy of a lot of that culture, but also the sort of breakdown of social standards because he was emblematic of an entire generation of Germans who lost all their social status. And so he lived in crappy conditions and so he would work these partial jobs and then he just stayed at home reading. And Hitler was a massive autodidact. He read in a variety of topics. And so he was just developing his ideology and sort of just living an artist's life. So he was not associating with these cafe guys.
- [63:58]
B
Oh, interesting. It was more solitary. Should have got him maybe a little more involved in the conversation.
- [64:03]
A
I could be Getting this wrong. If there's one person who would know, you would ask Merrick.
- [64:07]
B
Well, you know, he could have been talking to people and doing intellectual stuff, but if he wasn't at the top of the intellectual hierarchy, which I don't think he was back then, then he's not going to be in the.
- [64:18]
A
Yeah.
- [64:18]
B
Conversations with the famous people.
- [64:20]
A
He was not respected at all until the Nazi party seized power. The various right wing factions in Germany picked him is they saw him as the least threatening option and he was seen as a sort of right wing schizo crank.
- [64:36]
B
Right. He was like. If he was like an anon or something.
- [64:40]
A
Yeah, he was. And the reason he seized power and was popular was the German people felt betrayed by their own aristocratic leadership class. And he was a perfect symbol for the sort of stolen German soldier who went out to the front, was betrayed by his own elites, had horrible ptsd, wanted to win the war again. And so the German people who felt poor and depressed and angry could look to him and see sort of a representation of what they had lived through.
- [65:09]
B
It's funny that people thought that he could be a puppet for them when if you're like a populist figure who gets that energy, then your master is the crowd. And so you're going to go away from your puppeteers into the crowd.
- [65:26]
A
Most populists get co opted. Latin America is the best example where it takes a very unique type of populace to actually break the sort of sort of biological system. Because when, if for a populist, a genuinely change, change a society, they have to interface with sort of the evolved biological corruption of that society. So if you were to try to make Italy less corrupt as an example, that's a complete cultural change of the Italian people.
- [65:57]
B
Right. Which requires more than like changing the school program or something.
- [66:03]
A
Yeah. And so you had these three great empires in Eastern Europe and then you had the Balkans. And Bismarck said in the 19th century that if a great new war breaks out, it will be due to some damn fool thing in the Balkans, Balkans, because the Balkans was the place that was widely known to be the sort of hot seat of global tensions because there was this long standing pressure towards World War I. There were about 10 different places World War I could have started, but did not. And those include Morocco, Heligoland off the coast of Denmark, Fashoda in South Sudan, Libya, the Balkans. And so you had a series of tensions in the Balkans. And Matthew White has argued that the world wars in the western half of Eurasia are a side effect of the Fall of the Ottoman Empire. Because you saw the attempt to divide up the Balkans as the Ottomans fell. And the Ottomans held onto the Balkans surprisingly late. They were kicked south of the Danube after the time of the US Civil War, where Romania was established as an independent country first, or Greece even before them. And the Balkans generally got squeezed out where they held the central band of Rumelia out to Albania or the area north of Greece, but south of the Danube. And that area had a lot of Turkish settlers, Crimean Mongols, who were allies. The Albanians were one of the greatest allies of the Turks, and they lost that region at the start of the 20th century with the Balkan Wars. And the Balkan wars are a huge part of the sort of unraveling of the imperial world, the 19th century occurring at the same time as the Russo Japanese War, which was sort of. Matthew White has said that in Asia, what he calls the hemoclism, or the blood flow, which is his name, for the 150 million deaths from start of World War I until the death of Mao. He said in Asia, it's caused by the fall of the Manchu Qing Empire, and in the western half of Eurasia by the Ottomans. So the Russo Japanese War was occurring in Manchuria at the same time as the Balkan wars, both of them dividing them up. And you saw a lot of similar trends to World War I occur there in both conflicts. But the division to make the Balkans these small countries was a balance of power between Russia, Austria and the Western countries that we should divide the Balkans up into these small sub countries so that no given country can hold the Balkans and turn it into a geopolitical threat. And so by the time of the Balkan wars, you had Bulgaria, independent Serbia, independent Romania, and then the Greater Austrian Empire.
- [69:01]
B
And who's planning to divide the Balkans in this scenario? Who's the.
- [69:06]
A
So the Turks really wanted to take it. The Austrians would also be another logical answer. But, I mean, the Italians also had plans in the Balkans which they were not efficient enough to carry out.
- [69:17]
B
So pretty much everyone around them wanted them not to be united.
- [69:20]
A
Yeah, I mean, the Balkans was never going to be united. The concern was whether a larger country takes the entire Balkans.
- [69:27]
B
Okay, who has it right?
- [69:29]
A
And so the Turks were driven out of the Balkans. For Ataturka as an example, he was born an ethnic Turk in Thessaloniki in the north of Greece, where you had a huge Turkish community there. And the Balkan wars were really a sort of. They were a chaotic mess. And they created the map of the modern Balkans, where Bulgaria took some land, Greece took some land, Albania did. And Then Serbia did, where the Balkans were divided up between a series of different countries, and there was geopolitical tensions with the Russians or the Austrians, Austrians, the British, supporting different factions. If you read 20th century histories, they'll often leave in a chapter on the Balkan wars, but we don't really remember it much. And it's similar to the Italian invasion of Libya, which was of the same era of using modern technology to dismember the last remnants of the Turkish Empire. And this set up a causation of ethnic strife in this region, which we articulated the causes for in earlier videos, because there was not a sort of strong sense of ethnicity that when these countries got independence, there were not lines about who was what. And this is most prevalent for the South Slavs, where they were initially one ethnicity and then they got divided up by civilization. Where the Croats and the Slovenes were under Austrian countries, Catholicism, they became a broader part of Western civilization.
- [71:03]
B
There's east and West Ukraine, their conflict like that.
- [71:08]
A
And Serbia was Orthodox. They were a strong Russian ally, and they really were a pain in the ass for everyone, especially the Austrians. Then you have the issues with Bosnia, which were not that bad, because at this time, remember, the South Slavs are divided between Serbian lands in Austrian lands where the Croats and the Bosnians were under Austrian control. And this leads into the tensions that caused World War I, because World War I was killed over the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination in Belgrade. And what was going on there is a majority of South Slavs were in the Austrian Empire. Serbia was an independent South Slav country that kept on agitating against Austria. They did so because they were under Russia's protection, where if Austria attacked Serbia, the Serbs could count on the Russians defending them, which put Serbia in this weird position where they could act out against Austria in a way that Austria couldn't just throttle them. And this created a profound sort of sense of tension. And the Serbian government was enabling terrorists in a way that comparable to sort of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Iran enabling terrorists in the Muslim world. The alliances between the terrorist organizations and the Serbian government were so strong that when the Austrians attacked the Black Hand or the Serbian terrorist group, then the Serbian government would protect the Black Hand's honor, because an attack on the Black Hand was an attack on the Serbian nation and the Serbian government. And there were lots of terrorist organizations like this in Eastern Europe. Serbia was sort of more egregious than most. And so when Gavrilo Princip, who was the terrorist who did so shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, that was A near thing. He missed the first shot and he only finally did it at the end of the Duke's ride. He was killing one of the royalty of the Austrian Empire. And that was a big no no because in Austria they unified this multi ethnic empire under the loyalty of the king. So shooting part of the royal family was attacking their entire right to rule. And this was part of a long standing Austrian pattern of behavior. They'd keep on trying to incite revolution across the South Slavs in the Austrian Empire and Austria did not like that. So they threatened to attack Serbia if Serbia did not hand over the Black Hands that did this. Serbia would prefer to defend the Black Hands honor than to sort of not and hand them over to the Austrians. So this is what caused World War I.
- [74:08]
B
The Serbians are crazy.
- [74:10]
A
They are.
- [74:11]
B
Because like it reminded me of the all the narratives about Iran wants to assassinate Trump right. When obviously that wouldn't work out very well for them. But it seems kind of similar to the Serbs protecting the assassin of the Austrian Western guy. This is where the kickoff.
- [74:30]
A
This is one of the eras of history. My dad studied a lot and he would, as he read the books and the topic, he said The Serbians in 1900 were beyond insufferable. He would say that they would constantly cause conflicts with countries next to them and they would defend terrorists and genocide neighboring ethnicities. And the Serbs were very much. They were more nuts than the neighboring ethnicities. But most of these small independent countries were also very nuts. They were not totally out of line. And so when you're looking at these broader empires like Austria, Russia, Prussia, these societies were so much less crazy and vindictive than the smaller independent countries.
- [75:18]
B
Right. It's almost like a toddler who can get away with it because of the maturity and level of advancement of Austria. And then I'm like what is the point of the terrorism? Are they just kind of bitter lashing out? Are they trying to hamstring development because they know development will lead to like more of their anti coalition getting in power?
- [75:41]
A
It's not that coherent. Where the way to make sense of the terrorism because it was a huge variable in Eastern Europe in this whole time period especially so the anarchists. And leading up to World War I, I think the anarchists might have killed one of the Russian czars in an assassination in a public place. They even killed the president of America, Garfield, I believe I saw his grave in Cleveland and I think maybe another Western European political leader.
- [76:12]
B
So anarchism that wasn't in the Netflix show.
- [76:14]
A
Anarchism Anarchism was a fairly big element in East Europe. The Black Hand weren't anarchists, but the anarchists said that we should get rid of all government and social structures and sort of do. They were a weird combination of Ayn Rand's objectivism with like communal agriculture. Their idea was that we should make these communal peasant societies that have no rules, that have no market, you'll just share together where that's.
- [76:43]
B
Well, that's kind of a modern political trend, like the go live on a farm, set up a community. But also coming from like a more anti government right wing perspective.
- [76:54]
A
Yeah, that's. That's a good way of putting it. They're a political constellation that becomes shitlibs in America.
- [77:02]
B
It's like the Green Party plus like a militia.
- [77:06]
A
Yeah, it's Green Party plus messianic radicalism. And so one of the great enemies of the Marxists during the Russian Civil War were the anarchists. Where towns in Ukraine, in entire regions of Ukraine fused with. Fused anarchism with Ukrainian nationalism. And these were one of the factions in the Russian Civil War. You keep popping up again and again. If the libertarian nationalism, if the peasants were rebelling against the king. Sorry, if the peasants were rebelling against the Marxists, they were normally doing so under an anarchist ideology.
- [77:39]
B
And that's pretty interesting. Yeah.
- [77:42]
A
And the reason that anarchism and many other varieties of political radicalism between radical. You had rightist militias across east and Central Europe, you had Marxist militias. Because when the society broke down and it was unclear who governed the military, these militias would fill the void, is that East Europe was more educated than it was politically developed. Where East Europe had an uneven industrialization. Germany was industrialized, Austria was Czechia, parts of Russia, parts of Ukraine. But Poland was not industrialized except for a few cities and sort of western provinces. Hungary was partly industrialized. The Balkans was not. You had some industrial centers in places like Ukraine or Russia, but the vast majority were again not. And when you have this partial industrialization with populations that are reading all of West Europe's intellectual literature and with highly developed educational institutions where because these young people couldn't get jobs, they would stay in college to sort of keep getting degrees and then they go to the market and then not be able to get work with those degrees, which sounds like today. And so these people formed organizations of political radicals to topple the government across East Asia, Central Europe. And Thomas Sowell has said this is the most dangerous demographic in society.
- [79:14]
B
That's pretty funny because one thing people don't really Understand about universities is one of the ways in which they gain so much prominence and power. And their main functional utility is to create justifications and plans for the bureaucracy while also getting rewarded through positions in high society. So it's like. Like a control mechanism for that bureaucracy as it's emerging. And so it's just funny to think that they had the, like, universities and knowledge and intellectualism before there were actually the government jobs or the structure to reward them through the university. Like, we're in a similar situation in Eastern Europe because we're in a place where that whole cycle has broken down and the bureaucracy has become oversaturated. But they were in that place because they had the ideas but not enough government jobs.
- [80:09]
A
Exactly. That is a very accurate assessment of what's occurred. Let's take a break and then start recording again.
- [80:18]
B
Excellent.
- [80:21]
A
Before we get to World War I, I also want to say that the Balkan wars were followed with significant genocide in that area of the world. There were Turkish population populations in Bulgaria and Greece that got kicked out after the end of World War I. You had an Armenian genocide. You had a genocide of the significant Greek population, Anatolia, which was sent to Greece. There were Romanian and other populations in Greece that were kicked out. Albanians used to be in. A lot of Albanians were in Greece too. But there was ethnic shuffling which was quite bloody in the early 20th century with these independent Balkan countries where the Turks were significantly more friendly to religious or ethnic diversity. And now with World War I, the Austrians declared war on the Serbians. And there's a. One of my favorite songs ever, Last Dying Breath by Sabaton, is about the Serbian defense of Belgrade against the Austrians. And the Austrians were eventually able to defeat the Serbians after years of fighting when the Serbians fought quite well. And then the Serbians, the last of their military crossed the mountains heroically to the Adriatic Sea, even though Serbia does not have a coastline where they went through Albania and then the British picked them up by ship and took them to Western Europe. So the Serbs fought to the end, escaped across the mountains to the ocean and then went to Britain.
- [81:55]
B
That's cool.
- [81:56]
A
It is, yeah. It's like the Czechs who fought in Siberia in the Russian Civil War and then went out to Vladivostok at the end. And then the West.
- [82:04]
B
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
- [82:06]
A
And then also got picked up by the British out in Pacific Russia.
- [82:09]
B
Interesting. Same thing. I was thinking of the Jionese mercenaries who did a lot of heavy lifting in the defense of Constantinople and then peace. That right as the city fell Exactly.
- [82:19]
A
And as the Austrians attacked Serbia, they asked the Russians, we don't want you to get involved in this war, will you? And Russia said, yes, because we need to defend Serbia, our Slavic brother's honor. And so Russia and Serbia had a war. And then the question was punted to Germany, who said, yes, we will start a war to defend Austria's honor and also because we fear the growing Russian leviathan. And so World War I spilled out from there, from this conflict over Serbia and Bosnia, and it became a global spanning conflict. Where the Eastern Front of World War I, in my opinion, is a significantly more interesting war than the Western Front, where the Western Front stayed solidified on this line from the Alps to the North Sea that went only a handful of miles in each direction. The Battle of the Marne in 1914 at the start of the war, was fought in the same geographic location as the Battle of the Marne in 1918. At the end of the war in the Eastern Front, you had these huge geographic fluctuations. Where the first major battle was Tannenberg, which was a real humiliation for the Russians, where the Russians brought a bunch of different armies against the core of the German nobility's Junker heartland, Prussia. That was the area that was the springboard for the unification of Germany, because Prussia juts out on the edge of the Baltic towards Russia. And the Russians thought they'd take out sort of the heart and soul of Germany first. And they brought an army three to four times the size of the Germans. And then the Germans intercepted their battle plans. And the Germans were so much better organized where they had a genius commander, and they slaughtered the Russian army three times their size at Tannenberg, because Tsarist Russia was legendarily militarily inefficient. It was stuff that just gives you physical pain to read it between. I've said this story before about how in the Russo Japanese War, which caused a. They caused a little revolution in Russia in 1904, four that paralleled the later one in 1917. But they would have forts in China where the Japanese funded janitors who operated as spies, had full knowledge of the structure of the forts, which the Russian officer corps inside the forts did not have because the Russian security system was more primed to for making sure their own guys did not have knowledge than the janitors or the people who are the native Chinese. And so the Japanese could just bribe them. The Russians would get entire military formations, not train them, not give them guns and then give them sticks and have them charge into battle. And the Russians often could not supply their Armies, they often could not organize them. So the German commander intercepted the Russians plans and then attacked each of the Russian armies around these lakes and Prussia, Russia and then slaughtered each of them. So at the start of the war the Germans were terrified the Russians would utterly destroy them and march on Berlin. But then the Germans gained a strategic advantage through slaughtering all of these Russian armies.
- [85:44]
B
That's crazy how similar that is to Trust the Experts where the modern left wants to limit the amount of information that the public is talking or thinking about. So it's, it's like you're, you're both saying trust the experts and you're censoring information. Because the presence of information is going to get people thinking about. Yeah, the what they're doing. This kind of an interesting requirement of that kind of totalitarianism. But it shows how dumb that system is when you take out all that knowledge.
- [86:17]
A
It's why the Nazis and the Germans believed they had racial superiority of the Slav. Because the start of World War II the Germans could kill three Russians for every casualty they took. At the start of World War I, Ludendorff took a fort, I believe in the east, single handedly he showed up, said that a German army is about to take the fort and then he surrendered. So I believe that was Ludendorff single handedly took a fort and then that made him a hero in Germany and he was promoted to the high command and he was effectively military dictator of Germany by the end of the war. And so you hear stories about that where the Eastern front there were points where either side could have won. The Central Powers won the Eastern front, World War I, which is something that everyone forgets. We forget that by the end of the war the Germans had gotten Russia to surrender all of its western colonies. But after the victory at Tannenberg, which was a parallel to the great German loss in the east in the 15th century when the Poles and the Lithuanians defeated the Teutonic Knights, thus stopping the Teutonic Knights from conquering Poland. So the German propaganda played it up as we have reconquered the east after this medieval insult to our honor. The Germans took Warsaw pretty quickly and they took the area of Poland that Russia had that jutted out to the west of their other possessions. And then the line stabilized and there's a Sabaton song again called Attack of the Dead Men where the Germans were besieging this Russian fort with gas. And then as the Russians charged out heroically, they appeared like zombies because the gas had been sort of fucking with their flesh. So they appeared like walking corpses because they'd been shelled for days straight and couldn't sleep as well as having this poison gas mixed with their flesh in a weird way.
- [88:12]
B
Wow, that's crazy. And then they shot him as they came out or something. I can't imagine that battle ended very well.
- [88:18]
A
I think I got this story wrong. I think the Russians were able to resist a significantly larger German army and.
- [88:23]
B
Then they ch out.
- [88:24]
A
I forget who won that battle.
- [88:26]
B
Like the zombie Zulu strategy or something, just more charging.
- [88:31]
A
And the conflict in the Eastern front, it was a huge, huge deal. And it's really impressive that these militaries got their conflicts down to timetables where for all of these European countries they had pre planned the conflict so that within 48 hours of starting the war they would have armies on the enemy front line in enemy terrain. This was something they really put a lot of effort into, especially the Germans, where the Germans could see slam an entire military enemy side with their entire force immediately because they had the entire bureaucratic structure down of this faster than.
- [89:12]
B
The enemy could even mobilize internally.
- [89:14]
A
Yes. And when these countries built their train systems, the predominant reason was to get soldiers to the front as fast as possible. At the same time, keep in mind that for even for the Germans, one of the most industrialized nations on earth, their military system was more dependent on horses than trains for a lot of the war. And so you had these huge horses, bodies of horses that often consumed such a staggering amount of grain that it was one of the dominant costs for running these militaries. And so even the Germans had a huge amount of horses in the year where there were the most horses in America was 1920. Because as late as 1920 the American economy was still very heavily dependent on horses.
- [90:03]
B
And were we breeding horses for the war like we did extra wheat during that period, I wonder.
- [90:09]
A
So you can breed horses for the war? It's. If horses consume a metric ton of grain, especially a war horse. Warhorses.
- [90:16]
B
Yeah. It would be more about the grain because I mean the breeding cycle there, you only have a couple cycles anyways. Yeah, I'm just wondering if the demand for horses went up during the war just like the demand for grain.
- [90:27]
A
So most of the horse breeding now is for thoroughbreds. Thoroughbreds are racing horses. So most of the pressure for breeding horses today is just for the racing industry.
- [90:38]
B
Oh sure, yeah.
- [90:39]
A
You had war horses and farm horses and. But I mean it takes generations to breed a horse. You don't like breed a horse in a 30 year period.
- [90:48]
B
I Just meant the not breeding for genetics but increasing the supply. Like the US produced way more wheat during the war because Europe can produce as much.
- [90:56]
A
I'm just, I grew up in horse country. This is like horse racing was a big social event. And what they have now is they geld or they castrate most of the horses. So they'll have one stallion for every 20 mares. So they'll just bring a stallion from. They'll have a group of sort of female horses or mares and then gelding which are castrated. And so you just bring these stallions where their job is to occupationally impregnate mares. So a stallion will go to one farm, impregnate the mayor, go to another farm, impregnate a mare. And this is just what they do. And these stallions become quite conceited and arrogant because their entire life is impregnating mares.
- [91:33]
B
That's it reminds me of last episode when you mentioned, I don't remember what the exact example is, but in some part of Eastern Europe or something, you said here the horses were treated better than the peasants.
- [91:44]
A
Yeah.
- [91:45]
B
And I'm like, have you been to a Kentucky horse farm? I'm pretty sure it's the same.
- [91:49]
A
Yeah. And so the Eastern front gradually slowed down. The Austrians knocked out Serbia after a few years. Then it was the Russians against the Germans and the Austrians. And the Austrians actually fought market better in this war than people give them credit for. The Austrians could routinely take and wipe out Russian armies. They beat the Serbians, they held their own against the attack Italians in the Alps, which was a nasty conflict fought over. It's like something out of Lord of the Rings in these huge snow covered mountains. The Austrians and the Italians fighting over these sort of glaciers and then making no progress. Where the Italians joined World War I, had all of their men attack Austria ineffectively and die. And then became resentful, even though they legally won the war and chose Mussolini. But in Eastern Europe, the Austrian military was dependent on loyalty to the Emperor. So all soldiers in the Austrian Empire had to memorize the Emperor's genealogy and repeat it back to their instructor. Where because they had all of these languages, they had Czech regiments, they had Slovak regiments, German regiments that were in their own language. And the Austrian Empire was a wild card. Where there was sort of like cultural meme During World War I of the good soldier Schweck, which was what life in the Austrian Empire was in Austrian military was like. And so you hear stories of when, when I was at home, my wife was my wife, now my right hand is my wife. Or what. What it be like when your commanding officer doesn't speak the same language as the men so he has to get the translator? Or what it be like when you're rotting in a trench and you're freezing? And so they had sort of like cultural meme material during World War I in Eastern Europe.
- [93:48]
B
It's kind of absurd too, because it's like the technology opened up a new playing field where traditionally the Alps were. There just, you know, be an impenetrable barrier so you didn't have to worry about fighting through them. But now the technology enables this, like mountain struggle where you can occupy the points and they're shooting and there's artillery. And now you're like, oh, now we have to actually fight on the Alps, which sucks.
- [94:13]
A
Progress. So I'm going to bring up Kafka here because I will otherwise forget. Kafka is to Eastern Europe what Lovecraft is to New England, where Lovecraft speaks to the sort of insularity of New England culture, of, oh, this is a town where no one talks to each other, where they kick out outsiders. And there was a sea captain 300 years ago who brought fish people, and now we're all fish people in East Europe. Kafka is horror. Where I am part of this bureaucratic structure the Austrian Empire built, where if I literally became a cockroach, my family would demand that I continue to work. I am on trial for a crime which they will not explain to me what I committed. And so Kafka was writing Pre World War I, and he was highly prescient for predicting this bureaucratic horror nightmare that East Central Europe would slide into, because even as a Czech, he saw enough of that stuff in the 19th century.
- [95:13]
B
Yeah, that would suck about that.
- [95:16]
A
Yeah. I think Kafka was so bashful, he didn't want to share his writings until after he died, when his friend was going through his work and said, this guy's a genius writer, so I'll publish this.
- [95:28]
B
Wow. He didn't even tell anybody in his personal. I guess maybe he sensed that he wasn't going to be able to change things. So it's like an all or nothing, right? You get the creative overwhelmed by the sense of futility. A classic conundrum.
- [95:41]
A
Yeah, I forget if. If that's part of his work or all of his work. You guys should fact check that. And World War I in the east turned at an incredible battle no one remembers called Gorles Tarnow, where the front had bogged down between the Austrians and the Russians. And the Russians had Operation Bagration. Not Bagration, that was World War II, maybe Bagration, where they sent their entire reserves against the Germans and Austrians and got slaughtered because it wasn't well organized enough. The Russians have been experimenting with new sort of military strategies that did not work. I think the Germans invented stormtrooper warfare against the Russians on the Eastern Front and then they later used it on the Western Front. But Gorlas Tarnow was. The Germans sent their brilliant commander. This might be Falkenhayn, although I could be getting that wrong down there. And he organized where the Germans, the Austrians and the Russians met. Where by the end of the war, Austro Hungary was a near total German puppet state. The Germans would say during the war, fighting with Austro Hungary is like fighting being attached to a corpse. And Germany was a military dictatorship by the end of the war with the command economy and the Kaiser was sort of liminally in charge, where I believe Ludendorff and Falkenhayn were governing Germany as a military dictatorship, where the military had total control over the economy. Where they demand. This gets produced by this through blank. And so the Nazis were the sort of outgrowth of the Germans thinking by the end of World War I, we actually enjoyed being a military dictatorship more than a liberal democracy. So they built out the structure of the Nazis during World War I.
- [97:33]
B
Oh, and then they went back to it and like, let's pick this back up again. And why did they say they enjoyed that more?
- [97:41]
A
Because it was the coherent spirit of the German nation fighting against outsiders. It wasn't rational.
- [97:48]
B
Right. I'm just trying to think of, you know, a lot of Russians look back fondly on the pre 91 stop, you know, Soviet era, because very few of.
- [97:58]
A
The peoples involved had been trained to be free. Being free is a trait you have to teach people.
- [98:03]
B
And then it. It's like when you. You don't want to get in the shower or something. And then when you get in, you don't want to get out of the shower.
- [98:11]
A
I've been. I was. I've been reading Eric Take a Bath. Eric from was one of those intellectuals who was from the former Austrian Empire who was brilliant. And you can see Erich Fromm and the other author I bought recently, Voglan, as these Central Europeans trying to explain why what they thought was this highly cultivated civilized society devolved into the worst tyrannies ever. And the point that both authors came to was that sort of with the collapse of religion and the traditional class structures that there was nothing else. And so there was a psychic panic among the population that reverted to totalitarianism. And so Erich Fromm wrote a book called Escape from Freedom. And he said that there is an equivalent psychological impulse towards submission in populations equivalent to that, towards freedom. Freedom. And we think of the urge towards freedom, but we don't think about the urge to submission. And the urge to submission is what happens when a nation chooses totalitarianism. And in almost every case it's because they were never trained on how to be free. So they panic and revert back to totalitarianism. Or keep in mind, East Europe had practiced serfdom into the 19th century, where Austria and Prussia got rid of it in the Napoleonic War wars and Russia did in the 1860s. But they didn't have a rise in capitalism or a culture of freedom that was equivalent to it. So under pressure, they reverted back to a new form of serfdom. What was the case in these East European militaries as well was the militaries were people who were escaping the liberalization of the culture. The German military operated like a serf society. After the actual German society stop being serfs, or at least the Prussians, they.
- [99:56]
B
Kept dragging them back into that. Especially because the military was a source of social hierarchy.
- [100:01]
A
Exactly. The military was the only functioning social structure left because they hadn't developed pluralism.
- [100:08]
B
Or capitalism, which is very much like. Exactly like the Napoleonic wars in France.
- [100:13]
A
Yeah.
- [100:14]
B
Which reminds you, we're talking about Germany as much more Western than the Eastern counterparts, but they're still heavily bureaucratic society at this point relative to the US with like socialized medicine and healthcare, not medicine necessarily, and welfare, etc.
- [100:31]
A
That was a widely known thing at the time where German thinkers and thinkers across Europe would say that Germany is two nations, a West and an East. The east is informed by Prussia and serfdom in Eastern Europe. The west is informed by capitalism in England and France. And with Spengler, who is a very popular author, it was said that the east represents this barbarian vigor and the west represents decadence and urbanization. So the Nazis were an attempt to take this Eastern vigor and standardize it into a bureaucracy which did not work. Same thing as the Marxists. The Marxists in their own frame were trying to combat the degeneracy of the bourgeois urban or. And so you're seeing in Eastern Europe these Caesarist political handlers lying to the public that they are standardizing these barbarian peasant virtues across the population, while in reality they're just exacerbating decadence. And these urban maladies even more than the older bourgeois capitalist society.
- [101:36]
B
And they're probably trying to grow the bureaucracy in connection to like they're probably trying to grow it to keep the east satisfied. Like maybe the welfare or the benefits. You know, maybe that's connected into how they're trying to make this work. Which is the same thing the US did with the neoliberalism. Right. Was like, how do we, how do we tamper these communists or totalitarian impulses? It's like, oh, we'll do a mixed economy, we'll give you this, but free. You know, of course that doesn't work and that turns into various things. But it seems like an similar tension that Western Germany was trying to manage.
- [102:11]
A
Yeah, that's what happened. The Nazis got power because they were a useful alignment of multiple interest groups in Germany at once for that moment. And then they didn't realize they were locking it in for the next decade, which is always how totalitarianism appears. It's at a moment of crisis, then the totalitarians grabbed the SETI by its throat.
- [102:31]
B
It's even kind of like Truman after World War II where he was picked as a non threatening guy. And what that meant was the deep state just kind of run rough shot.
- [102:40]
A
Yeah.
- [102:41]
B
Not that he was a totalitarian in the same way. Or a leader.
- [102:45]
A
Yeah. With. So with Eastern Europe, Gorlas Tarnow. The Germans were able to wipe out the Russian formation and that collapsed the Russian front. So 1914 to 1916, after the initial victory at Tannenberg, the front stabilized from Riga in Latvia down to the Carpathian Mountains. And then the Germans were to knock out Romania in World War I in a few weeks to a few months. That's seen as one of the great examples of military genius because World War I is a war of static trench warfare. The German ability to take Romania from attacking in all directions with their ally Bulgaria, that was very impressive. And it showed that the Germans in World War I had one of the best militaries in human history. And with the loss at Gorles Tarnow up in the mountains, Russia stopping at the function as a society. Keep in mind that Eastern Europe was facing a secular cycle and East Germany was facing one, not West Germany. And that meant overpopulation. It meant regimes that were not responsive to the public. And so once they lost the military authority, the Russians lost the ability to execute orders to their people. And the military stopped being loyal. The cities stopped being fed because Russia was industrializing, but it did not have the industrial infrastructure to handle World War I. And so this was a social breakdown in Russia, where they had multiple revolutions and a lot of chaos, where there was a sorcerer who became quite popular among the ruling family named Rasputin. He was the only person who could heal their son's hemophilia. Whereas the son would start bleeding and then never stop. And then Rasputin would put his hands on him and it would stop. And he was a spiritual advisor to the court. He was dictating foreign policy a lot, which disturbed the Russian ruling class. Who killed Rasputin? Who? They had to sort of drag him through a river and beat him. And there was a lengthy process where they thought, why hasn't this guy died already before he finally did Russian Jesus. Yeah. He was also a sexual degenerate, where he would just sort of like, grab the breasts and grope the Russian noblewomen. And it was okay because he was sort of like. He was involved in sort of like shady mystic behavior of I will do degeneracy, then I will sort of. I'll beg God to let me go of my degeneracy, and then I'll do even more to get in this cycle. This is not sort of ethical behavior, by the way.
- [105:21]
B
Very Catholic.
- [105:23]
A
And so Rasputin was out. And then Kerensky, who was a classical liberal, seized power of Russia. With the czars sort of being forced in the corner, Kerensky continued the war with the Germans, which was not popular because the Russian public wanted to. To end it. In the process of the breakdown of Russian civil authority, the Germans took the Baltics, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. And the Germans were really sort of building out these areas. They turned Poland into a client kingdom or a client puppet state. They were putting German colonies in the east with German settlers in Ukraine and Latvia, etc. And when the Nazis wanted to conquer Eastern Europe, it was because the Germans had earlier conquered all of Eastern Europe, where Austro Hungary was their bitch. They had Eastern Europe as a colony. And then Bulgaria and Serbia were either allies or subjugated. I forget what Greece was doing in World War I. So the Germans had a majority of the European continent in the year 1918.
- [106:29]
B
Yeah.
- [106:30]
A
And they were using these as colonies too. This was not sort of like a light fang. And when Russia had its Marxist revolution, which split it into further civil war, Lenin, because he believed this would cause a beautiful global revolution, signed off all of the lands, such as the Baltics, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine to Germany, because he thought Germany was six months away from having a communist revolution itself. So it didn't matter. But this placated the Russian masses. And I am grateful that this video does not have to cover World War I, World War II, the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany totally, because those are specific videos. And so it can sort of. This can be an explaining the broader arc of this era sort of video where Russia had its civil war. The Marxists ultimately won, starting in the middle, and then they had to crush the whites up by the Arctic Sea, in Siberia, down by the Black Sea and the Caspian. And Russia became miles more brutal than any other society in this area of the world. Russia was a complete totalitarianism in a way that a chill military dictatorship is not. Neither a monarchy. And even among the Nazis, they were not this hands on among their own population. Wherein in Stalinist Russia, every element of your life was totally controlled for both the Nazis and the Soviets. They rose to power saying they were helping the working classes and they shut off all labor unions. And in the Soviet Union During World War II, you worked every single day of the week, no holidays, working 12 hours a day. And in the Soviet Union you had to sort of go to their study groups and their hobby groups after your work. If you had social events of more than five to 10 people, it was illegal because you could be having a political sort of discussion. You had people from the government listening in on you on every apartment floor. And I focus on the quotidian daily side because that's the bit people ignore. We can know about Stalin killing millions of people in the holodomorph. 20 million people dying. The thing that hits people, especially in our society, is hearing about how the government would just take people in the night and your neighbor could be gone and they would send in a replacement neighbor and you would never know what they did. It's the passive dread and horror where Stalin butchered the entire Russian nation. We talked about this multiple times in the Communism in the Soviet video. But when you're dealing with Stalinism, this is a level of tyranny that is significantly worse than anything else in history. That would be close to comparable. The Nazis are equivalently bad. Mao is a few other historic societies. But the difference between sort of like Brazil as a military dictatorship in the 70s or 1920s, Poland and Stalinism are not comparable. And our ruling ideology would like to suggest that Poland under Plutz is worse than Stalinist Russia.
- [109:42]
B
Yes, and people really underestimate like everyday psychic trauma. Yeah, it's like with COVID or something where the metric is if we can save just one life, but then the expense sheet is like tens of millions of dead from earlier than they would have been from, like, deferred cancer treatments or like a massive psychic trauma or, like destabilizing things with school and all that stuff adds up in a way that's kind of hard to fathom, but also a lot more impactful than whatever countermeasure you're looking at or whatever catches the news. Like this one person died in a riot versus, like 200 million people tortured for 30 years.
- [110:28]
A
Yes, that's true. And people perceive social status more importantly than wealth. So if you're constantly degrading their sense of social status, that's going to cause more psychological damage than making them poor. That's rid out in all of the anthropological data.
- [110:46]
B
We have frustrating meaning. Like, every time you try and get some momentum going, it gets cut off until you're like a ghost.
- [110:53]
A
Yes. And Stalinist Russia was sort of a North Korea. You can watch the video in the Soviet Union, it's nearly three hours. So it talks about these things, but people did not know how bad it was at the time. Poles in Ukrainians who are stuck on different sides of the border had radically different sort of lives. If you were a polar Ukrainian under Pilsudski's Poland, you lived a free life. You were not allowed to directly sort of say, I want the government to end. And Pielshkutsky was oppressive to various ethnic minorities, but he wasn't killing them off to a large degree. You could still like Koneczki, who was a historic thinker. He was writing in Poland at the time. And in Stalinist Russia, you were sent to a gulag for being Polish or Ukrainian. Those were two ethnicities that the Stalinists targeted on a genocidal level. And so I'm not going to speak so much at the dynamics inside the Soviet Union, but you need to know millions of people were dying. Utter repression. And this was not focused on in the Western world at the time. It was just sort of an impending mordor in the east.
- [112:08]
B
And there's like, no way to escape it. Imagine getting caught up in that cycle. There's like, no, you can't put two and two blocks together to fix this or make progress there. It's like you're just caught in this whirlwind. Yes, it's a breakdown in tyranny.
- [112:21]
A
It's an entire society turned into a prison. And the end of World War I was a breaking point in Eastern Europe, and it was one enforced from outside, which caused profound resentment. Where at the time of the end of World War I, the conflict ended because the Germans just lost the will to fight. They had had their western front broken against the French and the Americans and the British. They had their military, their navy mutiny around Kiel and Hamburg in the North Sea. And the Germans thought they were stabbed in the back because they were on the edge of Paris within the last year of the war. The Germans could have won in 1918. And most people in the Habsburg Empire did not want it to fall. The Habsburg Empire was still popular among its inhabitants. Woodrow Wilson demanded the division of these East European states under his principle of national self sovereignty. And I think it's kind of rich that Anglo Americans are the biggest white American ethnic group. And we say governance solely has to be by ethnic nations.
- [113:34]
B
Even though we're. How are we, are we hypocritical in that in some way or what's.
- [113:38]
A
So when America says you can't have empires and self sovereignty if you're dividing the Western diaspora and Western civilization countries, Anglo America will always win by that metric because there's like, there's 300 million Americans. Oh.
- [113:58]
B
So are. I'm missing the connection.
- [114:01]
A
So when Woodrow Wilson is saying we have to make Yugoslavia an independent country, we have to split the old kingdom of Hungary, oh, then we'll have the.
- [114:11]
B
Biggest country because we're a big block of Anglos and they're split up into a lot of difference.
- [114:16]
A
And so the fall of Austria created and Germany created these destabilizations where in the north Poland got independence. And this was a chaotic process because when the Russian civil war happened, the Poles invaded Russia itself and they made it pretty far out. The Russians got their act together and invaded Poland. And Pilchi was a cavalry officer who defended Poland from the Russian invaders at the Battle of Warsaw outside the capital. And otherwise the Russians would have kept going west trying to deal with the communist rebels in Germany, where Germany had the Spartacist revolts or these Marxist militias, especially around Berlin, which were all crushed by the right wing militias called the Freikorps, where you had mass famine and starvation across East Europe, including Germany. And so because the government was breaking down in Germany, the Freikorps beat the Marxists, stopped the Marxist revolution. And in Poland there was a conflict between the Poles and the Russians. In Hungary they had a Marxist government that briefly seized power and then it was crushed by the right. And Hungary was very messy. Where the kingdom of Hungary, which went back a thousand years, lost nearly half of its land at the end of World War I, with Serbia taking land, with Romania taking Transylvania, Croatia gaining independence and this was something the Hungarians still feel profoundly resentful about and it's why they sided with the Nazis in World War II.
- [115:53]
B
Interesting. I was wondering why all those Eastern European powers and even almost like Austria and Italy were just so weak. Maybe like you said, the Germans military victory was actually very impressive. So it's not necessarily their weakness, but their, their impressiveness. But it, it makes me think, is it just like if Hungary is kind of like Russia level technology but without the population or suicidal impulse? It's.
- [116:23]
A
So.
- [116:27]
B
It'S more suicidal.
- [116:28]
A
But the only two ethnicities that industrialized were the Northwest Europeans and the Japanese. And so in Austria, they were dependent on the Czechs and the Austrians to carry the industrial weight of the rest of the society. In Italy, the north of Italy was industrialized and not the rest. Industrialization and the cultural mechanization that allowed industrialization gave people a staggering advantage in the early 20th century. It's why the Germans could conquer all of East Central Europe up and they were only barely defeated by the Russians multiple times. Because the Russians had so much more scale.
- [117:06]
B
Right. So you have to industrialize or be crazy and have a lot of scale.
- [117:11]
A
Yeah.
- [117:11]
B
The Japanese bodies at it.
- [117:13]
A
The Japanese and the Russians made up with their lesser technological ability to the west by being crazy.
- [117:21]
B
That is the wild card. That is the way. Yeah, way to even the.
- [117:26]
A
And when the Germans invaded Russia In World War II, they were operating off the World War I data. And Hitler said that when we invade the east, it'll be like kicking the door open to a rotting house. Because In World War I, the Germans defeated the. They defeated the Russians and they lost against the French. In World War II, it was inverse. They defeated the French quickly and lost in Russia. So the Germans, if we can beat Russia easily, if we can beat France easily in 1920, 1940, we can beat Russia easily in 1941. And that was a staggering miscalculation because the Soviets forced industrialization, which Marxists love to hype up. But it was worse and less sustainable than the trend under the czars, although they continued the Czar's trend so that Russia was more industrial. But on top of it, the Russians fought with profound fanaticism in World War II because the Soviets would murder their families if they didn't. So under the Czars, they did not have the same degree of cruelty where the czars killed like 150 people with their secret police for the century leading up to the Russian Civil War. And then within the first few months, the Soviets expanded the scale of Their secret police over a hundred times and killed like 15,000 people. And so the Soviet, the Russians fought fanatically, bravely under the Soviets because behind the Russian military formations were machine guns who would shoot anyone who would charge back. And if they were caught with the slightest degree of insurrection, their entire family would be murdered.
- [119:04]
B
Right. And this is just their basic problem solving. Yeah, without adapting in an alternate way. This is how they're problem solving, how to win without technology and with a slave population. It's just funny to think of it as basic. It's basic problem solving. Well, put a gun behind him then.
- [119:22]
A
Do you people understand the sheer depths of horror of this time period? Like, I can say this, but I cannot communicate the depths of the horror these people live through.
- [119:32]
B
Yeah, and, and with the czars, right, it's kind of like an age of empires or something. Like they were, they were just industrializing, so they didn't have an ecosystem. They had some production here, production here, but it wasn't like a threaded through integrated ecosystem. It was forming. So it's like getting attacked when you're aging up or whatever, or you have like half the technology bonuses or you don't have this for that because it's like a whole network that can break down without that layer. But yeah, it's crazy to see the way that things adapt and how it's very logical. Even if you have a terrible system, like you'll adapt within the way to make that work, which turns out looks really, really bad.
- [120:22]
A
Having that much horror changes people. Because firstly, it shows you elements of the world you didn't think were possible. It shows you the depths of depravity of the humans around you that they have a potential for at all times. And it also freezes your mind in, splits it, where the moment of the trauma becomes frozen and you think of it sort of photographically and at the same time, it splits apart your unconscious. And it's hard to sort of integrate the different elements because they come divided as shards so that you can function on a daily level. And so when you're looking at East Europe, they had that level of trauma. And when you have that, you can either accept the challenge of do I generate a psychological positive in my life which is equal to this? And if you don't do it, the trauma will eat you. And that's what happened to Eastern Europe, because that much level of horror is innately transcendent. So you need to have a transcendent positive to psychologically balance. And due to the death of God, East Europe could not have that.
- [121:27]
B
Right. And that's a lot to overcome.
- [121:30]
A
It is.
- [121:31]
B
And like I said, every time you try and start something, you probably get wiped out.
- [121:34]
A
Yeah.
- [121:35]
B
So it's a real gumption trap.
- [121:37]
A
It is. I hope they can heal.
- [121:39]
B
I think they're doing. They'll do okay.
- [121:41]
A
Yeah. We can't afford to lose Europe because without them, America won't actually. So America is at a higher level of civilization than most places in the world. If we lose Europe, that's one of the few places that could even understand what we're doing. And Americans naturally have an incentive to stay in our giant, beautiful forested continent because it provides everything we need. And so if we lose Europe, then a huge part of the world will not have sort of. It could just revert back to levels of development far below what we know now.
- [122:23]
B
Right. It's like what you were saying with Eastern Europe or even Germany and the societal breakdown or what I was talking about with Thailand around not understanding the individual. If you lose Europe, then you just lose so much traction for those things. Like you have to go start back at a square one, which is just so far back, it'll take so much longer, versus if another big part of the world can kind of like translate that and understand it better. It's. Yeah, it's a big setback if we lose that. And it's terrible because, like, people talk about allies being good or bad or disrespectful or not. And Europe is like the worst example of it. They're incredibly disrespectful and their leaders are constantly, like, trying to mess with us and trap us in these crappy systems. And. Yeah, it's like you're. They're not being good allies and they need to be better.
- [123:26]
A
Yeah.
- [123:26]
B
It's a tricky situation.
- [123:27]
A
You can't force people to change.
- [123:29]
B
Yeah.
- [123:30]
A
But enabling people makes them more resistant to change. Europe can make this decision and no one else can.
- [123:36]
B
Well, that's why we're doing the perfect thing. We're trying to enable them less with military dependence. And we're trying to increase the hermetic pressure from our end. Right. You can't make them change. Just focus on yourself, increase the hermetic pressure. They'll start to get it because they won't want to be behind us. Ye.
- [123:56]
A
With the end of World War I, the region is subdivided under mostly not very bad authoritarianisms. You have a handful of democracy democracies. Czechia was a democracy and you saw the bulk. The Baltics become independent. Poland is independent. Hungary, Romania Yugoslavia was formed in the rubble of the Austrian Empire, where the Serbs were able to grab that and they were able to get the allies at the Treaty of Versailles to be able to integrate all of these sort of pseudo Serbian peoples like the Croats and the Fyramites and the Bosnians. And the Italians were pissed that they didn't get the coastline along Yugoslavia that they wanted. And the period between the world wars in Eastern Europe appears in retrospect like a pressure cooker. I don't know if it appeared like that at the time. John Gunter, who was an American journalist who traveled the world, is one of the best authors on this topic. And he writes of what life was like and the different regimes, because at this time the old culture hadn't totally been wiped out. So Bulgaria had a king, Greece had a king, Hungary still had a lot of its nobility in charge. Poland was still under the old regime where Pilchicki protected the nobility and the church. But it was a transitionary period. And that's basically all I can say before we lead up to World War II. We front load all of the cultural and the anthropological analysis. So all of the trends we were talking about were going on in the background. And with World War II, the Nazis and the Soviets initially positioned themselves as global enemies with fascism and communism fighting over whether the right or the left got to dominate the region. But over time they started to cooperate. And the first move was that Germany integrated with Austria. Germany then took Czechia or Czechoslovakia, which this was a huge crisis that nearly culminated in a war between France, Russia, actually Britain against Germany over Czechia. And Neville Chamberlain decided not to start a war. And he was greeted as a hero at the time. And they said peace in our time. And instead the Germans just did not follow the treaty and dismember Czechoslovakia, taking the ethnically German areas as we enabled Hitler. And then the next move was Poland. And Hitler assumed that Poland would be another Czechoslovakia, that the British and the French would back down, because his great dream was the genocide and conquest of east and Central Europe. And he hoped that the French and the Germans would realize their innate shared Aryan heritage and dismember communism with him. And instead the British and the French started a war, or Hitler started the war over Poland. And the British and the French defended Poland and the Russians and the Germans teamed up to dismember Poland. And this was a brutal event where Poland lost a quarter of its population over World War II, where the Germans their aspiration was to turn the Poles on the other Slavs into slaves. At best, their goal with the genocide downwards of 100 million of the Slavs, to turn the rest into slaves, make sure they were only literate enough to read stop signs. That was one of the things the Germans said and to move German settlers in. So they wiped out an entire class of Polish leadership and intellectual. And in Russia, Stalin killed an equivalent demographic of Poles at Katyn Forest, which was covered up for generations until the fall of the Soviet Union, where Western media did not mention how they killed so many Poles. And the Russians took the Baltics back from the Tsarist period, which were independent before. So in 1941, Eastern Europe had become divided between German and Russian areas of authority. And these were two brutal totalitarian regimes where Hungary became fascist to get back their old lands under Horthy, who was an old admiral from when Austro Hungary had a coastline and now stuck in landlocked Hungary. And they had their own group called, I think the Iron something. And then I believe Romania also had a fascist movement that seized power that was also pretty brutal. And the Germans steamrolled Yugoslavia in Greece over a spring. And this is actually considered to be a pivotal moment in the history of World War II, where due to the British interfering in Greece, the Germans took the spring of 1941 to steamroll Yugoslavia and Greece nearly immediately. They seized Crete with a paratrooper operation, which is really historically rare. And this is considered to change history because if they hadn't gone through the Balkans, they would have attacked Russia a few months earlier and they would have seized Moscow. Because with Operation Barbarossa, which I think was the biggest military operation of that era in history, Hitler backstabbed his former allies, Stalin launching an entire military front from the Baltic to the Black Sea in June 22 or June 21, I forget which is Napoleon's invasion, which is Hitler's. And they could wipe out three Russian men for every German casualty. They surrounded a Russian field army outside Kiev which had a million men sending them the POW camps where they by and large starved and the. And so they were able to punch across Russia. And I've said this before because it's a cool fact, but if you put the German Russian border in 1941 on the American east coast, by the end of the year, the Germans got as far out as like Kansas or Arkansas. So the Germans occupied an area the size of the eastern US and they reached out to Moscow, the Russian capital. And the Russians were only barely able to hold Moscow, where the German scouts could see the spires of the Kremlin, because they brought in troops from the Pacific to hold the front line. So within the first year, the Germans nearly knocked out Russia. And if they had added a few months, perhaps the Germans could have taken Moscow.
- [130:42]
B
Right. So if they went basically for the heart of it instead of down Eastern Europe first as a setup, it would have worked better, which the Germans should have known, because they're like the kings of blitzkrieg, right to the heart. You know, skip the fat, get to the center of the economy, start killing the villagers. Sorry, I'm going into AO2 analogy again.
- [131:05]
A
Hitler was a highly emotional strategist. It worked sometimes when he made rash decisions that worked, like knocking out the French early in the war. But there were other points where it very much backfired. I don't think the German command condoned the Balkan War, but also the German command did a lot of like, covering their ass after the wars of saying, oh, I didn't actually agree with Hitler. I had all the right ideas because they wrote autobiographies after the war. And we again, do not really have to cover World War II in that much depth because we already did a video on World War II where Germans got bogged down by Moscow in the winter of 41. And there was a lengthy siege at Stalin at St. Petersburg or Leningrad. I was going to say St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad. I was going through the historic progression at Leningrad that lasted years, where many, many people starved. And they only sort of ended the siege in 1944. But the Russians were able to push the Germans back around Moscow. So in the next year, in 1942, Hitler assessed that going after Stalingrad in the Caucasian oil fields was the correct strategy. So they launched Operation Blue that went out to the Volga river, which by the way is on the edge of Kazakhstan. And they fought a Russian army at Stalingrad, which is the bloodiest battle in history, while their armies made it down to the. The Caucasus, which is also very impressive. And Stalingrad was horrible because the Russians dug out the city in house to house fighting, which was the exact opposite of what the Germans were good at. And the Soviets formed a huge army with Operation Uranus that surrounded the German army at Stalingrad and butchered them. And so the Germans were able to.
- [132:56]
B
Fight a very Zulu.
- [132:58]
A
Yes, again. And some Germans were able to fight a rear guard defense breaking out of Stalingrad with. They had a brilliant general in forgetting his name, but most died at Stalingrad. Over a million people died in that battle. And it's really, it's hard to quantify or really comprehend the degree of suffering that occurred in Stalingrad. Dan Carlin breaks it down very well. The Germans did not. They were freezing to death. Both sides were freezing to death because it gets as cold as, like, Alberta out there. Minus 40 in the winters. The Germans did not pack winter coats because they thought they would have won the war. By then. There was barely any food. People were living off rotting food and rats and cannibalism, too. And you had thousands of people dying over certain apartment complexes. So it's unimaginable brutality. And that was the last time where the Germans could have potentially won the war. The last point where they launched a real offensive was at the battle of Kursk, which was their last hurrah to try to take Moscow. But after the battle of Stalingrad, the German army was crushed and they were pushed east. Then after Kursk, it was the Soviets grinding the Germans east until they eventually reach Berlin in 1945.
- [134:25]
B
Right. Stalingrad is like one of those situations where someone locks the door and they're like, actually, I'm not stuck in here with you. You're stuck in here with me. Except in this situation, they're both stuck in there with each other.
- [134:37]
A
Yeah.
- [134:38]
B
Neither of they're both getting the crap beat out of them.
- [134:41]
A
Yeah.
- [134:41]
B
And there's no way out because of the winner or whatever or the. You know, the retreat is difficult. Once you start retreating, you die. I mean. Yeah. Could you imagine it's like, with the apartment building, Just the repetitiveness of it. Like, the psychological situations people would have had to be in. Like, it's one thing to try and siege a castle, and you go out the door and you fail, and then you have to go again, and it's exhausting. But imagine just like months of sending people through the same apartment building into dead, dead, dead, dead.
- [135:12]
A
I can imagine it.
- [135:13]
B
It.
- [135:14]
A
I would rather not be able to imagine it.
- [135:17]
B
Yeah, that's the. That's the problem. It's funny you mentioned Kansas. Yes. I kind of thought about the. The Balkans. And the real theme here is the colonialism, because Eastern Europe is Germany's real colonial opportunity. Like, they can fight a little over Alsace Lorraine, but like you said, whatever. But at least Eastern Europe, that's something. Their population is expanding. That's, like, valuable territory. And it's kind of like a land race between Western Europe and Central Europe, or even Central Europe and Eastern Europe for that Western territory. And it remind me of the conditions of the American civil war because you have, like, a land rush out west, which could change the balance of power. And then you have things maybe Kicking off or tensions raising from areas out there that are under contest. Like Kansas, like the bloody Kansas thing.
- [136:14]
A
Hitler often compared Eastern Europe to the Germans for North America, for the Anglos. He thought it was unfair that the Anglos got to populate a continent and the Germans didn't.
- [136:25]
B
Well, they got to populate America. Half the women in the Midwest are German. Did he not know that he had should have just sent more immigrants over?
- [136:33]
A
He had differing opinions in America. He liked it earlier in his career and then he hated it later.
- [136:38]
B
Well, yeah, that makes sense.
- [136:40]
A
Yeah. Earlier on he said the American is the apex of the Aryan race because we were selecting among the most intrepid Aryans in Europe. And then afterwards he said America was degenerate because all these groups of Aryans were mixing with one another to make more.
- [136:54]
B
I realized that I think a big part of our current brain drain narratives around the developing world come from our ideas about how Europe was brain drained by America. I think it's a little less direct than that because, like, there's not necessarily going to be a correlation between being the second sun and like your genetic whatever. But yeah, it's interesting.
- [137:18]
A
I think that's a valid point. And the Russians ground the Germans east and the Germans were in the process of committing one of the worst atrocities ever, which was the Holocaust. And we have absolute airtight proof for the Holocaust. There are less Jews in the world today than there were a century ago. Statistically, that's crazy. And we have photographic proof from both the Soviets and the Americans. They recorded it especially potently at the time so that future generations would never be able to say that this had never happened. We have confessions from the Germans, they did it. We have the train wreckers doing it. We have, we have hundreds of eyewitnesses to them who all report the same thing. We have multiple important philosophers whose entire philosophy was built around this. So the Holocaust definitely happened. And it was part of the baseline.
- [138:08]
B
Of like the names that are missing, like the people that we knew about before that weren't there after. That's at least like 4.2 million or something.
- [138:17]
A
A lot of important American Jewish public figures of that era. If you asked them, let's look at your genealogy, they'll say 70% of my family's dead. That's a fairly normal thing. I know at least three people who had relatives who died in the Holocaust.
- [138:34]
B
Yeah, that's a fairly normal percent.
- [138:36]
A
And the Jews were like half of the deaths. They were 6 million. The Germans killed like 12 million people in their camps a Variety of Poles, homosexuals, gypsies, political dissenters, Marxists, labor organizers and.
- [138:50]
B
But you can see why the Jews are upset about it, because it's like half of all of them. Even if the number is smaller, that'll get to you.
- [138:59]
A
It was a large amount of Jews. East Europe went from the place with the most Jews on earth, where Poland had the most Jews of any country. And now Poland has practically no Jews. And that was all the Holocaust.
- [139:09]
B
Even Jews as a percent of the population. I think it was like 3% right before 1965, the Hart Seller Act. And today it's like two and a half, like slightly lower.
- [139:21]
A
Yeah. And the thing with East Europe is the Germans killed like 12 million people outside of the war. The Eastern Front in World War II killed 40 million people. That by itself makes it the bloodiest war in history. It killed more people than all of the rest of World War II combined. And there are certain years of people born in Russia where scarcely anyone survived. The combination of World War I, Russian Civil War, Stalin and World War II.
- [139:48]
B
That'S just so nuts. It's one thing to have like a yearbook photo where only one kid or nobody from that class survived, but it's a whole nother thing to make that the entire freaking continent.
- [139:59]
A
Yeah.
- [139:59]
B
Like nobody. Nobody who was born here had any shot.
- [140:03]
A
Yeah.
- [140:04]
B
Nuts are in that time period. A year or whatever.
- [140:08]
A
Yeah.
- [140:09]
B
And the.
- [140:17]
A
Sorry, I'm just stuck at how horrible it is.
- [140:18]
B
Yeah. I'm thinking about the European, like, lost generation where, you know, the veterans and stuff. The Russians actually, like, you can't find them. Like, at least the Europeans, you could find them at a pub or homeless on the street, like the Russians are. It's gone.
- [140:34]
A
It's also profoundly visceral horror. There's different kinds of horror. And this is a very visceral type of. Type of. Of horror. And there were also not get stuck.
- [140:43]
B
In one of those cycles.
- [140:45]
A
There were other killings too, where Poland had a liberation movement that rebelled against the Germans. And when the Soviets were to occupy Warsaw, the Poles thought, the Soviets are going to work with us because we have the shared ally of the Germans. Let's rebel and coordinate with the Soviets. What happened instead is that the Soviets stopped their military operation there, waited for the Germans to slaughter all of the Polish liberation fighters, and then took the city. They literally stopped at their side of the river. Did not help the Poles.
- [141:17]
B
Right. And they. Yeah, they just waited and then cleaned up.
- [141:20]
A
And the Soviets turned everything east of the Elbe into their Iron Curtain block. And Churchill invented the Term the Iron Curtain, from Stralsund in the Baltic down to the Adriatic, where FDR partly enabled it. But also this was Soviet militaries. The Americans could have worked a little bit more to make Czechia in Hungary American, but in the grand scheme of things, the Russians were taking the territory they had military occupation over. And World War II started to protect Poland. And now Poland is part of this huge slave empire where the Soviet rule, they extended the Russian tyranny across the entire region, which furthered the cultural death where Hungary, East Germany was by far the worst. Poland, Romania was also really bad. They were a European. North Korea, Bulgaria, they kicked out the king. That was one of the better ones. And then Yugoslavia under Tito, they were independent. And the Soviets tried to assassinate Tito so many times, but he worked with the Western allies because he was coastal. The Greek Communists lost. And then Albania was also sort of an insane Marxist state, where I believe, under Enver Hoxha, they were sort of like schizo Communists. They were Mao's only ally. They supported an ideology identical to Maoism, and they spent their national budget on building statues to the dictators as well as bunkers everywhere. Albania has the most bunkers per capita of any country.
- [142:56]
B
Fascinating. There's maxed out on bunkers and statues. Concrete.
- [143:01]
A
Yugoslavia held together because Tito was part Croat, part Serbian, so he was not sort of part of these conflicts. And he used the Communists to hold all of these distinct ethnicities together. And Yugoslavia was still Communist, but they were one of the least tyrannical varieties of communism. And Romania also, they had an insane dictator called Ceausesco who would do weird things like he was. Romania had a declining birth rate, like all of Eastern Europe did even into the 1970s and 80s. America moved past demographic sustainability in 2010. Russia did in 1971 or early 70s. And Ceausesco made all of these mating incentives where he said, no abortion, no contraceptives, except for the minorities. The minorities are encouraged to have abortions and contraceptives. The majority Romanian population is not allowed. And he said, if you don't want to have kids, they go to the state orphanages. And what happened is that the state orphanages were not well managed. And so these children were are literal test cases for childhood trauma. If you study their neurology, their brain scans in certain areas are a third the size of what they'd be when they're healthy. And some of them were adopted into America. And they're scared of looking at grass or they can't form basic social interactions where they have these weird neurological issues that stem from this. And that's an example for, again, how the communism touches weird sort of elements of human life you don't think about. And would have all of these weird sort of private obsessions and things he'd force the Romanian people to do. He had a horrible secret police. And at the fall of the Soviet Union, Ceausescu stood before the Romanian nation trying to solidify his power. And what happened instead was one man started clapping, and then the. Sorry, one man started booing, and the entire audience sort of booing. Choose. And with that public statement on TV that the Romanian people no longer wanted him, he could not hold power.
- [145:20]
B
Wow. One boo. Yeah. Started it all. That's interesting. Communism is kind of like drugs, right? Where you're trying to explain to someone why this is bad for them.
- [145:33]
A
Yeah.
- [145:33]
B
And it's just like not getting through until you just show them a brain scan. Like, you literally your brain on drugs, not your brain on communism. It actually does have those physical psychological impacts, stunted development. Like these is. These are like crippling injuries. These. Yeah, these have huge societal downstream ramifications. Like, it's a good example of the unseen.
- [146:00]
A
Exactly.
- [146:01]
B
Broken mines instead of windows.
- [146:04]
A
And the Iron Curtain, it was artificially held back behind the West. The places like Czechia and Hungary would have brief flings with liberalism when the Soviets did not keep their boot as much on their throat. But whenever they tried to push for freedom, they would get crushed by the Soviet tanks. And Western culture gradually dribbled in, and these areas realized the Soviet Union was falling behind. I'm not going to cover this because this belongs in a Cold War video. And people lost faith in communism by the end of the Cold War, where Gorbachev got rid of communism from above, where he tried to make Russia into a liberal democracy with freedom and with freedom of speech and elections. And then that collapsed, all of it, because the Russian Empire had been built off force and of authority. And. And this created a strange period where Russia let go of its empire and said, hey, guys, we would really like for you to stay. And Eastern Europe just said, nah, bro, we're going to join NATO and become liberal democracies. And Solidarity in Poland is a great example where for a decade, over a decade, the dock workers at gdask in the north of Poland. And I should mention that there was a huge demographic turnover where millions of Germans from the east were shuffled into Germany in places they inhabited since the Middle Ages. So Gdansk used to be the German Danzig. And there was also a mass Rape crisis as the Russian soldiers raped German girls and Russians populated old Prussia rather than the Germans that had been there since the medieval period. And then the Poles moved into the areas of former eastern Germany and then they shuffled the Ukrainians and the Russians west. And so there were more Poles in places like Ukraine and Ruthenia that now live in modern Poland.
- [147:59]
B
But Solidarity, that's another example of the consequences of things. It made me really mad at Hitler for a second and made me think about contemporary politics. If you guys mess this up in whatever way it can mean millions of your country women are raped by someone, by someone else like these. These are the potential consequences of getting this wrong. So stop like messing around ye or I'll kill you.
- [148:30]
A
So Solidarity again, a labor union should have been fine in a communist country. They were brutally suppressed and they became fused with Catholicism, where Pope John Paul II trip to Poland was a huge deal for that reason. And they seized power and became the new Polish regime. And Eastern Europe entered the era of neoliberalism after the quiet collapse of the Soviet Union, where the old Orthodox countries went to kleptocracy and nihilism, where Ukraine, Russia, Belarus became either corrupt democracies or military dictatorships, where oligarchs controlled the economy. And then the former Western countries, as well as a few other places like Romania or, I don't know, Greece, they joined the Western NATO bloc and went through a process of liberalization. And this belongs in a sort of neo. I'm going to make an age of Neoliberalism video at some point soon.
- [149:24]
B
Oh, cool.
- [149:25]
A
Well, we're going to talk about the post Cold War era and the spread of liberalism. But Eastern Europe is immune to a lot of Western Europe's pathologies because they already had the Marxist leftist boot. So they know what it looks like. They already had cultural shifts enforced upon them by the state. So they look at the West's migration, they see the same thing. They have already seen Marxism. So Eastern Europe is more capitalist than Western Europe. If you're making a startup, you're often better served going to Latvia or Poland than France or Britain totally.
- [149:58]
B
Which was why we're in this weird situation now. Because it went from throughout the 70s and the 80s where you want to be part of the Western bloc, you want to be part of NATO because you want to be part of this development. But at the same time that the Eastern European countries are more able to kind of make this choice to go in that direction, the bureaucracy is piling up in in Western Europe who are basically like Communists themselves. Yeah. So it's like a weird like half or half red, half blue, half blue, half red. Different trajectories can impact each other in either way. Like could pull each other both up or down.
- [150:39]
A
Whoa, man. The snake is eating its own tail. We're ending the conversation with the thing we started with, which was Western East Europe's variant versions of Marxist ideology.
- [150:51]
B
Oh, you're right.
- [150:52]
A
So, yeah, I was going to make the next video, the History of Protestantism. Instead we're going to do the Age of Neolithic.
- [151:00]
B
Okay, interesting. And we've talked about related themes about that a lot relative to other topics. So it'll be interesting to like, dig down on the actual thing.
- [151:08]
A
I'm also going to split off the age of neoliberalism from the age of the Last Men. I was going to make an Age of the Last Men video, which is basically, how do you get the civilization that produces wokeness? But neoliberalism is its own topic. And we'll start with the fall of the Soviet Union, which was the instigating variable.
- [151:31]
B
Excellent. And that makes me think of the giant rock and roll concert in Russia. Was it Metallica with millions of people? Imagine that was like nourishment for the underserved parts of their brain. That's probably one of the reasons why it had such an impact. I felt like drinking water in the desert.
- [151:50]
A
I was watching the Walk in Metal concert in north. In Poland because one of my favorite bands, Nine Treasures, a Mongol Buddhist metal band, they were performing there. And you could see that in Eastern Europe, heavy metal was a huge part of their culture. It sort of. It was that that urge was repressed under communism.
- [152:12]
B
Right. Which gets back to the importance of, like, the cultural side of the politics and like entertainment and music and how it intersects with those brainwaves relative to the deficiencies caused by the abuse of the political systems.
- [152:26]
A
If there's one thing I will teach you in this, in these studies of history, it is the importance of culture. If there's one theme that should have percolated through your mind, it's that, as.
- [152:36]
B
Frank Turner said, who would have thought, in the end it was rock and roll that saved us all.
- [152:42]
A
A bunch of hippie boomers thought that.
- [152:46]
B
Yeah. But that's because that was lame rock, man. The boomers are crazy. I just saw a video of them talking 60 years ago about how they just needed to let everybody in and like, give people to stay. And it's so not. Not nice.
- [152:59]
A
This was the blonde girl.
- [153:01]
B
Yeah. And there was a longer video with like, four other people saying the same thing.
- [153:05]
A
Yeah.
- [153:06]
B
Like in 1960, where they're talking about letting the whole, whole world in and, like, because they're suffering, like, of course. Why wouldn't we make some room for them? It was just, like, such a weird perspective. And it just shows you so much of what we blame, like, Zoomers for. They're either taught directly. Worse or better, maybe. But, like, it's. All these ideas come from the Boomer neolibs, which we will get into in the next episode.
- [153:34]
A
I couldn't tell if she was English or Australian. She had sort of weird smile. I see. I don't trust people who make that smile.
- [153:40]
B
I think they were English because I saw some other people in the video. It was England. Yeah.
- [153:44]
A
Okay, so I will see you next week for neoliberalism.
- [153:49]
B
Excellent. Yeah, we'll get Dan McKinley to look at her physiognomy.
- [153:53]
A
Exactly. History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen, live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube. Forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.