← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining East Europe's Age of Empires
01:56:59
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:33]
B
East Europe's Age of Empires. Very cool. Before we get started, aoe last night for the first time in a while, so Age of Empires is very triggering.
- [01:44]
A
Yeah, same.
- [01:45]
B
I lost.
- [01:46]
A
Before we get started, I want to apologize. There's construction in the neighboring lot. Zoom is normally pretty good at filtering it out, but some noise might get through. But fundamentally I am not under control of these variables. I just had to sort of live with it. And I thought of that video game too when I named this video where I think Age of Empires was a seminal moment for an entire multiple generations of men.
- [02:11]
B
Yeah, it's the only computer game I ever played because we didn't really have that many video games, but we had age of Empires 1 on the old PC, like when it came out. So until I was out of high school, that was every game for me and for you. You played actually a lot of those strategy games. Right? Because your dad wouldn't Let you play other video games, but he'd let you play those ones.
- [02:30]
A
Yeah, I played a crap ton. My mom bought me Age of Mythology when I was nine years old, and that was my first video game. And I loved Age of Mythology. I started playing as the Greeks and I thought, wait, I'm ethnically Norse. Shouldn't I play the Norse rather than the Greeks because they're my ancestors.
- [02:47]
B
That's when. That's when it all started.
- [02:49]
A
I would mass produce jarls. Jarls are the Norse nobleman. That was my strategy. I would just mass produce as many jarls as possible.
- [02:57]
B
I never got to get that game, but I saw the trailer and I was. Yeah, it looked like the most amazing thing ever.
- [03:01]
A
It was awesome. Including Arkantos the Atlantean, who is a quite chadly figure.
- [03:07]
B
They got Atlanteans in the new Pendragon series, the Daily Wire, some walking.
- [03:12]
A
Yeah, yeah. Huh? Oh, yeah. Because Pendragon, that's like a Celtic fantasy novel where Atlantis is a side plot. I think I have that book and I haven't read it yet.
- [03:23]
B
Well, it made me think of what you said about there aren't there like some myths to maybe explain the Roman knowledge, but that, like, there's some myths about some mysterious infusion of knowledge in like the 500s or the 600s where they have like an alternate explanation to Rome. So maybe it can tie into like those cultural stories, like the. Like you. You mentioned, like the Arthurian kingdom was enlightened and something. And it was. It was part of the. I mean, maybe that could fit into like an Atlantis lore or something.
- [03:54]
A
Atlantis is not involved. I'm sorry, Atlantis.
- [03:56]
B
I'm talking about lore, not history.
- [03:59]
A
You are wrong. Okay, so Atlantis solely makes sense through the prism of Plato. And we will not elaborate. I will not elaborate on that.
- [04:14]
B
Atlantis is real, bro.
- [04:16]
A
No, at best, it was the richat structure in Mauritania.
- [04:20]
B
Good night.
- [04:23]
A
I'm glad that this is the third video of our East Europe run where I. I guess the Volker wandering is the first Volker wandering or Aryans or earlier videos, but I don't really count that. They just happen to start in Eastern Europe and they splurge elsewhere. But we're doing an East Europe run where we just did medieval East Europe, which was when the nations formed. We already had a video on 17th century Eastern Europe, which was the last video I did with Eric. This video is from the end of the 17th century until World War I. And our next video is going to be on 20th century Eastern Europe because that's a valuable video to fill between the gaps where Timothy Snyder calls the area the bloodlands, where Eastern Europe was the unfortunate area stuck between the twin great European tyrannies of the Nazis and the Soviets and they were the collateral in between. But this video, I'm very grateful that we already did the legwork for explaining why these nations started, what their context is and all those different things. Because when we cover areas that are not West Europe or its diaspora, it often takes us longer than than eras of Western history that are more historically significant. Where if we're going to talk about the Napoleonic wars of the French Revolution, enough is assumed about France as a society because we're an English speaking country that I don't need to autistically articulate the different social structures that really matter because as more time passes I find that the society's internal social structure is probably its most important variable for how it operates. And I was, I'm reading a really wonderful book. I was considering whether or not to read this book or to read something else, but I'm glad because it's this book, Visions of Empire by Kumar. It's been very useful for the last two videos and I didn't expect it because it articulates the ruling philosophy of three different of five different European dynasties. And he goes through the Austrians, the Turks and the Russians. And it's very much changed how I perceive those empires. And so if we had made this video a month ago, I would have given you a fairly different narrative than what I would give you now because he's changed my perspective on those three empires. But because we've already established what these East European societies are and we've. And you can already watch the previous two videos to explain why Austria, Prussia, Poland, the Turks and the Russians have divided up Eastern Europe. This is the concert of nations where they fight against each other. And a great historic irony is under these strong unified empires, this was Eastern Europe's golden age. It wasn't look like it compared to Western Europe because in this time period it was a widely known thing among everyone that Eastern Europe was on the rise and it would eventually displace West Eastern Europe where one of the biggest causes for World War I was the varied speed of industrialization in Eastern Europe where everyone was scared of the Russians industrializing because an industrialized Russia could take all of Europe. But the Germans were also industrializing which scared the British and the French. So the British and the French wanted a war against the Germans and the Germans were also, they were developing their Eastern European area Later than their Western. The West. East. There's West. There was a West in East Germany even before the Soviet division. And then the Germans were in turn scared of the Russians developing. And so at the start of World War I, it didn't appear like this was the end of Eastern Europe's golden age. It felt like it was the start. But then the rise of totalitarianism throttled that. And we will not get into that in this video. That belongs in the next video. But Eastern Europe was unified under these large empires that were the most tolerant this region has ever had with complex societies. Because you can, you can't judge complex and simple societies by the same metrics. A tribal people of half a million will have completely different rules than a developed society of 20 million. You have to go through a seismic shift in social structure between these two. And so after evolving into becoming advanced societies in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, the age of Empires was the period when Eastern Europe was the most tolerant of religious and ethnic minorities. It had the highest degree of free market and capitalism. It had the largest geographic extents, the highest degree of scientific and intellectual cultivation and the greatest importance in the world. And it was held together by these, these cultivated imperial elites who were pulling ideas and technology from Western Europe and then trying to implement it across Eastern Europe. And a metaphor that was consistently thrown around in Russia at this time is that Russia was a nation that was colonizing itself. And Russia did this more aggressively and brute forced this more than a lot of East European countries. But across Eastern Europe, the lingua franca, haha, lingua franca is Latin for the French language. The French language of Eastern Europe was the French language that the East European nobility would speak French at their, at the dinner table. They'd have French chefs, they would indulge in French culture. And so oftentimes the Turkish or the Russian or the Prussian or the Austrian nobility would converse with one another in French, not their native languages.
- [10:21]
B
It's funny because the hope of Eastern Europe existed around the same time that France still had this idea that they were the dominant cultural sphere and would continue to kind of accelerate in that way. It's interesting how those two hopes are a little bit tied together, at least in as far as Eastern Europe goes.
- [10:40]
A
The way to start, I'm going to start this video is there's three conflicts that form the beginning of this time period that will ultimately end in World War I. This is East Europe's luncheon regime. Those three conflicts are the Great Northern War, the War of Spanish Succession, and the Turkish defeat of the Ottomans. And this is the bookend for the end of the 17th century East Europe podcast. And I made a distinct podcast on that topic because the 17th century, much like colonial America, was the period where all of where by and large, the governing institutions of East Europe was formed. That was when Prussia, Austria, Russia, whatever the rest, you'll get to know them. That was the time they were solidified. And so a real tipping point was when the Turks tried to seize Vienna in 1683 and they were defeated. And then the Austrians used this to conquer a significant amount of the Ottoman empire. And in 1683, the Ottomans were a genuine threat on Western civilization. But this was the last time this ever happened, where the Ottomans went through a process of decline that was more complicated than just a pure decline. And we'll get to that later. But 1700 was the last time that the Ottomans could consistently be seen as a real aggressive player. After that, they were purely on the defensive. And the Austrians fought that war really well, where within a few years of driving the Turks out of Vienna, they seized all of Hungary and Transylvania in everything north of the Danube. And this changed the character of the Austrian Empire because it flipped from the Austrians being the sort of titular father of the Germans to to them instead becoming the governors of a huge eastern empire. And beforehand Austria's big role was we block off the Turks and we try to unify the Holy Roman Empire into a single German Empire. And this had failed in the Thirty Years War, which forced a reassessment because even with the Spanish and the global empire, the Austrians could not take Germany. But they gained these enormous victories in the East. And one of the things that Kumar has changed my opinion on is I used to see the Austrians as sort of decadent and sort of like low energy. But the point he's made, and Peter Turchin speaks to this too, is what the Austrians pulled off was insanely impressive. You just have to stop seeing them through the lens of Prussia, where Prussia at the time Prussia was called the Sparta of Germany and Austria or Bavaria was called the Athens. But by that logic, Austria might have been the Macedonia. It's the place that the fringe territory that conquered out the huge Eastern empire. And with the Austrians, it was a vast multi ethnic kingdom that included a variety of peoples between the Germans, the Austrians, who are ethnic Germans. And they were in a weird position where they could not fully exploit German nationalism because that would involve too many loyalties to the rest of Germany. So they were German. But then German became a civilizational identity. And the shared threat across all of these imperial peoples was, except for the Prussians, the dominant ethnic identity became fused with the ruling government, in many cases backstabbing the original population that formed that ethnic identity. Where for. And this was less pronounced in Austria than Russia, where, because for the Austrian Empire to hold together, you had to have a German culture that Hungarian, Croatia, Czech, Polish people could learn to speak German and work in the imperial government. It meant that the German Austrians could not be proudly German, lest it butt heads with the sort of German imperial identity, if that makes sense. And that happened in every major one of the East European empires.
- [15:15]
B
And what were some of the differences between the imperial identity and maybe one example of local identity? Or where would that come into conflict with a political issue? I guess any. I mean, you can imagine anything where they were opposed. Right.
- [15:29]
A
It's less exacerbated in Austria than other empires. In the Turks, as an example, the concept of being Turkish is a creation of the early 20th century. It was an ethnic identity, but you were an Ottoman, if you were an ethnic Turk, because the ethnic Turkish identity was routed through the empero. And so the young Turks, who were the Turkish nationalists In the early 20th century, they were pushing back against the Ottoman designation to say, we want to be a Turkish nation state in Russia. And Solzhenitsyn speaks to this. Solzhenitsyn, who was sort of the chronicler of the end of the Soviet Union, he had a big career after the fall of the Soviet Union as a political figure and pundit and all that stuff. And he said that the Russian people were exploited in both the Russian tsarist empire and in the Soviet empire, because in the Russian Empire, the. There was no sort of way for the Russian nation to manifest its sort of identity distinct from the czars. So you had a Russian nobility that were highly Westernized. A quarter of the Russian imperial bureaucracy were Germans. Same thing as the military. They. A lot. They used a lot of Tatars for conquering Asia. And for the military, the nobility would speak French and take in European culture. And so for the average Russian serf, yes, you get more lands. You, if you're in the military, I guess you can sort of lord yourself over the Poles or the Central Asians, but you're still a functional serf in the military. And so a lot of these imperial peoples have this weird sense, and you see this very much exacerbated in the British and indirectly in white Americans of when you become the imperial culture, the benefits accrue to the elites and the population are expected to be the grunt soldiers and the people who maintain the empire, while the benefits go to the elites who form a uniform upper class culture. And this noble upper class culture was the thing that held Eastern Europe together. Which was why nationalism was so dangerous in the 20th century. Because nationalism took power from these cosmopolitan elites to localized, basically lawyers and intellectuals who had to build these identities either artificially or organically to produce these independent national countries. And then that meant they had to form ideology which was significantly more intolerant than the nobility because when the nobility were in charge, everyone else was a peasant and they didn't really have to argue why they should be in charge. So they could have a significantly lighter hand in a significantly looser reign on the population.
- [18:23]
B
That's interesting because say you have like the empire being less restrictive and then the nations being more restrictive and I'm trying to compare it to trends today and you see like the disruption of the US global empire order, but it seems to be mostly disrupted by nations who are going in a more free direction like Hungary or Argentina or the US So that's kind of an interesting reversal.
- [18:54]
A
Yeah. I'm going to keep shilling this book, Visions of Empire by Kumar, where he goes through all of these and they have the same issue of an empire by definition is one ruling ethnicity that conquers a series of other ethnicities. And then they have to incorporate multiple full ethnicities within the same country. So people will say the Athenian empire. That's not true because classical Athens at its peak controlled people who are all ethnically Greek. The British have an empire because they controlled the Marathas and the Hindis and the Bengalis and the Zulus and whatever. America is in a weird position. We will not get into that now because it would just become a lengthy conversation. But as an example for the British, English nationalism has been de emphasized because England has become synonymous with British. And so a lot of the current WOKE stuff is imperial carryovers that the ruling ethnicity has a sort of noblesse oblige that, that they should maintain the empire. And that involves disincentivizing their own ethnic interests for the, for maintaining sort of government of the empire. But that opens it up for government exploitation very easily.
- [20:14]
B
Right. They, they found a place where there was give and it turns out it's like selling your own people because that maximizes their leverage and operations elsewhere. And it's interesting that the Ottoman decline or like the moment where the Ottomans were no longer perceived as a threat to Europe coincides exactly with the invention of the grand piano. Because when you have the. Yeah, when you have the tech, if you have the technology to make a grand piano, you can probably totally outclass them in weapons technology and logistics and infrastructure. And like that's the point where the technological gap, it's an interesting kind of marker of it because a grand piano is really complex. It's kind of like if you have fancy electronics, well then that can be used in a drone or something.
- [21:04]
A
Yes, good transition because Austria was the world center of music with Mozart being the most famous example. And Mozart, when he was alive, there were still people who remembered the great siege of Vienna. And that's how rapid a transition this was where when Mozart was a popular musician, Austria was a great power and he was part of an entire ecosystem of classical music that there was there at the time. But we don't sort of put the pieces together that the 18th century was the child of the 17th century. And Austria, as I said before, was a multi ethnic empire. They had ethnic Germans in Austria. They took Czechia, which was Slavic, and they. That was in the 17th century, and they destroyed the old Czech nobility, forcibly reconverting it to Catholicism, where there were a lot of. Czechia was majority Protestant. The Protestants nearly took over Austria. The Protestants were dominant in Hungary. So you had an entire belt of Protestants across central Europe that the Austrians crushed because the shared threat of the Austrian Empire was Catholicism, because the Holy Roman Emperor took his title from the Pope in most Germanic societies in Europe converted to Protestantism. The Austrians were the exception. And the or the Habsburgs, the ruling family of Austria. They were the people who stopped the Rhineland and Central Europe from converting to Protestantism, which they would have organically. And there was this period after the end of the Thirty Years War when the Austrians had to unify their entire empire. And so they, they crushed Czechia. And Czechia went through a process of deindustrial, of basically decommercialization under the Austrians after they had to crush them in the thirty Years War where they would bring artisans and technology and that stuff to Austria. So Austria became wealthier than Czechia artificially. And on top of that, Austria was one of the most early adopters of the industrial revolution. If you look at sort of charts of places that made the first factories and steam mills, it's England, Belgium, the Netherlands and then Vienna, because the Austrians were keeping track of this stuff. So they'd bring in experts from Belgium or the Netherlands to industrialize Austria early. And the Austrian empire was weird for having a muddled industrialization where Austria and Czechia were industrialized. The rest were, by and large, not. Where Hungary is a really interesting story, as well as Croatia, because through conquering everything out to the Danube, where they had Transylvania, they had the northern part of Serbia. And then the Turks could hold them off from the late 17th century until the mid 19th century. And we're going to talk more about the Turks, where we have a sense that the Turkish Empire was decadent and declining. But the more you study this, it's genuinely impressive. The Turks made it to the 20th century and there were periods where they could hold their own against the Europeans. And for getting this Eastern Empire, the Austrians had to cooperate with the Hungarians. And this was an issue because as of now, it's quite funny that the areas of the Austrian Empire that were under Austrian governance. Look back very fondly upon the Habsburgs, where if you go to Krakow, as I have, that's their favorite period of the modern world because the Austrians were way nicer to them than the Germans or the Russians in Bohemia. It's the same deal in Austria. Of course, they loved the empire and then they had to work through the Hungarians in the other half of the empire. And the Hungarians were significantly more brutal in the parts of the Austrian Empire that were under Hungarian governance. Look back upon it very poorly, where the Croats, as an example, were an independent country at the start of the high Middle Ages. And they got folded into the Kingdom of Hungary by the time of the First Crusade. And the Hungarians kept the Croats as serfs. The Croats were also the crack irregular cavalry for the Austrians because they were a mountain warrior people. So the Austrians would hire these Croat mercenaries to act as skirmish cavalry. And it was their version of the Finnish Hakkapelita, which is Finnish for cut, cut, cut, which were the elite irregular cavalry the Swedes used. And they fought against each other in the Thirty Years War. But it was said before World War I that the Hungarian nobility in Croatia their horses lived better than the peasantry, where the horses would often have indoor heating for their stables. They would be perfectly well fed because the Hungarians are a nomadic people. They're relatives of peoples in Siberia and the Huns. And so they have that sort of trajectory of viewing the farmers like cattle or sheep that they can call and herd around and also loving their horses. And Croatia was split between the coastline that was Italian oriented. There was a city state of Ragusa which was basically an. It was a Slavic extension of Italy. It was as wealthy as Italy. They fought against Venice quite often the Crusade that killed Constantinople. The Venetians demanded the Crusaders attack Ragusa first as their predominant rival in the Adriatic and then attack Constantinople. That was the two cities required to pay off the Crusader debt. And the interior behind the mountains of Croatia was Hungarian dominated. And the Hungarian plain there is Greater Hungary and Lesser Hungary. Greater Hungary is modern Hungary, like half of Romania into Transylvania and up through Slovakia to Poland, where there is a castle south of Krakow. There's two opposing castles south of Krakow, one on the Hungarian side of the border, one on the Polish side of the border. And I was going to go there, but I could not rent a car, so I didn't. Narnia is filmed there. And the Greater Hungary is, I think, minority ethnically Magyar, where the Magyars are people from Central Asia. They conquered the region, maintained it, and they have many other peoples like Romanians or Jews or ethnic Germans, who are the wealthiest people there. They were the entrepreneurial class. And then you had, for example, the Austrian settled Serbs and Croats on their bottom frontier with the Turks. And so you had these Serb and Croat free peasants who lived in militias where they didn't have a nobility because in exchange they fought the Turks. They were like Cossacks. And McNeill talks about Hungary in this time period very well. And it's very interesting where I'd highly Recommend you read McNeil's book Europe's Step Frontier 1500-1800. It's an incredibly well written history and it's very breathable, if you know what I mean. It talks at a time period you would otherwise not know about. And MacNeill is such a good historian that it's illuminating and you understand how each of these societies work. Where in his conversation, in his writings about early modern Hungary. Hungary was a pre capitalist society where because serfdom was so strong, the Austrians controlled it through a ruling nobility. And Hungary was very much divided by its noble identities. Where some landlords were more progressive and I don't want to use the progressive, some were more open minded and capitalist, others were more serf oriented. It was like Poland where the nobility had enormous power. And due to this, a lot of the Hungarian plain was very lightly populated because there wasn't an incentive for having children. And the Austrians had an internal colonization process in Hungary and the steppe lands over the 18th century where eastern Europe had to be consciously settled in this time period. And it's really crazy that 18th to 19th century Hungary might have been. If you were a West European, you might have perceived it as a. I don't want to trigger Hungarians unfairly because I know They're a proud and honorable people. But you could see it as a place in like Asia where it's. You go there, it's a totally different world. The nobility were in contact with Western Europe, but the peasants were not. And if you read Dracula, where the character in late 19th century Sylvania, he sees the Hungarian peasants and the Romanian peasants and they're in a different era of history. And Hungary was integrated into the modern world as part of the Austro Hungarians. By the end of the 19th century and through controlling their empire, the Austrians made a compromise to unify Austro Hungary into a single federated society. And that worked through increasing the amount of leadership class. Where the Germans wrote a quarter of Austro Hungary and the Hungarians meant that you could get like nearly half to 40% of the population. Because Austro Hungary was so divided, no given ethnicities could predominate. The Slavs were a technical minority of the population, but the Slavs were so subdivided that a Czech is not a Serb who is not a Pole, that you couldn't get the Slavs to congregate.
- [30:59]
B
Nosferatu, the recent Dracula movie, did a really good job of showing the differences between Eastern Europe. Probably not necessarily a really good historical accuracy, accurate job, but it was in the 1800s and they had a German guy go all the way out on the road to Transylvania and when he got to the place with the peasants, it. They showed kind of a very distinct culture. It almost felt like Gypsies. But it wasn't just because it was so different from what you saw in the first half and the German part of the movie. So it's kind of cool to imagine that and also crazy to think how much space there was out there. It's hard to imagine space in Europe like the population boom to the point to the population they have now happened, you know, mostly after that. So, yeah, that's pretty crazy. And it's interesting that the Germans settled it all because they were, I guess they were better settlers. Right. You said Eastern Europe was lightly populated. Maybe it was largely unstable. Maybe they had less long traditions of building sophisticated settlements. And so it's the same as like today, if you have skills and you can build and you can create wealth that enables you to settle. You also have expats, pop excess population from a diaspora. The one of the ways American expats go abroad is they have some sort of skill. They're like setting up a greenhouse in Thailand or they're doing X, Y and Z. So yeah, it's very. It's all very similar.
- [32:22]
A
An interesting element Here is that these empires encouraged multiculturalism where Poland invited the Jews in from Western Europe because during the high Middle Ages, Poland was lightly populated and the Slavs were by and large, not merchants. They were reliant on minorities like the Jews, the Armenians, the Germans and the Greeks to be merchants, while the Slavs were either the nobility or the peasants. And so Poland, Lithuania was the country on earth with the most Jews. You had Jews in Greater Hungary, Vienna, Czechia, across the entire sort of Central East Europe. And the Jews were tax collectors, they were money dealers. They were all of the jobs that the Polish Lithuanian nobility could point at the Jews and said, hey, we're not the ones exploiting you. It was a Jew who did it. And so the Jews got a very bad reputation. And they lived in their own worlds where if you went, if you went through the life of an average Jew in the early modern period, they would practically never interact with Gentiles. They had their own walled compounds, they had their own legal system. They were governed as a distinct nation. Where in the pre modern period or Until World War I, a nation was an ethnic identity, it wasn't a national identity. So these different sub ethnicities inside these empires would have their own distinct legal codes. And often if they were a conquered people, they routed their governance through religious elders. And so that was really big in the Ottoman Empire where the guy who, if the Ottoman sultan needed to talk to sort of the representative of the Greek community, he would talk to the head of the Greek Orthodox Church, who was actually a figure of profound respect in the Ottoman Empire. And so that was true in a variety of these peoples where identity was. Ethnic identity was often routed through religion. And so in the Austrian Empire, that was Catholicism. Prussia was weird. We'll get to them in Russia, that was Orthodoxy by converting to the Orthodox Church. Even if you were an ethnic Asian or a Pole or a Lithuanian, you would be Russian. And the thing with this book is it over is it emphasizes the multicultural nature of these empires, which I think is fair. I think it's colored by this era of history though, where we have the multicultural empires. And I've read other histories that have spoken about these empires as ethnic projects. And I think both of them are fair in different contexts. And we'll see that over these empires where Russia especially went through Russian nationalist phases and multicultural phases. And it would oscillate between them like three or four times just over the 19th century. And so when you're looking at these different empires with the settlement of Greater Hungary and the grassland on the Steppe. A lot of it was settled by ethnic Magyars, who are the native Hungarians, not the native ones, but they're the ethnic Hungarians. They arrived in the 9th century. Parts of it were settled by ethnic Germans, by Serbs. And I've seen maps of the Balkans in the 19th century, and it's just staggeringly insane. And it's true of all of Eastern Europe, where if you look at the map today, you can think, why is this a country? And there's often a reason why it's a country. Why is Slovakia a country? Why is Bosnia a country? Why is Macedonia a country? However complex you think Eastern Europe to be now, it was so much more. In the 19th century, the mouth of the Danube river was inhabited by Crimean Tatar peoples. The Crimean Tatars are descendants of the Mongols. They are now practically extinct. And they. Because the Russians genocided the Crimean Tatars and the Circassians, and then they moved to the Ottoman Empire. And Hasan Piker and Chenk Uyghur are actually half Circassian Crimean Tatar, not ethnic Turkish.
- [36:21]
B
No way. They're part Mongolian.
- [36:25]
A
Yes. So the reason I paused again is the Crimean Tatars are so ethnically Turkic that they're not really Mongolian there. You know how Latino or Arab is a term for an ethnic identity that transcends race?
- [36:41]
B
Yes.
- [36:42]
A
The Mongols did that too. It's just they got utterly steamrolled by the Russians. And so the little remnants you pull together are small. Between the Moguls in India or the Crimean Tatars or whatever, and. Or the Hazaras in Afghanistan claimed descent from the Mongols. And so you have a variety of ethnicities across this region of the world. And they were sort of a part of a biological ecosystem where Eastern Europe did not form nation states like Western Europe. It formed empires. And because the empires were unified around the shared monarchy, you had these weird biological ecosystems develop under the assumption of a shared monarchy. So in Russia, for example, the Germans were predominant in the military and in the civil government and in a lot of the merchant classes. The Jews were dominant merchant class. And the Germans predominated in parts of Ukraine, out by Kazakhstan a little. The Baltics and the Teutonic Knights splattered across Germany and Russia. Sorry, the Jews were a merchant ethnicity concentrated in Western Russia in an area called the Pale, where the czars were the worst regime against the Jews in Eastern Europe. And they forced the Jews to inhabitate a specific region in at least to own land in Russia that consisted of Ruthenia and parts of Poland. But the Jews were often dominant, like in a Variety of industries. They were predominant in Russia's industrialization. And the Armenians were a merchant class that controlled the trade stretching from Russia and Scandinavia out to India. When the British colonized India in the 18th century, they would use Armenian merchants in Bengal by Burma for their ship construction and their banking. So the Armenians were pretty important as well. And then the Ottoman Turks used the Greeks as their dominant merchant ethnicity. Where in the Ottoman Empire, the Turks practically never touched money. They were either the warrior nobility or the sort of proud free farmers where the Ottoman Empire was sustained by letting the Anatolian Turkish farmers be yeoman who owned their own land in exchange for military service. So the. The Arabs have been cowed by centuries of tyranny. The Balkan peoples had been successfully sort of castrated. I apologize. But it was true for a period. Please don't kill me. And so the Ottoman Empire was held together by this Turkish freeholding peasantry. But then the Greeks managed all of the trade, the navigation, and the Ottoman Empire straddled the Mediterranean in a way that the Romans did. The Ottomans also had ships that went out to Indonesia and East Africa, and they had a brief fling with the colonial empire in the Indian Ocean. But the Ottoman sultan or the caliph would often lean on his Greek subjects harder than his Turkish subjects. And there was a period in the early 19th century, before the Greek War of Independence, where the Ottoman sultan was reliant on his Greek allies to form a sort of cosmopolitan elite to keep his more Muslim radicals down, because the Greeks were a window into the west because they were Christians and they traded around the Mediterranean. So when the Turkish Empire went through a few phases of modernization, they would deal with the Greeks. And the Greeks ultimately backstabbed the Turks and tried to use this to seize control of the empire. And the Greeks had their own war of independence. So the Turks had to turn on the Greeks. But I mean, a lot of these dynamics of cosmopolitanism, intolerance were present in the Ottoman Empire as well as the Christian ones. And the Ottoman sultan had a. Often a quite close relationship with the patriarch of the Greeks, because the Greeks had their sense of identity through the Greek Orthodox Church based in Constantinople. And the Ottoman sultan would claim to be sort of a lord of the Greeks. He was the caliph of Raw ulum or Rome, because until the rise of the Greek Republic. And so for certain islands, this was the early 20th century, if you were to ask a Greek what their identity was, they would say Romanitas, because of the Byzantines. And so the modern Greek identity was an artificial creation of their independence of their independent status due to the British supporting them. And modern Greek is an artificial creation of these Greek nationalists who first of all had to expel all of the other minorities in Greece, like the Romanians or the Albanians or the Turks. And then they went back to the Homeric period and the classical period to artificially create a Hellenic language that was a mix of their ancient language with the modern degenerated version.
- [41:48]
B
Wow, Interesting way to pull it back together. It's like the opposite of the invention of Mandarin where they just simple simplified their modern version. It's interesting. Go ahead.
- [41:59]
A
The Hebronics did that too.
- [42:01]
B
Oh really? They. Was that Hebrew?
- [42:04]
A
I periodically use the word Hebronic for Jew because that's what 19th century anthropology textbooks use as the term. They'll say the Hebronic race.
- [42:12]
B
Well, you're anti Hebronic, bro. You can't be saying.
- [42:17]
A
I once told an Israeli friend, he's a cool guy. I have an Israeli friend who's 1% agreeability on the ocean test. But he's, he's a, he's a, he's a. He's an honest, smart guy.
- [42:29]
B
And that's how you stay alive.
- [42:31]
A
Yeah, I've, man, I've done business with Israelis. They're the singular sort of worst. Israelis are the singular worst demographic I've done business with. I've said positive things at the Jewish people in Israel, but I mean, actual Israelis are so low trust. They're the only demographics that are equivalently bad to the Israelis to do business with are both Balkan people and Russians.
- [42:55]
B
It's interesting. It kind of reminds me of like, I don't know if these things are all related, but Ayn Rand and objectivism and like Israelis, it's like they've distilled a lot of the best parts of Western civilization, like property rights and various things, but there's no love behind it. It's like I'm going to go within the rules of the property, but I'm going to get. There's no charity behind it. Which is why I mentioned like Ayn Rand.
- [43:23]
A
Another thing is that I'm from an honor culture and so when an honor culture person deals with someone from like in Israeli low trust clan society, you're communicating with other in the exact opposite ways.
- [43:36]
B
How is that?
- [43:38]
A
So if the, if these sort of Israeli or Balkan people were to be doing these deals in Philadelphia in this manner, they would get beaten up within the first few hours. You can. People. People are polite in a lot of Pennsylvania so that they avoid violence because outside the cities and People are pretty polite in Pennsylvania. And so you just can't, you can't get away with this stuff, right?
- [44:04]
B
Because there's an honor thing where it's like, I expect you not to screw me too much here and I won't try to like, screw you too much here. Let's just try and find, yeah. Line of optimal trade without like, yeah, I've had social interview each other, find it.
- [44:22]
A
I've had social interactions where I've had to apologize to someone and I'll like, I'll write out a paragraph answer detailing like, why are you going all this effort? I'm like, oh, in an honor culture, this is me clearing out all of the tabs.
- [44:36]
B
And it makes sense kind of, because if the trust in the society breaks down, then pretty quickly you're an idiot for not taking everything that you can out of the deal. So because you can't expect that the other side is operating in a forthright manner.
- [44:54]
A
I will explain this because it speaks to the Balkans quite well. So the differing assumption between like a Pennsylvania Celtic honor culture or an Appalachian honor culture and then the Balkans or the Levant is in the Celtic honor culture. And this speaks to the older European pre modern current is you are polite and respectful because your society is based around war bands. And the war bands bleed into corporate structures which operate the Western corporate structures that descend into the pirate structure because the. Our merchant class were originally Vikings and pirates. And so you are polite because you operate in a society where your current war bans could fail and you will need to go out into society in order to find a new one to hire you. And so honor and mutual respect and politeness exist in these societies because there is a passive level of social trust that you need to have to jump from project to project. It's why the Tocqueville, upon visiting America, said that our defining cultural trait was the ease with which Americans socially organize. He said Americans will form a company, break up, form a social organization, break it up immediately, do it. He said, in France, you're tied down by your social class, your sub region, your dialect. And so people will organize according to their localized group that they grew up with, while Americans will just meet new friends and move to a new city. And he said this was America's best trait. And he was concerned that the atomization of democracy would break it down. He said that would be the death of America. When you're looking at the Levant or the Balkans, they are creations of the sort of. Firstly for the Middle east, for the Fertile Crescent region, the Corrupt regimes that came out of the fall of the Mongol Empire because the Middle east was so burnt out that these very low trust regimes showed up that would just steal everything. And so in the Levant, for example, the tax collectors were so brutal that you would flee to the hills and the secluded desert to avoid having them take your stuff. So the Levant has developed this culture that's highly clannish and oriented. Clannish in parochial. Where if you go to Lebanon, and I have not been to Lebanon, but I have no people who have. Every little area of Lebanon has their own very distinct clan culture. Because in the absence of sort of in with this extractive system, the only people you can rely on are your relatives. And so this is the process that occurred in the Balkans, but not the rest of Eastern Europe, because in the Balkans they were under the same Turkish structure. And when the Turks first conquered the Balkans, they were often greeted quite positively. And I say this so that only I may have the death threats. Yuga, I am agreeing to take the. I'm not agreeing to this. Sorry. But when the Turks first conquered the Balkans, they were seen positively because they got rid of the local nobility, where the local nobility was often quite oppressive. You also had religious differences with Catholics and Orthodox and others oppressing them. So the Turks removed the local nobility, which the peasants liked, because the Turks radically lowered lowered taxes. What then happened is the Turks replaced the local nobility with their bureaucratic governing class, like the Janissaries, the Sifahis. And they were able to pool the best Balkan talent through the Janissary system, where they would steal young Christian boys, bring them to the capital, I would say in a straight way, but I don't actually believe that. And then train them to be the shock troops for the Ottoman Sultan, because the sultan required Christians that he could use against the Muslims who lacked the clan loyalties that the Muslims had inside their own society. But classic with the. It's classic, especially in the Muslim world. But with the Turkish solidification of the Balkans and the rise of a new bureaucratic nobility that the Turks would assign your position, much like the Russian Empire, the Balkan people lost their localized structure of leadership. So them removing the nobility was a disaster. Because in Eastern Europe, the nobility were you the culture, they were the leadership, they were the education, the art. And this fossilized the Balkans in a Middle Eastern level of development versus the rest of Europe. And the Balkans itself has potential they have reached in earlier eras of this history. But the Ottomans hobbled them sort of unintentionally. And by the end of the Ottoman Empire, they were profoundly corrupt and exploitive because the centralized government had worn down. So that the Turks, as an example, would hire these tax collectors to just say, give us what we need, we don't care what you do to attain this. Which is one of the most exploitive systems, where the Turks would say, like Rumalia, we're your tax collector for rumalia, we need Dh50,000, we don't care how you attain this. So the tax collectors become these highly parasitic elites. And the Ottoman Empire was also dependent on highly constrictive guild structures which the Greeks and the Armenians and these peoples controlled. And so when you look at the Balkans and you compare it to a place like Israel, the shared thread exploitive government with tax collecting system like this causes entrenchment of hyperlocal identities that don't talk to each other and they become super parochial and low trust. Where you could hypothetically have unified all of the South Slavs into a single identity, but it was. Yugoslavia was too late. Yugoslavia was held together under Tito's iron thumb, and it was already past the point of ethnogenesis. But the reason that you have Iran and Bulgaria and Serbia and Bosnia all next to each other, being Slavs, but they don't get along is partly the establishment of the Byzantine churches, and secondly, because the Turks removed local leadership, the only social organization was hyperlocal. So when you force these countries together and they actually had to talk to each other like, wait, we haven't really spoken to you in centuries. You guys are really weird and not like us.
- [51:31]
B
Right? So the Balkans is kind of what would have happened to Eastern Europe if the rest of Eastern Europe didn't have those empire forces or multicultural empire forces, which ties back to an earlier thought I had about the scale of everything. Because maybe it's weird for a modern person, you think of people in those regions with strong identities back in the 1700s. Why would they tolerate a multicultural empire then if like people are mad about it now? And well, the, the scale is totally different. And like you said, why were all the expert classes foreign and various things is because the scale was just like these small villages spread out, that would be like a day's travel between each of them. There's no cell phones, there's no Internet, So it's a totally pre modern world in terms of the scale. So there's no traction there.
- [52:31]
A
The other thing is that the imperial elites genuinely govern the populations better than what came after. And so for most people it was tolerable enough. And one of the things Kumar talks about is that at the start of World War I, the Austrian Empire was a sort of loved institution by most people of the Empire because it was understood that the Austrian Empire was basically the highest form that this area of the world could reach in those, in that context where it was wealthier, it was more tolerant, it was more cultivated. And so the different peoples of the empire understood that they had a shared place inside this broader structure in this almost Catholic sense of we are part of the shared church. And in the same way that Catholic societies in general tend to collapse into hierarchy and silly bureaucracy, that happened to Austria. And the issue Protestant countries tend to run into is radical. I don't like the term individualism, but I'll use it here of my truth. Protestantism can culminate in trans. Catholicism can culminate in the eu. And the thing with a lot of Catholic societies is the Catholics are often too good at social engineering because Catholicism maps onto the human condition pretty well, where if you have a Catholic society, there's something for the intellectuals to do, there's something for the mystics to do, the king, the peasants, there's holidays and festivals. And Catholicism is less rigid than Protestantism. The thing Catholic societies do is they're very good at domesticating all at domesticating their own populations because it's a pleasant enough social structure for everyone involved.
- [54:25]
B
Well, it kind of reminds me of the opposite of the American spirit that you mentioned earlier and something that you see in Europe a lot today and increasingly in America where or like the, the Japanese age based or father, son, grandson based guild structures is they're always kind of looking for a situation that's stable in which things won't have to change forever. Some sort of like expected and then you, you freeze. So basically the things you're mentioning here is like ice, water and gas or evaporated water, steam, because you have the, the Catholic right, which can't change it. And you see the flexibility of Protestantism with, as being water. And obviously that can go into like complete subjectivity which is meaningless, which is like steam. So people would often only point to the steam when water is probably the best of the three options. Unless you want a cold drink.
- [55:40]
A
No, I'm just, I'm just mentally processing it. That's, that's, you're, you're, you're going hard into alchemy thinking. Yeah, I mean, I always prefer water because water, water is a liquid, it's a solid and it's an air. Under different context. Water is the ultimate thing because it can change Its form depending on different contexts.
- [56:03]
B
No, I guess I meant liquid. Yeah, I mean, I like water best in liquid form.
- [56:10]
A
No, I'm thinking I need to have a joke there. And I don't actually have a joke. It's just disappointing. There is a concept of the Austrian idea, and this was formed especially so after Germany created a counterpoint that the Austrians to justify themselves against where the Austrian idea was sort of civilization and cultivation. And I didn't even realize until recently how intellectually important the Austrian Empire was. You have so many thinkers, and I won't even do this justice, but. Because there's probably five times as many. But Hayek was an Austrian. Austrian school of Economics. Sigmund Freud was an Austrian. Adolf Hitler was an Austrian. I mean. I mean, there was.
- [56:56]
B
I was gonna ask about that.
- [56:58]
A
Kafka was an Austrian. Austro. Hungarian intellectuals.
- [57:02]
B
I was going to ask, like, because I always kind of wondered in the past, as a German nationalist, did being Austrian kind of hit hurt Hitler at all or did it actually help because they associated it with this kind of positive Austrian Empire that might be like the way Germany should have been run or something.
- [57:21]
A
So it's useful to see Hitler as a rejection of the Austrian Empire. And because he was from Austria, he was from quite near to the town. I believe he was near the town of Fucking. There was a town in Austria called Fucking. And he grew up somewhere close to it. He was all right in the border and he went to Vienna. So he served in World War I with the Germans because he was more of a German nationalist. And the Germans thought, if you're an ethnic German, you can join the German army, no problem. He went to Vienna afterwards. And the reason he became a far right radical was he was disappointed in how cosmopolitan and degenerate Vienna was because Vienna had a large Jewish population. This was the origin of his dislike of the Jews. Vienna was quite libertine. Vienna was quite. Vienna was one of the great European centers of all varieties of culture. But when you look at the sort of Nazis, sometimes the Stalinists, they were reacting against a very strong sort of cultural, libertine, open, sort of degenerate culture that existed in central Europe from the late 19th to the early 20th century. And the world wars were sort of a reaction against that in some ways. Where when Nietzsche was writing about how the 21st century be the age of the last men, of nihilism and suicide, he said that because there were those same cultural currents in late 19th century Germany.
- [58:50]
B
Mm. Yeah. It's all very similar stuff. And they were also poor and just saw kind of society collapsing all around them. Which is funny to think about because it's kind of like the US right now where you see things collapsing. But Even in the 30s, Germany had kind of potential as the premier manufacturing location in the entire world. Kind of like the same potential that we have now. Even in the midst of things falling apart. If we decided to turn things around, we're actually in one of the. In the best position to do so by far of anyone in the world.
- [59:32]
A
It's really insane how Americans don't look at Europe more. Because we should really be studying why Europe declined. And the intellectual level of European thinker versus American thinkers is not comparable. If you read the philosophers of the Austro Hungarian Empire a century ago, they are so much more vastly superior than the thinking we're doing today. And we have no interest in learning learning from Europe. Where people today would think of central Europe and they don't. They think it's a sort of decaying place. But those very same people's great grandparents saw themselves as the high point of civilization and as the end point of history. And we sort of wrote that out.
- [60:19]
B
Yeah, I mean probably because the Austrian Empire failed when it did right before it could kind of carve its place into history at a later period. No one remembers about the 1700s.
- [60:32]
A
I will throw in Karl Popper and Wittgenstein as other other Austrian thinkers of that era. But I'm not doing it justice. They had a huge space Kafka as well. And Kafka speaks to the bureaucratization of these systems with the early 20th century where bureaucracy became bigger over this time period as a way to switch from the monarch having power to the population. The monarch having power in short circuiting out the nobility for the bureaucracy. But then in the 20th century the bureaucracy ultimately, ultimately won. And bureaucracy was really big in Austria because the Austrian idea was sort of where more chill and cultivated than the Germans. But then you had these hyper complex bureaucratic things where if you study the Austro Hungarian Empire they'll have different. It's like the kingdom of. Whether or not it was the kingdom of Austro Hungary or like Austria or Austro. It's really silly stuff like Austria and Hungary or Austria Hungary was important is it showed the relationship between Hungary and Austria which was a dual monarchy. But there was the whole many things were going on. I do not have the mental breadth to articulate the intricacies of Austro Hungarian bureaucracy.
- [61:47]
B
However, you bring up an interesting point with monarchy. Because what I the point I make about monarchy is that it's the same as communism. It just has a higher potential to scale. Like communism doesn't scale past 150. Monarchy, you know, pick your number like an order, a couple orders of magnitude bigger, but it still has this limit. So then you have empire, right? And in some contexts, the empire can facilitate trade, but the empire grows bureaucracy. Bureaucracy kills the empire because the way it's run expands for various incentives. So how do you like it? Seems like it's almost like communism, monarchy, bureaucracy. But how do you manage bureaucracy without it getting out of control?
- [62:38]
A
Whoa, man. This speaks to the Spenglerian concept of culture and civilization, which was popular at the turning point of early 20th century East Central Europe, where Spengler said the force of culture was the organic biological society that stemmed from their relationship to the land and civilization was the bureaucratized national structure which was created artificially to control the empire. And Spengler said that Europe's core issue was that civilization was killing culture. Where in the German context they saw West Germany as civilized and East Germany and Prussia as culture. And so in the early 20th century with these national movements, they had the goal of integrating these rural peasant populations to bring culture into the ruling society. But in fact that merely increased civilization because through the attempt of bringing these large peasant mass populations into national politics, they had to use the bureaucracy which standardized them.
- [63:41]
B
What do you call that? There's got to be a expression or an analogy for that. The thing that gets you the thing. Also, I don't think there is a bad thing.
- [63:51]
A
I don't think there is one.
- [63:52]
B
So basically, just let people cook.
- [63:56]
A
The point I illustrated is too complex for me to understand without a flowchart, let's pause and then come back. Right back.
- [64:04]
B
Perfect.
- [64:07]
A
To finish off the Balkan south thread before we go to the two other wars at the start of this time period, I'll use to explain the dynamics going on. Firstly, is this tendency to sort of see the Austrian Germans as decadent and kind of lame. I don't think that's justified given and Peter Turchin speaks of this as well as Kumar, how impressive it is that the Austrian Germans held this many other ethnicities together under their empire for centuries. Because when you look at the Ottomans and the Austrians especially, the crazy thing is they made it to the 20th century where the Ottoman Empire existed at the same time as Warner Brothers film studio around World War I and they were able to hold together because their elites weren't stupid. Where the Ottoman Turks as an example, they went through multiple pushes to modernize and they ultimately failed, but they had a big push at the end of the 18th century to modernize. They several. Over the 19th century, they were fairly tolerant. The Wahhabis or the radical Islamists were formed because they saw the Ottoman Empire as too degenerate and too cosmopolitan and not radical enough. And the Ottomans did have to lean on the Muslim part of their empire later as they lost their Christian possessions, which made them more Islamic. But then even by World War I, the Ottomans had already modernized their military. And if World War I hadn't destroyed them, I think the Austrian Empire and the Turks might have survived.
- [65:46]
B
Yeah, because no matter how increasingly Islamic the Ottoman Empire was, their fundamental operating model was outside of that. That was just like an appeasement strategy so they could do their thing.
- [65:59]
A
The other thing is the Arabs are such poor fighters, I think the Turks could just beat them. And I don't think Turks would let go of power. I mean, Arab militaries practically always lose Israel. Israel got Palestine.
- [66:11]
B
Not against India.
- [66:14]
A
That's not Arabs, that Turks and Persians. There's a difference. And final thing to clear out Austria. Austrian high culture is one of the best haute coutures in Europe, where if you look at sort of Austrian art and palaces, it's beautiful. And they were a center of European culture, where the highest form of German cuisine is Austrian court culture, where they developed their own form of German cuisine around the court of Vienna, where Vienna was one of the great European centers, which was artificially created by Austria being at the middle of an empire. And so there were periods when people like Adolf Hitler and Sigmund Freud and Stalin and a few others. I believe Einstein was an Austrian. They were all in Vienna at the same time. And we forget about this thread.
- [67:08]
B
Vienna's still beautiful. And it looks, you know, you could think of it as kind of like an alternate Paris back then, maybe even like Austin, Texas to Silicon Valley or whatever. And you see the remnant of that today. It's one of the most beautiful cities. Everything is like a gorgeous stone building. And the Christmas market there is insane because it's expansive and still very, like, in touch with a real European Christmas market. It's not just all I've wanted to.
- [67:37]
A
Go, I have wanted to go to Vienna, but I haven't. Their empire was maintained more by marriages than by actual warfare. And so Mary Antoinette, the French princess, at the time of French Revolution, she was Austrian, who was married to the king of France. And right.
- [67:55]
B
Because it was the center of, like, the European nobility inbreeding with so many.
- [68:00]
A
Came from Germany and The European nobility were German. The ruling families of Britain and Russia at the end of World War. At the time of World War I were majority ethnically German.
- [68:11]
B
The Romanov to think about.
- [68:13]
A
Yeah. Because the Romanov ruling family of Russia, they were 90% German ancestry at the time of World War I. And the reasoning for that was that due to geopolitical quirks relating to the collapse of a unified Holy Roman Empire, Germany had a majority of the ruling nobilities of Europe. Because you had all of these tiny places like Hesse or Cologne or Saxony or like Baden Wurtenberg, Friedland, and you could just. If you didn't have a ruling family, you could pick an obscure German. And so obscure Germans became a greater degree of the European royal genetic pool. Because if you're the King of England, you cannot really marry the top English nobility because that would be showing favor. You have to marry a German. And the Germans have all these tiny duchies and principalities that can produce royalty who are not attached to local politics. And so if you read the website Ethnic Celebs, as I do, I studied the ethnicity of celebrities. And so in ethnic celebs for monarchies, they have European royal ancestry group, the European royals inbreed enough, they have formed a distinct genetic ethnic population that's mostly German.
- [69:25]
B
Right. It's so crazy. They should make like a Seven Brides for Seven Brothers movie where some backwater kingdom like in Andorra goes to Germany to capture. Capture a princess to make like a noble ruling class or even a prince.
- [69:41]
A
Tangent. The original version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is that Freya, who is the Norse goddess of fertility and magic, she wanted to get some nice jewelry from Dwar, the dwarves. And the dwarves said, you have to sleep with all seven of us in order to get the jewelry.
- [69:58]
B
And Freya was the original story.
- [70:00]
A
Yeah. And Freyja was a huge slut. So she said yes, and she did it. And then she got the jewelry.
- [70:05]
B
I knew something was going on in that cabin. Like, you don't just send a young girl away, live with seven guys in a trap house and expect nothing to happen.
- [70:14]
A
Not gay. So second war to explain this time period is the War of Spanish Succession. And this is a war by omission where it was fought in Western Europe, in Germany or the Netherlands or Belgium. And I'm bringing this up because it occurred at the exact same time as the Great Northern War, which was the war where the Swedes fought against Poland, Lithuania, Denmark, Russia. And so these are sort of the two vortexes of Europe in the year 1700. Eastern Europe stuck in its own concentration. Western Europe's got its own war. These are both very historically decisive wars where France nearly conquered most of Western Europe, Sweden nearly conquered Eastern Europe, but in both cases, the sort of aggressive faction lost. And so the War of Spanish Succession ended in a world where the Anglo Saxons eventually became the dominant global civilization, not the French, but the French were culturally dominant across Europe in the 18th century. This was big in Eastern Europe, where the Enlightenment rippled across Eastern Europe, but it was under enlightened absolutism, where the nobility became often quite interested in the Enlightenment, while there wasn't a sizable middle class. So the nobility would try to do these various policies to bring about Enlightenment values. But the oddity here is that they were majority serf societies where most of Eastern Europe at this point were serfs. We've spoken about this in other videos, such as Prussia were mostly serfs. Most of Austria were. Most of Austria had serfed, Russia had serf. So across Eastern Europe, serfdom was really big. And the nobility would keep these serfs in very oppressive conditions. And so if you look at Frederick the Great of Prussia, he said something along the lines of, I speak. I've said this line before, and I'll say it incorrectly again. I speak French to French for I speak French for my noble things. I read Latin and Greek, I speak Italian to lovers, and I speak German to my horse. And so that's how Francophile, the Prussian elite was. And Frederick the Great invited Voltaire over as his guest. And then Voltaire engaged in corruption and degeneracy, which Frederick the Great kicked him out over. And even in the Ottoman Empire, the Wallachians or the Romanians and the Moldovans, their nobility became quite enamored with the French. The Greeks in the Ottoman Empire became quite interested in French culture. And so across Eastern Europe, you saw a Westernizing nobility who are often quite interested in the Enlightenment. And they were the cosmopolitan elite that managed these empires under, on top of peasant populations that might as well have been in the Middle Ages. And this causes weird details where Catherine the Great, who was the Czar Tsarina of Russia, one of their female rulers, she was an ethnic German born into Germany, who was married off to the clinically retarded Czar of Russia. And he died, but he would do things like play with toy soldiers in his bed. And he was clinically retarded for his entire adult life. And so she got power and tried to inculcate these Enlightenment values into Europe for reforms against the peasantry, but the result was uniformly the peasantry got worse treated and had worse conditions. And so Catherine the Great ruled Russia over the mid to late 18th century. And although she fronted as enlightened, she made the peasants lives worse off. She fought constant wars to Russia's west and south and increased Russian power so that the end of her reign, Russia nearly had a revolution by the Cossacks, who were pushed into serfdom as a formerly free people. Or in Frederick II of Prussia, he was enlightened, but he was constantly waging wars and was hyper aggressive and militaristic. Most of the population were serfs. And there's a wonderful conversation where Frederick the Great was talking to one of the Tudors he brought in from West Europe, and he said, what. What we believe now is that mankind is innately good. And we used to believe under Christianity that mankind was innately fallible and broken. And Frederick the Great said, yeah, there's no truth that mankind. There's no chance that mankind's innately fallible, innately good. I've seen too much. And there was a time at the.
- [74:49]
B
Which is the point of religion.
- [74:51]
A
Yeah. In the mid to late 18th centuries, when Austria was under the governance of Maria Theresa, Prussia was under the governance of Frederick the Great, and Russia was under the government of Catherine the Great. So you have two female queens running two of Europe's largest empires. And these were all enlightened despots. And their nobility became quite interested in the Enlightenment and studied these texts and that stuff and were interested in atheism and agnosticism and the classics, ruling over these serf populations. And these three countries constantly fought each other in these balance of power wars.
- [75:28]
B
It was basically like a progressive chick got randomly in charge of an empire in the 1700s.
- [75:35]
A
Yes.
- [75:36]
B
And then pulled a man who would be king kind of thing, where they made changes that ignored the constraints or operating ways of the various areas and resulted in conflict also.
- [75:49]
A
And so just war, you know, it's much like today.
- [75:55]
B
It's always much like today. And like Sean Connery in the famous movie the man who Would Be King.
- [76:02]
A
You know, Sean Connery was one of the most important Scottish actors of a certain time in the last century.
- [76:10]
B
He was a brave man. He went to the Caribbean, refused to come home until Scotland was free. Indeed, he died a free man. And now we're Irish.
- [76:19]
A
You know, for the next topic, I'll cover for around the Baltic and with the Great Northern War. You saw the rise. I can't keep doing it. You saw the rise of Russia, and I'll cover the Great Northern War in cursory detail, because it is profoundly based, even though we talk about it again in the 17th century East Europe video, where Russia, Denmark and Poland, Lithuania declared war on Sweden, who had a 16 year old king who just took power. And this 16 year old king was one of the greatest geniuses in European military history.
- [76:59]
B
He mogged him.
- [77:00]
A
Yeah, he did. As a teenager. He wiped out the Danes, which the Swedes been trying to do for a while. He humbled Prussia, took out Poland, Lithuania, turning it into a Swedish colony. And Poland had already grown weaker due to an event in the 17th century called the Deluge, where the Swedes also invaded them as well as the Cossacks and the Tatars and other peoples. And so Sweden folded under him and Sweden back, sorry, Poland folded under Sweden. And Poland had already been a tributary of Sweden because Sweden had humbled them earlier, but they, they kept the territory and that gave Sweden, Belarus and Ukraine, because Poland, Lithuania is one of the largest countries in Europe, albeit weak. And he invaded Russia. He had earlier defeated the Russian armies at the Battle of Narva on the Baltic Sea, but Russia had potentially its greatest king ever, Peter the Great. And Peter the Great, between losing at Narva and the Battle of Poltava outside Kiev, which, it's crazy, a Swedish army made it nearly down to the Black Sea and they had allied with the Cossack Hetman, who was the warlord of the Black Sea area, where I think if the Swedes had won at Poltava, they would have gotten the. They were fighting in the winter and he was driving deep into Russia. If they had won at that battle, they would have met up with the Cossack Hetman, who would have provided additional cavalry as well as Ukraine's grain, and they would have won the war. And when asked Charles why they're going into the Eastern European wilderness without a plan or supplies, Charles XII said, because the hungry wolf bites the hardest. And they did. The normal Swedish strategy of going up is charging with cavalry and men like a highlands charge against the disoriented Eastern European armies, which used to work where the Eastern European armies had drill training. But Peter the Great had modernized the army with drill, getting rid of Ivan the Terrible Straussy or his musket sort of nobility. And then they beat the Swedish military, wiping it out. Charles XII had to flee to the Ottoman Empire, who were tangentially a Swedish ally, and that kept them in captivity for years so he wouldn't cause trouble. And then everyone demolished Sweden. And so by the end of this war, Russia had established itself by taking Sweden's coastline, moving its capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg on the coast, which was in former Swedish swamplands territory. And then Poland, Lithuania had been made a puppet of Russia, where for the next century, until Poland, Lithuania's dismemberment, it was. It was. It was a. It did what Russia said. Russia would march its armies across Poland. At any given time, Poland was sort of a doormat. And it's sad because Poland was this big state with a lot of potential, but their nobility had been grown complacent to keep the government weak and keep the serfs down. And with the end of the Great Northern War, you saw the rise of Russia as a European power, where rather than being a great Brazil in the east or China, a country that had potential but had not reached it, Russia attained said potential by doing a radical process of Westernization, which Peter the Great enforced on the population, killing over a million people. And it was done in a sort of almost Japanese way, where I was thinking today about the parallels when Imperial Japan and Russia, both of them are collectivist. In Russia's case, nearly Asiatic. In Japan's case, very Asiatic societies, which. Which chose to westernize under an emperor and with using the nobility, went quite far and then ultimately hit sort of like a cultural issue with it. In Russia's case, they followed the Soviet Union. In Japan's case, they fell to. They fell to fanaticism and hysteria around World War II.
- [81:20]
B
Right. And yeah, the years leading up to it. That's funny. I was going to mention Japan earlier when you discussed the Soviets. Forced or not the Soviets, the Russians forced development. And it's really funny that you mentioned that Swedish attack, what it was in.
- [81:35]
A
The 1700s, it was like 1701 starting.
- [81:40]
B
Because it's a real historical echo of the origin of. Of Russia through a much older Swedish conquest. And it kind of was like a last chance hurrah to reverse the impact of the Mongols, if you think about it. But it. It was all. Even without succeeding. It created the hermetic pressure that forced Russia to industrialize. And it's funny with the drill because it's like Sharp says, I know you can fire three rounds a minute, but can you stand?
- [82:14]
A
Yeah.
- [82:15]
B
And so much of the battles are about forcing retreats. Right. And it's like what Drill did was just take a huge percent of battle tactics away because it made it way harder to force retreats.
- [82:32]
A
That's a great point. And that requires a lot of military history knowledge. So I command you. The expert JFC Fuller writes really well about this era of 18th century warfare. He goes to Poltava and the various battles. This was the era of drill and muskets. And the difference between free troops and surf troops wasn't that strong until the French Revolution. The French Revolution radically increased the size of militaries. So everyone had to enter into the age of mass mobilization. But in this time period you had the nobility as officers and they would ground up the serfs, scrounge up. The serfs in, in Prussia had conscription. Russia had conscription. East Europe besides France had conscription before West Europe. And they would just, they'd build these armies that would fight these set piece battles. And 18th century armies were not that large. It was like 20,000 guys, 40,000 guys, 10,000 guys. And so when you're looking at the second, the Seven Years War between Prussia fighting against Russia, Austria and France is at these battles, Rossbach and Leuthen, which were battles of survival for Prussia that determine the course of European history. The armies are so much smaller than in the Napoleonic wars. I think the biggest army is in the mid 18th century, like 60,000 to 80,000. And by the time the Napoleonic wars you have armies of hundreds of thousands, like 500,000 people.
- [84:16]
B
Just an insane shift. I mean, I wonder what people thought about when that transition was happening. It was probably a lot of panic that was equivalent to like nuclear panic. Right. Where you start to visualize the possibility for total war and then you can see the possibility for total destruction.
- [84:35]
A
Yeah. And the thing to keep in mind also is that Napoleonic era was one of the most philosophically and culturally literate societies ever. And that includes Eastern Europe. So they were thinking about the implications of this at the time. And there were a litany of answers where Tolstoy as an example. I really do not like Tolstoy as a philosopher. He was a shit lib. He said that we should just. He was a Russian aristocrat who lived off as serfs. He said we should make a society with no rules or standards or first.
- [85:05]
B
Thing, kill Tolstoy and take his barn.
- [85:09]
A
He also had a weird arc where he was an edgy atheist and he had a failed marriage. He was a best selling author and then he became a Christian at the end of his life because he said I've done all the things except, except Christ, I might as well do it.
- [85:25]
B
After leading everybody else astray, he's like, all right, I'll jump in.
- [85:29]
A
You have Kant who was writing at the time. He was a Prussian philosopher of Scottish ancestry in around Konigsberg in Prussia. And God, I Cannot explain Kant in the context of context, in the context of European politics at the time. It's too autistic. It's Kant's doing his own thing. You had Goethe who was saying that like Napoleon was the spirit of the age, same thing as Hegel. Because a lot of this with a turning point from the Enlightenment to Romanticism which also occurred in Eastern Europe was that with the conflict around the Napoleonic wars it forced Germany, Austria and Russia to double down on their own national identities against the Enlightenment. You saw a counter Enlightenment in Eastern Europe of nativist philosophy that was often sort of irrational or mystic or ethnically focused where there was this reversal of French influence. And part of this transfer was the transfer from French cultural dominance to German cultural dominance from the Enlightenment to the Romantic era.
- [86:36]
B
Right. And the nationalism combining with the rejection of the French because it's like why should we speak French? Why do we want this French influence through like elite networks that are in their language. And then basically they did a whole bunch of philosophy in German, most of it, which yeah, the English world has never read.
- [86:59]
A
Like Herder, he would say that there's the ethnic consciousness of a nation and so you merge with the ethnic consciousness of the nation and there's the sort of Rousseauian will of the people. And so that's how you make the jump of we are no longer just the nobility, we are the ethnic consciousness of the nation which the pre established upper class happens to be in charge of.
- [87:20]
B
Right.
- [87:21]
A
Represent this and then the mass and then the caesarest sort of mass mob. People took the logic for totalitarianism.
- [87:28]
B
It's kind of like the Catholic version of ethnic politics. Yeah, Sort of we represent the will of the folk.
- [87:36]
A
Yeah, no, that's a great way of putting it. That's what Rousseau, who was a. Rousseau was Protestant but he was in a Catholic society. So after the Great Northern War, Russia became a contender for the European balance of power in a way that was novel in Kissinger's book on the topic. He said it was the first great attack on the Westphalian nation state system because Russia was a great oriental empire that everyone in Europe could look at with fear because they knew they were different. And you saw a series of wars ripple across the region where firstly Russia secured its position along the Baltic up by Latvia and Estonia and they were quite lenient in governing them. They let the German and the Polish, the German and the Finnish elites do a lot of self governance during this time period because their whole thing is we're a multi ethnic empire. Let's let the more competent elites govern themselves and then govern the sort of people we have to colonize like this. Actually the Muslims were governed by their own tribal nobilities. But the Russians would develop different relationships with the different ethnicities in their empire based on context.
- [88:45]
B
That's a fairly non hypocritical way to go about it because their excuse is that they're trying to basically help people get better. The degree where they're interfering with these like separated small undeveloped towns and is to basically help them. And then when these other guys don't need help and it'll be kind of run better if they do it themselves, then they're like, okay, you're responsible enough to rule yourself.
- [89:17]
A
Yeah.
- [89:18]
B
You're not gonna, you're not just messing everything up for everybody. It's kind of interesting.
- [89:21]
A
That was what the British did too. They had different levels of self governance where even in sort of the non dominion colonies like India or Africa, they gave almost all of the British and the French empires were de facto self governed. There just weren't enough white people. But they had differing levels based on stuff like that. And the Turks waged a near constant war, sorry, the Russians waged a near constant war against their south starting with the foundation of the Russian Empire and ending at the end of the 18th century with the seizure of the Crimean Tatars. And we've spoken at the Crimean Tatars in previous videos. They were this Mongol descended population around Crimea that held the bottom of Ukraine. And they were enormous slave traders. They depopulated the entire region for my hundreds of miles around Crimea, populating the bottom of the peninsula themselves and captured a lot of Russian slaves. And the Russians had to make their own version of the Great Wall of China called the Belgorod Line against them. And the Russians were finally able to defeat them by the end of the 18th century through wearing the Turks down and populating the region partly by Cossacks. And the Russian settlement of the Chernobyzim black soil steppe region of southern Ukraine in South Russia. That was done after the time of the American Revolution. And so by the time Napoleon invaded the region in the early 19th century, the Russians had only been there for a generation. That was part of a process of settlement where in Moldova and in Romania, the local populations who were under Turkic governance, they flipped from being semi pastoral to being farmers on the step due to partly the introduction of corn agriculture from the New World that was important at the end of the 18th century. So even sort of native peoples that had been semi pastoral beforehand, they made the turn to full time agriculture, often living in terrible surf conditions at the end of the 18th century.
- [91:35]
B
It's really interesting again when you look at how split up all these domains of expertise were. Like you said, if anyone from around Germany, if they wanted to serve in a military or if they were respected as someone who had military knowledge, it's because they just served in the German military. Because there weren't that many organizations, there weren't that many people who knew how to farm X way. Right. You want to bring this kind of farming, you take this kind of settler. And what happens is the more these kind of nations are able to develop, the more saturated the ecosystem gets with knowledge. So if you served in the German military or the Italian military now you can have kind of like some semblance of similarity or level of skill, something where you could kind of apply it to that other industry. And it's the same thing with manufacturing and agriculture where the more saturated the knowledge environment gets, the more localized the industry gets because you're taking out the transportation cost and the trading cost. And so in the early stages of forming all that, it's like only the Austrians know how to do this, only the Danes are good at this, only the Jews can do this.
- [92:49]
A
Yeah, that's very true. And you see it with Carl von Clausewitz, who's the most famous military thinker ever, who was an officer for the Prussian. The Prussians. And then after Napoleon beat the Prussians, he didn't like that the Prussians were cooperating with the French. So he fled to Russia, became one of the top commanders in the Russian military to fight his former country, partly the Prussians, during Napoleon's invasion of mos of Russia while fighting against the French because his hatred of the French was the French was greater than his loyalty to Prussia.
- [93:24]
B
Well, yeah, and he could easily justify it as loyalty to Prussia because he's still fighting the revolution.
- [93:29]
A
Yes.
- [93:30]
B
Which is when it gets into like foreign help. Right. Everybody's always so hypocritical because everybody takes all the foreign help they can get. If someone's aligned on something with, with you, then they're like yeah. And then the other side is like foreign interference and vice versa. It's just, that's how it works.
- [93:50]
A
And the Russians continually had a goal of taking out the Turkish Empire. So they waged a lot of different wars against the Turks, such a, such as against Romania through Bulgaria because the Russians claim to have a legal right to, to be the defenders of the orthodox population in the Ottoman Empire. And this was a right that they had extra was a sort of legal interpretation of a treaty they had once cited, the Ottomans. And their goal was also to take Constantinople, to open Russia up against the Mediterranean and to retake the holiest site of the Orthodox Church that the. The Turks had taken in 1453. The British and the French consistently propped up the Ottomans, as they were called the sick men of Europe. So the Crimean War as an example was when the Russians were fronting up against Moldova and Romania, which were Turkish possessions. The British and the French launched an attack on southern Ukraine, which was this horrible trench war. It was one of the first examples of trench warfare with the charge of the light cavalry, which is a Tennyson poem, one of the most important pieces of the English speaking canon. That was at this heroic cavalry charge against the Russian guns that all got slaughtered. It was supposed to be a sign of the end of the age of heroism and nightly warfare for modern warfare.
- [95:19]
B
But the French failed to read that report.
- [95:24]
A
The French were also just high off. They were just so high off their own nationalist substance. In World War I, it took several million deaths to get the, the French off of their sort of like high horse. I was gonna say copium, but that's like meth, like spiritual meth.
- [95:42]
B
And literally got shot off their high horse.
- [95:44]
A
Yeah, yeah, machine gun. And that was deeply humiliating for the Russians losing in Crimea because they could not supply their own armies or fight an effective war on their own turf in Ukraine. And so that resulted in Russia going through a litany of reforms, including modernizing the military, abolishing serfdom, doing land redistribution, establishing a parliament. Russia could have had a revolution at the early to mid 19th century as well as the end of the 18th century. But their elite kept on making good decisions which made them last until World War I. That's a consistent thread that East Europe's leadership class actually made correct decisions. And so rather than having revolutions in 1848 or the French Revolution, when they easily could have, where the triggers of the French Revolution were present across Europe, instead they survived until World War I, which in some ways was worse. Because if you have a Revolution in 1850, classical liberals and nationalists are going to seize power. You're going to end up a lot more like America or France. If you have a revolution in 1920 or 1910, socialists seize power, which is significantly more dangerous because they overextend the government, every facet of life and kill the culture.
- [97:11]
B
Yeah, you're doing it in the context of like the death of God and modernization instead of like right before where It's a little easier and it's crazy. A detail there that I don't want to let slip is that you said Russia was going to retake Constance, Constantinople until the Western Europeans started messing around on Ukraine.
- [97:34]
A
Yeah.
- [97:35]
B
Which reminds me of like the first time Constantinople was lost when the Western Europeans sacked it right before. So like, why do the Western Europeans keep messing up the reclamation of Constantinople?
- [97:47]
A
Whoa, man. It's because a locus of power concentrated at the place where Europe and Asia meet is too dangerous to the Western European sensibilities.
- [98:00]
B
So they don't want to mess with it and they're just. They ignore. They have no respect for the Eastern Europeans plans. They're just going to invade right in the middle of them just because of their own reasons.
- [98:11]
A
That's not how this works. Power, power politics works through their own logic. It's not about respect and kindness.
- [98:17]
B
Well, that's what I mean. They see an opportunity to take a hit.
- [98:22]
A
Yeah.
- [98:23]
B
It could have been a little more strategic. I guess not.
- [98:28]
A
The Fourth Crusade was not strategic. No one wanted the Fourth Crusade. The Pope excommunicated people involved. The Fourth Crusaders are sort of just like a confluence of variables that fucked up and I mean, I don't. I would have propped up the Ottoman Empire. I don't want Russian fleets in the Aegean and fair.
- [98:49]
B
Because you can beat the Ottomans. But the Russians are the threat. Right. In connection with.
- [98:54]
A
Yeah, it's also going on in Eastern Europe. The thing with the Russians is they're not good faith players, especially in this time period. If you look at the great game, for example, every. The Russians broke practically every single treaty they made. The Russians were just constantly grabbing up land and they would bring it into their empire and they were voracious. It was called the Russian Menace where all of Europe feared the Russians in the mid 19th century. And then the Industrial revolution negated the Russians until the Russians industrialized and they feared the Russians once again. And then Russia fell to communism and then people didn't fear them. And then World War II happened and they did. Then the Cold War happened and they didn't. Then Putin happened and they did. It's a pattern. They come and go and. But there's a great painting called the Russian Octopus where it's an image of Russia as a huge octopus putting its. Do not. You are not. Not allowed to think of Hentai. No, I forbid you. Octopus putting its tentacles. I'm talking to the audience. The octopus is putting its tentacles across the European continent. And the rest of Europe looks at fear, at this Huge Russian octopus trying to grab the entire continent.
- [100:08]
B
Right. And the tentacles of octopus operate independently from the central brain slightly because they have their own neurons. Which adds kind of a chaotic element. Like it's self propelling itself.
- [100:18]
A
Yeah.
- [100:19]
B
Through this mind central brain of the rulers of the Tartars and Mongol hordes spreading.
- [100:25]
A
My mom was obsessed with that thing of how octopus think through their legs. She wrote like five books about it.
- [100:31]
B
Yeah. It makes people think octopuses are smart because they have brain cells in their legs. But it just means that. But their legs are retarded. It's like they're surrounded by retards. It's very low level intelligence flopping around.
- [100:42]
A
So to go through the balance of power wars, which are of course the most important part of this. I can't tell if I'm ironic or not. War of Austrian succession was Frederick the Great, lord of King of Prussia, was trying to take Silesia from Maria Theresa because under one legal code but not another, a woman could not take the Austrian throne. And so Frederick the Great said under this legal structure, I have a right to take this because a woman can't govern. And then this became a war. Frederick the Great is one of the greatest military geniuses. And she was right.
- [101:24]
B
He was mansplaining. He was right. He's like, we need a man in charge. I know what to do. And he was right.
- [101:31]
A
And so he. I believe that was the French and the Austrians. Prussia beat them. Prussia really is dark horse in this area of the world. They were formerly Brandenburg, which was an area that lost three quarters of their population during the 30 Years War. And that put them in sort of a. Put them in a fight or flight where their kings who later unified Prussia, formerly part of the Teutonic night, lands with Brandenburg to make these two distinct geographic parts that worked independently through walking through Poland, in between around Gdansk. And they made their country to be the military. And Prussia was able to punch above its weight as one of the not very important German states to ultimately unify Germany through raw force of will. Where they were a Lutheran country, the ruling family were Calvinists. And they were quite hard. And they, they had conscription and they gave veterans quite good benefit. So the military was the highest status thing. And they brought the Junker nobility or the Junghurs, the new German frontier nobility from the former Teutonic Knights to become the new ruling sort of military cast. And the Junkers had a profound emphasis on excellence. And Prussia modernized in a weird way. And it's similar to Japan actually. Barrington Moore is a great book about this and connects both Japan and Germany turning fascist due to it. Where the Junker nobility with their serfs beneath them were highly coherent. So they modernized and then brought the modern techniques on top of their peasants forcibly. And so Prussia was dragged into the western world by the coherent Junker nobility who were working with the king. And the king would give the Junkers these military positions for this sort of dualistic relationship between the military and then the centralized government. Slash. Military slash with the nobility.
- [103:40]
B
And in what. In which area? In Prussia.
- [103:44]
A
Prussia.
- [103:45]
B
This was a classic like new model.
- [103:47]
A
Ethnically German. Yeah. They made the modern education system because they were trying to standardize men who would fire well. And the Prussia is eastern Germany, Brandenburg, parts of Poland and an area currently controlled by the Russians out by Lithuania. And that entire coastline region was ethnically German. They sort of formed in the power vacuum with the defeat of Sweden and Poland. Where it's crazy. Look at the Great Northern War where just no one thought about Prussia. And then Prussia had two kings and they're suddenly unifying Europe. Where you had the first Frederick, who did not like his son, who was a homosexual, Frederick ii. And so he. Frederick II as a child had a gay lover which his father killed. He was quite disappointed. He was quite disappointed about that. But Frederick II was a great man. He was a figure of culture. He invited Voltaire, he studied the classics, he was a good writer. And he made Prussia a great nation by first going after Silesia and then with the Seven Years War which started independently at Pittsburgh between the British and the French and over central Europe where Frederick the Great had to fight off Russian, Austrian and French armies while he was supported by Britain. And he won through some of the greatest military genius history with battles like Rossbach and Leuthen. And Frederick the Great was able to sort of hack 18th century warfare by being hyper aggressive in a way the rank and file firing wasn't used to. He pioneered a lot of Napoleon's tactics and Napoleon idolized him. And you have stories like the he. He won several battles heavily outnumbered due to things like this. And Prussia only survived because they started growing potatoes. Because when the enemy armies were marching over the land, they wouldn't dig the potatoes out of the ground. So Prussia was surviving on potato supply which they brought in scientifically as well. As Prussia was nearly destroyed. But the miracle at Brandenburg occurred when Catherine the Great, who hated Prussia died. And the next successor to the throne was a huge fanboy of Frederick the Great. So he stopped the attack because he respected him so much.
- [106:13]
B
No way. Yeah, well I can't play Michael Jordan.
- [106:16]
A
Exactly.
- [106:17]
B
I'll let him win. And that's crazy. You mentioned potatoes. It brings me back to a point that I wanted to tie in and it's like piling on. But first a question. When we talk about people from Denmark or people from various countries joining the German military, how much of that is. We're talking about them joining the Prussian military?
- [106:43]
A
Same thing.
- [106:44]
B
It's through the AI. Yeah. So they're really joining. That's the organization with the expertise, where they come from. Because I watched a movie last night randomly. Not at all to do with this episode. It's crazy how topical it is. It was called the Promised land, made in 2023. It's a Danish movie and it's about the settling of the Jutland in the early 1800s. And the guy that managed to settle it got potatoes from Germany.
- [107:08]
A
Yeah.
- [107:09]
B
And he also had served in the German military. And it was like. And then they got Germans to be their settlers. Yeah, it's like all these exact dynamics were showcased in the movie, which is funny.
- [107:26]
A
Germany had a real superiority over Denmark for like a generation because they industrialized earlier. And there's a staggering cultural gap of pre Prussia versus post Prussia Germany because the Prussians made the education system and the military system. That was the thing that acculturated generations of Germans. And a lot of the field of anthropology was German thinkers of this era where if you look at Max Weber or Hayek or Carl Jung or any of these figures, they would often talk about how the German of the 19th century was laid back, especially in the west of the country, more so like German Americans or English or the Dutch. And the Prussians were much more stern and rule following and hierarchical. And they were in the east. But because the Prussians controlled the military and the education system, they trained all the other Germans in these traits. So the German of the post versus pre independence were practically different countries. And so when you're thinking of the German military, you're really thinking of the Prussian military. If you look at Bavaria or Saxony, these were a lot more like Austria. They were laid back, they were princely, they were professional militaries. But more so like toy soldier militaries. A toy soldier military is a lot of these smaller countries where they have really nice uniforms and they look good and they're well drilled, but they're not the sort of like. Sort of almost like vampiric nature of the Prussian military. The Prussian military had sort of this. We are a form of apex predator. This is our ecosystem advantage.
- [109:07]
B
It was kind of like a little bit of an Eastern European energy and into it. And a lot of the German migrants to the U.S. and over different periods. Right. They come from one area or another and it creates a very different character. Especially the ones that came over from like Bavaria in the 1800s or before. Maybe before that this culture was instituted in them. Yeah, through the Prussians.
- [109:36]
A
So I am not going to explain the Napoleonic wars because it's a distinct video. What I will say is Napoleon raged across Eastern Europe to an incredible degree. He had to fight Austria and Prussia like three times. It's pretty remarkable that he had to continuously reoccupy Prussia and Austria because he simply did not have the men to occupy them. And they kept them at the pot back. And then he attacked Russia, which was a huge disaster that he, Napoleon could struggle to hold Central Europe, let alone Eastern Europe. And he amassed an army of I think over half a million men, including a lot of Prussians and Austrians who he had temporarily brought in as allies. And you know that this is a monarchy society where the King can decide we're going to raise men to attack, to work with our former enemy and the people go along with it.
- [110:36]
B
Maybe he had to invade Russia to keep the Central Europeans under his heel because he's turning them against.
- [110:46]
A
More historic.
- [110:47]
B
Or scarier enemy that they can unite against. That is if he doesn't fight them, they're going to want independence.
- [110:53]
A
That is true. And that was the calculus he is making. That is high level.
- [110:57]
B
That's why he invaded. Russia actually had a reason.
- [111:00]
A
So there were several reasons. One of which was he had come to realize that Britain was his dominant opponent but the British had wiped out the French Navy so he couldn't attack Britain directly. Instead he was straining to destroy Britain economically. And I do not think this would have worked. But it was his last option. So his thinking was if we get the entire European continent to be part of our blockade, then we can get Britain to surrender peacefully. And so he invaded Portugal and Russia due to this. But this is widely considered to be hubris because it increased the amount of enemies he had at the worst time. And Russia was willing to work with him where he and the Russian Czar had a bromance where they met up at the edges of the Masuri and Prussian border and they hung out together and they had incredible respect for each other as people. But then there was the dispute over the trade system where Russia would refuse to stop trading with Britain. And Russia also asked for Poland in exchange for letting Napoleon off his Back in Poland was one of the places in the Napoleonic Empire that he was attached to because they had recently been divided up by Austria, Russia and Prussia at the end of the 18th century, because Poland's been weak for the 18th century. And they had a regime switch involving, I believe, Kashuta Kosciuski, who is the fort designer in the American Revolution, where they started bringing in manufacturing. They made a liberal democracy with maybe universal suffrage. They were trying to become a liberal democracy and they started raising a genuinely powerful military. And then all of the neighboring countries found this very dangerous because it occurred at the time of the French Revolution with a similar ideology. So they were trying to contain the East European version of the French Revolution. And they divided up Poland politely in the beginning with taking a little bit of the edges, and then they divided up Poland ruthlessly afterwards. And the Polish nation kept going where, if you were from Krakow, you would still have relatives in Lublin or Warsaw. But Poland was divided up as a country. And so the Napoleonics, Napoleonic French exploited this by making the Duchy of Warsaw, where they were using the Poles against the Russians. So the short answer is that Napoleon was embroiled enough in Eastern Europe that his hope was to knock out Russia, but instead he, instead he overextended himself.
- [113:41]
B
Right. And yeah, what we mentioned earlier with the Eastern Europeans, that being a good way to control them is part of that larger equation of how you take your momentum to cover the whole continent. And it's ironic because the French cutting off the English from trade and trying to cut them off from all of European trade was probably a big impetus and motivating factor for England to switch to get their population to agree to switching on a total war model because they're feeling a lot of economic pain. It's a big threat. Right. You have to get volunteers or conscriptions to go out and fight Napoleon. You know, if you volunteered, you got the, the shilling or whatever. And they were suffering economically. So it's like, hey, we need to beat Napoleon. So then the economy will get better after the war, we'll have access to Europe, access to France. And I think after the war they didn't actually have trade access to as much of Europe as they wanted to. There were still a lot of economic problems that took a little bit of time to shake out.
- [114:48]
A
A crazy thing is that the highest tax rate British Britain ever had in the pre industrial period was a 10% income tax for the Napoleonic Wars. In an emergency, they took away World War II. They had a 95% tax rate. That's how much of a shift this was.
- [115:07]
B
Total society from total war in terms of like conscriptions to also all of your stuff and all of your money.
- [115:15]
A
Exactly. So Napoleonic wars are over. We see the retrenchment of the long regime which lasted with stable borders until World War I. And I am going to put in the cultural and the economic and the political shifts that occurred over the mid to late 19th century in the next video, because only after World War I do you see their manifestation. So in the next few, in 20th century Eastern Europe, we're going to backtrack what shifted between the Napoleonic wars and World War I. That meant you saw the end of this world of the great empires of Austria, Prussia and Russia, towards firstly the division into smaller countries and secondly, the rise of totalitarian ideologies.
- [116:04]
B
Excellent. Yeah, let's see how that went wrong.
- [116:07]
A
Like Bill and Ted. Excellent, man.
- [116:10]
B
Okay, we should do a Bill and Ted someday. No, we could do it. Get some history in there. Some like, funny figures, some of the insights, get their dialogue on point.
- [116:24]
A
When I was a teenager, I considered making an alternate history for April Fools about what if Bill and Ted actually did their adventures? What would the downstream alternate history implications of that be?
- [116:35]
B
The butterfly effect of meeting every most consequential figure. That would have been chaotic to plan.
- [116:41]
A
Oh, man, it was aliens.
- [116:43]
B
Turns out Ted. Bill and Ted had zero impact. They have no charisma or intellect. Okay, sounds good, Sounds good.
- [116:53]
A
See you next week.
- [116:54]
B
Peace.
- [116:56]
A
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, Lifelock.
- [117:16]
B
How can I help?
- [117:17]
A
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
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B
One in four tax paying Americans has.
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A
Paid the price of identity. Identity fraud.
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B
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A
My refund though. I'm freaking out.
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B
Don't worry, I can fix this.
- [117:27]
A
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