Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio interviews Dan Carlin, host of Hardcore History, about the uses and misuses of history, and what the fall of Rome teaches us about the modern West - http://www.dancarlin.com
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| Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| I have on the line Dan Carlin of dancarlin.com, the host of Hardcore History. | |
| And I was very excited, of course, when I first heard about Dan's show because I thought it would be about the rise and fall of the porn industry. | |
| But no. Even though I got over my initial disappointment and began listening, it's a very interesting show. | |
| And the passion and clarity and level of detail that Dan brings to the examination of history is most impressive and it's highly recommended. | |
| Thanks so much for taking the time, Dan. | |
| It's great to chat with you. Oh, I'm very glad to be here. | |
| And you're not the only person probably disappointed by the porn aspect of the show. | |
| I know. I wish I'd been a little more original, but that's the only joke I can come up with about your show, which deals with some pretty grim topics. | |
| Many disappointed teenagers out in the internet world. | |
| So tell me a little bit, I guess, tell my listeners a little bit about your history with podcasting, how you got into it and how it's grown and what it's been like for you. | |
| Well, I have to be honest and say that when I got into podcasting, there were no such things as podcasts, and I was not really optimistic about what was out there. | |
| I was working at a radio station doing talk radio, and I never fit in talk radio because I'm not really a conservative or a liberal, so I was screaming at my audience one day, which... | |
| Which was the modus operandi in general. | |
| And I said to them, you know, what are you people prepared to do to foster change, to make a difference? | |
| And I got off the air, you know, mad, kicking things, too much coffee, whatever it was. | |
| And there was a message waiting for me on the phone from some guy. | |
| I called him back and he said, let me tell you what I'm ready to do to foster change. | |
| Can we have a dinner? And so we had a dinner with this guy who had hair down past his waist. | |
| Turned out he was a computer genius way ahead of his time. | |
| And he said, I want to hire you away from the radio station and I want to put you on the internet. | |
| This is about, I want to say 1996, and I thought the guy was crazy. | |
| I thought, I don't know, what are you talking about? | |
| But long story short, he hired me away from the radio station. | |
| I sat around for years waiting for them to develop the software and everything. | |
| And one day, some guy in the company we started who used to work at Apple said, you need to get on this podcasting thing because they're about to release this thing called iTunes, and you want to be there when it happens. | |
| And so we rushed a bunch of things into production, and sure enough, that's how it started. | |
| And I'm truly shocked to be here doing what we're doing today. | |
| I saw none of this. | |
| You have to be probably one of the only people who's been happy at the offer to do hardcore on the internet. | |
| Who's actually been happy with the last porn joke, I promise. | |
| That's right. And making the least amount of money, I'm sure. | |
| Right. And so, sorry, I just missed that. | |
| Were you still working at the radio station while you were waiting for all this stuff to come out or were you preparing for the show at that time? | |
| No, we formed a company with some people and we were working on paying our bills while we developed this stuff. | |
| And so, no, I wasn't working with the radio station anymore. | |
| That was a good thing because I was in radio... | |
| Since 1992, and when I got into it, it was still fun. | |
| By the time I left it, you know, everyone owned 900 or a thousand radio stations each, and everybody was a little cog in a machine, and it had lost a lot of its flexibility and creativity and ability to innovate. | |
| It was kind of a nice break to get out. | |
| And plus, like I said, I didn't fit in with the right wing or the left wing or anything. | |
| I was the Martian in their day part. | |
| So it was nice to not have to fit in that box anymore, or at least nice to not have to go into the production meetings afterwards and get yelled at by the program director. | |
| Well, and of course, the more affiliates means the lowest common denominator that you have to appeal to, which means put on your Cro-Manion forehead and use monosyllabic words, right? | |
| Well, and you just hit the nail on the head. | |
| What I always tell people is what's great about what we do is that this is a niche market sort of deal, but the niche when you're talking about a pie that's as large as the English-speaking world, niches all of a sudden are valuable. | |
| I mean, one could argue that CNN and MSNBC are simply niche market products now. | |
| Right, right. Now, history. | |
| I mean, I did history up to the graduate level, and I love history as a discipline. | |
| But tell me a little bit about your history with history and how you decided on the format and content of the show. | |
| Well, we did – the other podcast that we do is called Common Sense, and it's more on politics and current events, and it's what we did on the radio adapted for the internet. | |
| And then while I was doing that, my mother-in-law of all people had an idea. | |
| She said – Can you do anything you want with this podcasting medium? | |
| And I said, yeah, sure. | |
| We can do anything we want. She said, well, why don't you do a show where you're telling the sort of stories you tell over dinner? | |
| And I talk about history over dinner and all these weird little things. | |
| And I said, because no one would want to hear it. | |
| And she said, well, could you give it a try? | |
| And we sat down and we banged. | |
| Wait, wait, wait. I've got to interrupt you for a second. | |
| Sure. So you tell all of these history stories to your family at dinner, but then you say nobody would want to hear it. | |
| Would that include your family? | |
| Were they slowly face-planting in the soup while you were talking about this stuff? | |
| But wait, no, I have to go to the fall of the Republic and what Sulla did. | |
| I think this was an attempt to sidetrack me so I wouldn't talk about the dinner anymore. | |
| Absolutely. This was just trying to... | |
| That's right, exactly. | |
| But so we did the first program, which was like 15 minutes, and if you go back and listen to it now, it bears very little resemblance to what it evolved into. | |
| And we started doing weird things about history, and then we started doing some narrative shows, and... | |
| You know, it just took off. I had truly no idea that there was such a desire out there on the part of people who maybe felt a little short-changed by the lowest common denominator, like you mentioned on television now or cable channels. | |
| I mean, if you turn on the History Channel now, you're likely to get a show like Monster Quest or... | |
| And that has very little to do with history, which has, I think, left an unsatisfied history demographic out there. | |
| Or it's like evil porn history. | |
| You know, there's that joke on Two and a Half Men where he's like, hey, it's Nazi Week on the History Channel. | |
| It's like, it's always Nazi Week on the History Channel. | |
| That's right. Listen, I'm actually looking back on those days fondly and nostalgically. | |
| I wish it was still Nazi Week on the History Channel. | |
| And so then you developed it. | |
| When you were thinking about doing the show, I mean, I was looking through your archives and I was trying to sort of figure out a pattern, which is sort of like trying to find a straight line in a Jackson Pollock painting. | |
| Agreed. What was your approach? | |
| Obviously, you're not going completely chronologically because you have the Roman Empire after the Eastern Front in the Second World War. | |
| So what was your approach? | |
| Was it really a seat of the pants? | |
| Is there any master plan that we can reveal slowly with curtains and flash pots? | |
| Or how was your approach to the sequence of the shows? | |
| Well, you mentioned your education in history, so you're going to be able to relate to this. | |
| But we started talking on the program, and you know this too. | |
| When you form a program and start something, you have an idea on paper. | |
| And then as the program grows, it evolves in ways that you don't have a lot of control over. | |
| I always say that a TV series like Seinfeld, if you go back and watch the first ten episodes... | |
| Isn't Seinfeld yet. | |
| It takes a while for everything to click into place and go in directions that the people who designed it never had in mind. | |
| And the same thing happened with our history show. | |
| My goal was to go and talk about some of the things that history majors used to talk about on our lunch break with each other. | |
| The first history show talked about the question of, was Alexander the Great as bad of a person as Adolf Hitler? | |
| And to me, those are the kind of questions that history majors talk about. | |
| And then one guy will try to make the case that there's no way that that's true. | |
| And another guy will try to make the case that, well, only too much time has passed. | |
| We've lost touch. | |
| And you'd have those kinds of debates. | |
| And then all of a sudden, I would find historical stories that I would want to present. | |
| And you're right, there's no rhyme or reason why. | |
| We're in the middle of a series now that's four episodes into it and I hope won't go six, but about the Roman Republic. | |
| And I thought I was originally going to talk about Cleopatra, and I couldn't figure out how to talk about Cleopatra without going back and giving some detail. | |
| Now I'm not probably going to get to Cleopatra at all. | |
| So sometimes I'm caught by surprise by how much time and effort these things take myself. | |
| I know what you mean. | |
| Now, let me ask you this, because when I was looking at your show, Archives, and I saw the fall of the Republic, and I also knew that you did a political show, I was a little surprised to see that you were talking about Rome and not the United States. | |
| I was wondering if you could dip a little bit into the parallels that you see between the fall of Rome and some of the later decadent stages of the American Republic or, I guess, Republic slash Empire. | |
| It's funny you ask that because I remember thinking when we were talking about doing a Roman show pretty close to when we did the ones on the Punic Wars. | |
| And my assistant, my producer, he said, should we really be doing Rome again so quickly? | |
| And I thought what you thought, that here in the United States we talk all the time about the parallels between the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire and our country here in the U.S., I thought, wouldn't it be good to actually talk about that subject so that when we're all discussing these parallels, we have a little bit maybe better understanding of what those similarities and differences were? | |
| So I thought it might be a good time to talk about Republican Rome since we're so quick to shoot from the hip and talk about the similarities. | |
| I did an interview once. | |
| shows like Connections and the Daytona. | |
| Oh, yeah, that guy's great. | |
| Yeah, he's wonderful. | |
| And I threw that same sort of question at him, and he said, well, he said, if you look at it on the surface, sure, there's a thousand ways that you see similarities between Republic and Rome and the United States, because, but if you dig deeper, there's also a thousand ways that we differ. | |
| There's that old line from Mark Twain that history doesn't exactly repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes. | |
| And I think that that's what we see here is that I think when you get certain equations that are similar, for example, large, militarily powerful commercial republics, you're going to see similarities just because of those things. | |
| You're going to have senators, and you're going to have special interests, and you're going to have partisan politics. | |
| I think another thing which is pretty clear is the creation of a near-permanent unclass of people dependent upon state largesse. | |
| Everything. I mean, the dynamics become, I mean, if you go and look at the history of Byzantium, which is just, in some people's mind, later Rome, I mean, you can start to see that happen in the urban setting, where if you get A plus B, you get C, and they had street gangs that were defined by their colors that fought in the streets of Byzantium. | |
| I mean, I almost think that human beings thrust into similar situations behave in similar ways, and there's certainly similarities between the situation that the Republic found itself in and the situation we in the United States find ourselves in. | |
| Although hopefully we will end up with, I think it was Rome went from a population of over a million and in the Dark Ages went down to about 17,000 people, which was a pretty significant depopulation. | |
| Hopefully we won't end up with like 12 homeless guys living in New York and everyone else scattering to the countryside. | |
| I'm sure it won't go that way. | |
| So yeah, I think it is interesting. | |
| If people want to see the parallels, they're there. | |
| And if people want to see the differences, they're there as well. | |
| I personally think that the overall trend tends to be That the power corrupts and trade gives way to arbitrary laws designed to benefit special interests and that the government buys the loyalty of the underclass with goodies that can never be sustained. | |
| But yeah, you can certainly find differences in that. | |
| Are you going to do a specific show on that or have you done about the similarities and differences between the two republics? | |
| I have not done one like that, although we do tend to delve into these issues on the political show probably more. | |
| I don't want to alienate the very many people with different political beliefs, which is pretty much everybody in the world, than I have on the history show, but we do deal with that in the political show sometimes. | |
| And to piggyback on what you were just saying about the republic, I think the lesson that's very interesting is that I find very few examples of successful people The successful ability to freeze out the special interests and the money and the – in all these societies, they always talk about the people in quotation marks. | |
| But I don't see a lot of examples where the people have gotten to run anything for very long, whether it's – A Bolshevik-type regime that supposedly takes power for the people or a country even like ours that supposedly is founded on the will of the people. | |
| I see very few examples when the people have been able to influence things to the degree that I want them influenced. | |
| Does that make sense? Oh, completely, and I couldn't be behind you more. | |
| It has been my analysis of power that what power elites desperately want to do is to create a fictional entity that is all-powerful, but only speaks to them, or only they can speak for, right? | |
| So you have priests who create gods, and then the gods are all-wise, all-knowing, and all-powerful, but the gods have no voice because they don't exist, and therefore you need the elites to speak the word of God for you, and that's supposed to cow you and sort of bow you down to them. | |
| And the same thing is true with the nation, the state, the common good, the will of the people. | |
| I mean, there is no such thing as the will of the people because so many of us disagree about so many things. | |
| There's no unified will of the people. | |
| But it's a convenient fiction which lends weight to the pronouncements of utterly ordinary people in positions of power. | |
| Well, I just recently finished Christopher Hedge's new book – Chris Hedge's new book, The Death of the Liberal Class. | |
| And he had a very interesting rationale or point running through it that people who get out there and say things that don't conform – and he was saying to the New York Times, to liberal and conservative institutions are simply marginalized so that the people to liberal and conservative institutions are simply marginalized so that the people who follow what you would call regular media or consider themselves informed or will cite reputable sources like the New York Times, is that you're given a purposely small spectrum is that you're given | |
| And I often feel in debates with people that they feel like those are the only parameters out there, and Hedges would make the point that that's sort of by design and that if you steer too far off the guide rail, you're automatically marginalized. | |
| He, for example, dropped from the New York Times because he got a little too outside the box for them. | |
| So I think it's interesting to back up your point about how if you don't follow a certain line of thinking, the reality that is given to us and fed to us, you're marginalized as someone who should not be listened to. | |
| Yeah, and I think that it's been a great tragedy in Western education over the past generation or so that there's been a more than 50% drop in courses and tenureships and enrollments in the humanities that everybody's going in for specific technical trades. | |
| And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, we need dentists, we need lawyers to some degree, I suppose. | |
| We need engineers. But... | |
| The challenge of overcoming the problem of confirmation bias is not really being addressed in society. | |
| And in a sense, the Internet has helped that in that it exposes people to different viewpoints, but people self-select or they tend to self-select information which confirms their existing biases or prejudices or even facts. | |
| And then they kind of tunnel into those biospheres of self-confirmation and don't have the discipline to continually expose themselves to opposing viewpoints, which can only help, I think, broaden and sharpen your thinking, but that's become a little bit less common I would say these days. | |
| But I think you brought up a key point. | |
| Why are people not taking the humanities like they used to? | |
| Is it because they don't see the value in it? | |
| And if they don't see the value in it, is it because the humanities are not delivering on the promise that they used to? | |
| There have been a lot of educational critiques about whether – I mean Who Killed Homer by Victor Davis Hanson is a perfect example where he tried to defend the teaching of the classical text that used to be a part of every standard education going back 100, 200 years. | |
| Your classical British education would have included ancient Greek, ancient Latin, all the ancient writers. | |
| That's kind of a thing of the past, and many people say good riddance, but you begin to wonder if our forebears thought that such a useful education, the old classical humanities education. | |
| Have we not lost something at the same time? | |
| Perhaps students are just making a rational, logical choice when they don't choose the humanities because maybe the humanities aren't giving them what a specialized education would give them now. | |
| I think some of the value has been sort of cut out of them. | |
| Well, I think that's right. | |
| I mean, I think that there has been a kind of slow harikari of Western culture and civilization which has slid from a kind of imperialistic dominant hierarchy where we're always right to now a almost self-hating cultural relativism, which is that we're always wrong. | |
| And I think that nobody really, no healthy person wants to go into the humanities to get lost in a fog of relativism and postmodernist critiques and so on, particularly since if they come out, they're not even, I mean, you don't even need to take a base, you can go all the way to a PhD in the humanities without ever being forced, from kindergarten to postdoctoral work, without ever being forced to take a degree in logic. | |
| Sorry, even to take a single course. | |
| And I think that's one of the things that humanities used to provide in great depth and detail was, you know, writing skills and verbal skills. | |
| A lot of people go through humanities now. | |
| They don't even get that much in terms of writing assignments because, you know, professors wanted to be doing other things and grading papers. | |
| But even more importantly, they don't get those critical thinking skills that can really work outside of So yeah, it gets a lot of textual analysis of a lot of cultural relativism and so on, which, you know, I think turns critical minds into a kind of fog. | |
| So I think you're right. | |
| I think the humanities aren't fulfilling the same promise that they used to. | |
| I mean, I think they needed a revision, but I think that revision's gone just a little too far. | |
| Well, I think you mentioned the key point, too. | |
| I think some of that logic and ability to be broad-minded and compare and contrast ideas in one's brain comes from being exposed to a wide variety of them. | |
| I'm not particularly a Victor Davis Hanson fan, but I think reading that book and then reading another book on the totally opposite viewpoint and then being able to compare and contrast ideas and arguments, that's part of what made the humanities, I thought, stimulating. | |
| Debate, rhetoric, logic, like you said, A lot of tools that used to provide for the average student. | |
| I mean, if you're not going to be a doctor, you don't need medicine. | |
| But we could all benefit from knowledge and the ability to, like you say, critical think. | |
| And, well, I mean, I can't watch television a lot of the time today for exactly the reason you mentioned. | |
| I mean, if you think logically, you watch this stuff and you can't suspend disbelief. | |
| And if you can't suspend disbelief, you can't enjoy the program. | |
| So I think you're seeing across the spectrum, especially in a society like ours that's based on voting, What that lack of critical thinking can do in terms of the sort of, you know, what's the old line from Adlai Stevenson? | |
| In a democracy, people usually get the kind of government they deserve. | |
| Well, the lack of critical thinking is giving us a government based on a lack of critical thinking. | |
| Right. Let's go back to your history show. | |
| I had a couple of just thought experiments I'd like to fire your way and see if you would enjoy responding to them. | |
| You've talked quite a bit about your desire for a time machine. | |
| Yes. If you had a one-shot time machine, like you can go someplace for, let's say, a week or a month, and then you can come back and then the machine self-detonates or something, you can only use it once. | |
| Where and when would you go and why, do you think? | |
| Well, this is extremely self-serving and is probably not going to make anybody – they're all going to think less of me probably. | |
| But there are certain things that I can't visually in my head envision and yet come up all the time. | |
| One of them is what pre-gunpowder warfare between major states was like. | |
| So when Rome fought Carthage, for example, if you were above the battlefield 100 feet in a hot air balloon – What does that look like? | |
| It's a pretty big time machine, so you want to pack yourself some granola bars, change of underwear, and a hot air balloon. | |
| Okay, I just want to make sure. I need to know how big to make this thing theoretically, so sorry. | |
| I want the floor demonstration model with all the bells and whistles. | |
| But see, I guess why I want to understand that is because I was a military history major basically, and I have no idea what – I mean I've studied this left, right, and down, and I still have no idea what an ancient battle looked like. | |
| And so I think I would like to see that because I think whatever you saw in that one snapshot of a moment would help you understand the whole period before gunpowder in terms of what it was actually like. | |
| Well, again, according to my historical sources around ancient battles, they're entirely composed of guys with stupendously great abs and other guys with swords for hands, at least according to the research biopic 300. | |
| But that may not be quite enough to completely close the gap of ignorance. | |
| Okay, so you'd like to go to an ancient battle. | |
| I'm sorry? Yes. | |
| I was going to say, you wonder why I can't watch the popular culture sometimes. | |
| You know what? I just noticed this too recently. | |
| I listened to another podcast called The Bugle, which is a comedy podcast by a guy from The Daily Show and some other guy. | |
| And actually I find that with enough critical thinking skills, even comedy becomes annoying when you realize just how many ridiculous straw man arguments they're making fun of and so on. | |
| So it can even happen that one of the greatest delights of life, which is comedy, can even be undermined by critical thinking skills. | |
| I'm just... That's why you need a Peter Cook or somebody who can do the comedy from a very high level. | |
| We'll call that high IQ comedy, maybe. | |
| Right, right. Now, here's another question for you. | |
| Well, no, let me back off before the next question, which is to ask you about your approach to history. | |
| There are, in my perhaps oversimplified brain, sort of three major approaches to history. | |
| The first is, you know, the socioeconomic, the Marxist school, or, you know, which says that history is shaped by economic forces and so on, and technological changes, and it all flows out of the economy. | |
| And there's, related to that, you know, these sort of big political movements and so on. | |
| There's another school of history which says it's, this is sort of the Paul Johnson view, which is that it's more around individual decisions and individual willpower, that history is made by individuals and not sort of greater socio-economic forces. | |
| And the third is that, you know, it's all completely random, so to speak, and nothing can really be predicted. | |
| Do you fall anywhere into those three camps? | |
| There is another one that I haven't thought about at all in your approach to history. | |
| No, we always talk about that, too. | |
| Those are good points. We used to call the one theory the great man theory of history, right? | |
| The one where you have your Churchill's. | |
| That's right. A Churchillian history, James Burke called it. | |
| The other one is the old trends and forces theory. | |
| So, like you said, it's not even just Marxism. | |
| It's the whole – you could go into Hegel and the dialectic and all that stuff where it's – things happen that – the old line is – Is Adolf Hitler in charge of everything Adolf Hitler was in charge of and did he make his opportunities in the world or did the circumstances create the situation where someone like Adolf Hitler would rise to the fore? | |
| Is it like a bunch of dry wood waiting for a lightning strike or is he actually setting a match which wouldn't have happened otherwise, right? | |
| Exactly. And I think, if you're asking me where I fall, I fall with a lot of the more modern people, which is that there's an interplay going on between the two. | |
| Sometimes the great man pushes history. | |
| Sometimes the trends and forces pull these people into greatness. | |
| And sometimes there's an interaction going on with some give and take. | |
| I think we'd be silly to suggest, for example, that the Great Depression here in the United States didn't create conditions that people were able to exploit. | |
| At the same time, I think we'd be crazy to assume that Some other guy would fall into the Adolf Hitler role and do it like Adolf Hitler did. | |
| So in that sense, I think... | |
| There's a third way, by the way. | |
| I'm rereading science fiction author, and it's almost 100 years old now, H.G. Wells' Histories of the World. | |
| And he's fun because he's not a professional historian either. | |
| So he speculates and his own bias is openly portrayed in the book. | |
| But I found it interesting. | |
| He constantly has this feeling when you're reading it that every society from the history of the world has been hanging sort of on the edge of the abyss because none of them quite understands what they're doing. | |
| It's almost like if you could look at the world today and say... | |
| Boy, we're just kind of shooting blind when it comes to the economy or world affairs. | |
| We're not really in charge. | |
| Everything's so complex. | |
| And at some point, the complexity will overwhelm our ability to deal with it. | |
| I mean, when he was writing about the Roman Republic, that's the way he phrased it, as though the banking system in Rome had become so complicated and there was so little history for the people in that time to learn from, to know the mistakes they were making, that they essentially just... | |
| We're unable to manage the complexity of their world. | |
| His whole theory is kind of on that, and that might be almost a different way. | |
| I don't know if that falls in the trends and forces category or not, but I kind of feel like we could fall into that category today as well. | |
| Yeah, that may be more into sort of it gets so complex that it's basically identical to random to some degree. | |
| Agreed. Maybe that's true. | |
| I mean, you do to some degree subscribe to the great man slash woman of history theory. | |
| So if that's the case, if you could go back and change one person's decision in history or one person's action or life in history, who would you go back to and what would you change? | |
| Well, I have to – you know, I would be very careful. | |
| I love those – you know, we talked about the time machine a second ago. | |
| I love those science fiction themes where someone goes back in time and then they step on a flower or something and they change the whole rest of world history. | |
| So I think I would be a little too careful. | |
| I'm a little too cautious. | |
| I'm a conservative person when it comes to time travel, I guess you could say. | |
| And I would be very careful about getting rid of people because it's like if you get rid of an Adolf Hitler, what do you end up with? | |
| I mean I would have to assume that would be better. | |
| But get rid of an Alexander the Great and what happens. | |
| Get rid of – you could go back to like a Karl Marx might be a perfect example. | |
| You get rid of a Karl Marx and how does that change things? | |
| Does history just create a new Karl Marx to fill that vacuum? | |
| But see, that would be an interesting experiment, right? | |
| Is it just like a rock in a river? | |
| You pull it up and the river just fills it in, right? | |
| I mean, do you change anything fundamentally? | |
| I mean, I'm not sort of talking about bumping people off. | |
| Just, you know, I don't know, slowly massage Karl Marx's aching feet with the hot oil of Adam Smith's free market theories until he comes to his senses. | |
| That may be... And then does somebody else, you know, Karl Marx II with an even bigger Old Testament beard show up? | |
| Or does it change the course, right? | |
| I mean, are these people just filling up the vacuums pulled forward by history? | |
| Or are they actually getting behind the wheel of history and pushing it forward? | |
| It would be an interesting experiment, right? | |
| I mean, if you got Hitler into Freud's office or something and got him to resolve his issues, of which I'm sure there were quite a few, would Hitler, Mark II, simply stride down the street in his place? | |
| I mean, it would be kind of a fascinating experiment to see. | |
| It wouldn't be conclusive, but it would certainly be interesting. | |
| No, that was what I was thinking too, is if you could have a laboratory and you could play with history like it was science, and you could take a person out of the equation and just watch. | |
| I always view the different, what was it, Back to the Future, one of those time travel movies, talked about there being various different shades of your reality. | |
| You could have all these different – I guess you would call them alternative realities or planes of existence. | |
| And in one, Hitler dies and the world goes off on a different course. | |
| And in another, Hitler lives and the world goes off on a different course than that. | |
| And you mentioned Hitler like on the psychiatrist chair. | |
| I have these dreams sometimes, and I think this is what my mother-in-law was talking about, all these weird things I think about. | |
| But I have these dreams of being able to go back in time and tell world leaders how things are going to turn out. | |
| If they do this or that. | |
| And then see what they do. | |
| Or do they follow my advice? | |
| Do they tell me to get out? | |
| Or am I just misunderstanding? If you go to Churchill and talk about what's going to happen with Great Britain if they don't – if they even participate in the Second World War, do they do that? | |
| Or what was the line – Neil Ferguson had that great line that got him in so much trouble when he said that Great Britain should not have been involved in the First World War and the whole world would be better now. | |
| What an amazing thought to play with. | |
| I love those kind of things. | |
| Or at least go to that stupid railway car in France and say, listen, dudes, take some of the eye for an eye out of the Versailles Treaty. | |
| It's really not going to do too well to the German middle class. | |
| And you kind of need them to keep the radical elements at bay. | |
| And, you know, but they wouldn't listen. | |
| You say, hey, I'm a bald guy from the future. | |
| Listen to me. I mean, you just get locked up. | |
| I do think that's what would happen. | |
| And I think probably because if you go back and you read like Versailles, a perfect example, there were people at the time who said, this is going to really be bad. | |
| And there were a lot of people who looked at a lot of money coming from German reparations and a lot of other things that said, when's it going to be bad? | |
| Is it going to be bad in my lifetime or after my lifetime? | |
| I think you're right. I think that would be the really frustrating part of time travel is finding out you can't really change very much, even if you step on that flower that changes the world. | |
| Well, I mean, and certainly after America got into the First World War, pushing the balance of power so much on the side of the Allies, that's why they were able to impose this brutal treaty. | |
| And once the Allies had that upper hand, there is no way that democratic politicians were going to not impose a punitive punishment on Germany because... | |
| So many people had lost, you know, in my ancestors, four or five men from a single generation just all got wiped out in the Somme. | |
| And so many people had lost so many lives that it would be almost impossible to take the, hey, let's all go home and just have the lions the way they were before, because then everybody would say, well, what the hell was all that for? | |
| And they'd vote those people out and maybe even charge them with something. | |
| So they kind of had to bring the hammer of Thor down just to satisfy people's lust for vengeance for everyone they'd lost. | |
| No, I agree with that, and I think it's great that you bring up the First World War, too, because I think the First World War is so important to understanding everything that's going on today. | |
| I mean, I think, and this is another great game, I think, for people to play, is, you know, pretend you're looking at our times now, 100 or 200 or, God forbid, 1,000 years from now. | |
| Yeah. This whole period we're living in now to me, as time compresses and gets shorter to the modern viewer years from now, this all looks like we're shaking out the contradictions and the wrinkles left over from the First World War and the demise of colonialism and the slow killing of the colonial powers like Britain and France economically. | |
| I mean the stuff we're watching in the Middle East now, all that seems to me to be related to the First World War. | |
| Well, yeah, I mean, there's the domino theory that comes out of, to mention the US again, right? | |
| The US comes into the First World War in 1917, provides so many resources to the Allies that Germany ships Lenin off with arms and weapons to Russia, where he ferments a revolution. | |
| If you didn't have the revolution in 1917, I guess first the Mensheviks, then the Bolsheviks won in Russia, it seems very unlikely that you would have had... | |
| The Chinese revolution under Mao. | |
| And therefore you would have had two major entities not turning communist in the 20th century. | |
| The ramifications of that are still shaking out as these countries try to wake up from this disastrous century of genocide and self-slaughter. | |
| So, yeah, I mean, really, the entire 20th century is entirely shaped by the First World War. | |
| And the First World War wiped out, and it's interesting, almost to the dollar, all of the wealth that had been created through the Industrial Revolution. | |
| It's almost like, I mean, I listened to your podcast on psychohistory. | |
| DeMoss and his crew would say that it was kind of a growth anxiety that... | |
| There was too much plenty and we had to wipe it out because we felt anxious in the same way that people get really depressed when they win the lottery. | |
| So, yeah, the whole 20th century, I think you're right, was still shaking out so much of what happened out of the First World War, which was not expected, not anticipated, not stopped even when it went on so long and created so many distortions in the post-war period that are still being ironed out to this day. | |
| Neil Ferguson said just what you did. | |
| He goes, imagine no communism in Russia. | |
| Imagine no Nazism in Germany. | |
| Imagine no communism in China. | |
| What a different world we have today. | |
| He said if Great Britain doesn't enter the First World War, he goes, you have the Franco-Prussian War Part 2. | |
| And he goes, and then it's done. | |
| I found it's an interesting theory, and it's fun to see how many dominoes can fall off a single event. | |
| I mean, even look at the situation we have here in the United States today, all this talk about resurrecting the 1917 Espionage and Sedition Acts and all these things, which are all a part of America's involvement in the First World War. | |
| I mean, you talk about a major... | |
| I mean, looking back at the Espionage and Sedition Acts for me is like looking back and seeing the internment of Japanese Americans in the Second World War. | |
| You look back and you say, wow, we must have freaked out. | |
| That was a really dumb decision. | |
| We'd never make a mistake like that today. | |
| And then all of a sudden, boom, people are going, well, isn't that old 1917 law still on the books? | |
| Couldn't we resurrect that? | |
| The First World War is still casting – it's funny. | |
| Bismarck is still casting his shadow on all of us today. | |
| Well, including the public school educational system. | |
| But just imagine, imagine this. | |
| Gosh, I mean, this is a, I mean, it could be a utopian fantasy, but just imagine if the growth rates currently being experienced in China had occurred a century ago, or even half a century ago, or what's going on in India where like 50,000 people a day are coming out of poverty. | |
| If that had occurred, you know, prior to partition and prior to the somewhat ignomious exit of England from India after the Second World War, India after the Second World War. | |
| If the wealth that had been created from the Industrial Revolution had not been so thoroughly destroyed in the First World War, if a third or a half of the world hadn't been lost to totalitarianism as a result of the First World War and the Second World War, we'd be very unlikely to have had an income tax increase. | |
| If the growth in the economy in the Western powers had continued, At the 4, 5, 6, 7% without the interruptions of wars and depressions and all of that, I mean, we'd be 10 to 20 to 30 times wealthier. | |
| I mean, the world would be a paradise. | |
| We'd not have any poverty. | |
| I mean, the number of missed opportunities for human salvation in the 20th century is, I mean, to even get 1% of them is to break your heart into a thousand pieces. | |
| Well, and you can look at the First World War, and many people do, as the first – as ending the first great era of globalization. | |
| And you're right. Had that not happened, you would have – I mean you've got me now thinking of all the dominoes. | |
| I mean you mentioned losing so many ancestors at the Somme. | |
| Think of the many millions of Europeans that would not have been killed. | |
| I mean, the First World War is really – they're going to look back in the future and they're going to see that as a crucible moment in the history of what we used to call the West. | |
| These uprisings in Egypt now, I mean, this is Lawrence of Arabia-type stuff in terms of the people in that era thinking that they were going to have real freedom in 1918 and having it put off. | |
| I mean, this is like putting the boiling pot lid back on as hard as we can, and now it's blowing off because it's been on there so long. | |
| It'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out. | |
| I mean, we just got rid of communism, which was another, as you pointed out, leftover holdover of this. | |
| It's going to be interesting, too, I think, to see how the democracies of the world, which have been built up militarily for a very long time now, are able to either shed some of that and return to what they called in 1918 normalcy, or we're so hooked Well, | |
| I mean, the Western governments have significant problems with democracies in the Middle East and in North Africa because they have so many established trading and diplomacy relationships with the existing dictatorships, and we have such a desperate need for oil at all times and at all costs. | |
| That we don't particularly like it when nationalistic, pro-democratic movements get into power because those movements tend to do somewhat unpleasant things to us like nationalize oil industries or raise the price or try and get more of the oil revenues for their people. | |
| So, you know, I hate to use the collective, but we are not such big fans of self-directed, populist-driven movements over where the resources are that we need to get a hold of, any more than England was a big fan of Gandhi. | |
| Well, it's funny you say that. | |
| I printed out a piece from the German magazine Build, and they said about the Egyptian situation, I'm quoting here, we have reason to be worried. | |
| Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians or more want a different kind of freedom from the freedom we mean. | |
| They want to be free to turn... | |
| They want to be free to turn their country into a fundamentalist theocracy. | |
| They want the freedom to declare Israel as an enemy again after decades of peace. | |
| They want the freedom to tear down the solid bridges to America. | |
| That cannot be in our interest. | |
| We need... Go ahead. | |
| I think that Germans... | |
| Well, I don't know. Are they in a position to start talking about the freedom of others? | |
| Maybe yes, by now. But it's an interesting, open way to put it, though. | |
| Yeah, but what I find fascinating, Dan, is the idea that the average guy on the street in Egypt who hasn't eaten in four days and who has been suffering under this 32-year brutal regime of Mubarak, I can guarantee you that he is not being driven by a hatred of Israel, but a desire for carbs and sugar. | |
| And a desire to breathe some sort of free air before he dies. | |
| His major focus is not the imposition of Islam or, you know, lobbing grenades over into Israel. | |
| His main focus is just to get the boot of the state off his neck because he's got nothing to eat. | |
| The idea that it's being driven by some abstract anti-Semitism to me is deranged. | |
| It just means people have not had much exposure to people in those kinds of desperate situations. | |
| It reminds me when Bill Clinton gave a speech when he was president and said, yes, we have freedom, but it's got to be responsible freedom. | |
| And you turn around and you go, well, whose definition of responsibility are we talking about? | |
| I mean, once you say that, it could be – I mean, they had freedom in Nazi Germany, too, as long as it was responsible freedom. | |
| Well, and there are, I guess, probably some people in the world I would take lectures on responsibility from. | |
| I don't really think that Bill Clinton would be very high on that list. | |
| You'd have to show me the politician that could give us a lesson in that. | |
| I mean, you know, he did pretty awful things to his interns, not least of which he also lobbed bombs into Sudan and destroyed an aspirin factory. | |
| I mean, there are things that this man did without repercussions, got involved in Kosovo in some very negative ways, ran up debts. | |
| And I mean, the idea that Bill Clinton's going to lecture me on responsibility is just kind of funny. | |
| But I mean, I can understand that, you know, people find that sort of stuff believable as long as you don't look at the person, but rather just listen to the rhetoric. | |
| It depends on the definition of responsibility. | |
| Is, is, is. | |
| Yes, yes. Well, what have you got coming up in your show that my listeners should check out? | |
| Other than everything, of course, but what's coming up for you in the near future? | |
| Well, as you, another podcaster, will understand how overwhelmed you could be when you have a good idea and you sit down and you start a podcast on it, then the idea takes over everything and you're not in charge anymore. | |
| The possession theory of public broadcasting. | |
| That's exact. And I have to follow this Roman road we've started down We're good to go. | |
| That's just fun. I mean, you don't hear that stuff, and I don't necessarily buy into any of these things we talk about. | |
| What I'm trying to expose people to are the kinds of weird kinds of conversations we had as history majors, and the idea of, you know, how is history affected by how parents raise their children, I thought was just a fascinating question. | |
| So I want to get back to more of that stuff, and it's nice to have the narrative histories like the thing we did on the Eastern Front and all that, but I'd like that to be more the aberration and the fun little weird questioning shows to be more And I would, you know, just by the by, Demas is a great interview subject. | |
| He's been on my show a couple of times. | |
| I've actually, and if you're interested in more sort of background, I'm reading a book that he's producing at the moment. | |
| I'm reading as an audiobook. | |
| It's called The Origins of War in Child Abuse. | |
| It's available on my website at freedomainradio.com forward slash free. | |
| It's free for anybody to look at a PDF or listen to an audiobook. | |
| It's a fascinating book. That was a really... | |
| It's hard to say, but... | |
| It's a controversial show. A lot of people were angry with that. | |
| But again, it's why we say either parents have an impact on children when they grow up or they don't. | |
| And if it's a whole society that does things that we would consider to be abusive, does that impact the population itself? | |
| Like I said, the questions and the wonderful little eddies mentally we were able to travel down was a ton of fun. | |
| I'd love to do more of that. Well, if you want to just give out your website once more, I really do appreciate it. | |
| It's a very thoroughly enjoyable and engaging chat. | |
| And maybe we can rope together some other people for... | |
| I'd love to do a roundtable about if you're interested in lessons in the near future based on examples from the distant past. | |
| I think that would be interesting because, I mean, you know, they say that if you don't learn from your history, you're condemned to repeat it. | |
| I think that people like you and I who've tried to simmer in the slow broth of at least Western history for many years could maybe offer some insights into what historical patterns may be And I certainly think there's a lot of interest. | |
| People do sense, based on the socioeconomic problems and the debt and so on in the Western world, that we are poised before a chasm of significant change. | |
| It may be fun to get a couple of people together and just do a roundtable on what lessons of history we think might play out in the near future. | |
| Well, let me suggest something on that because I think that's a great point. | |
| I always watch these media shows – and to get back to what Chris Hedge has said about how you have to be within a certain narrow band of thought to be included in these programs. | |
| But you'll turn on a major media outlet like CNN, and they'll have a roundtable of people, David Gergen, a bunch of rehashed old people whose opinions are – I mean the same ones we've heard for 40 or 50 years – How interesting would it be to have eight or nine people who make their living doing stuff on the internet like we do and then compare and contrast what our group think came up with compared to what their group think came up with? | |
| I would just love to see it from an experimental standpoint. | |
| And the great thing about doing stuff about the near future is you can actually test it. | |
| If I say, here's what's going to happen in 50 years, I mean, who's ever going to check and test it? | |
| But if we say, here's what's going to happen over the next 6 to 12 months based on what's occurred in the past, that's a little bit more testable. | |
| And I kind of like going out on a limb with those predictions. | |
| I do too. I do too. | |
| Yes, I agree with you. Well, get on that, would you, Stefan? | |
| I'm all over it, baby. We'll set it up. | |
| And yeah, thanks again. It's dancarlin.com and the show is Hardcore History. | |
| It's highly recommended. Thank you so much, Dan. | |
| I really do appreciate your time and have yourself a great day. | |
| It was nice of you to have me. | |
| Thank you. I enjoyed the stimulating conversation. |