Angry Planet - What makes a historical arsonist?

Episode Date: November 3, 2015

The host of the Hardcore History podcast joins War College to discuss some of the most powerful figures in history - men and women who burned down the world they were born into and -- many generations later -- are sometimes credited with laying the foundation for progress. But that doesn't mean that's what the arsonist set out to do, or that the people in their way were happy to pay the price.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. It's tempting to think that anything that moved us along and got us closer to our current reality is progress. But we have nothing to compare it to. We took the fork in the road and anything that got us.

to that fork in the road is positive, but what if the fork in the road that we're on isn't as good as the fork in the road we could have been on? This week on War College, we're talking about historical arsonists. These are the people who set the world on fire, often literally, and they plant the seeds for the world that we live in today, for better or worse. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front line. Here's your host, Jason Fields.

Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters' opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Born. We're very excited to be talking to Dan Carlin. He's the host of the popular podcasts, hardcore history, and common sense. We'll be discussing a concept he's brought forth to the world, historical arsonists. Dan, thanks for joining us. I appreciate you guys having me.

Thanks. So can you start off by just explaining what a historical arsonist is? Well, if I'm going to take credit for anything, I might have come up with the name, but the concept goes way back, this idea, and it's a construct. It's a way of looking at history that sometimes you get these amazing historical figures who seem to almost burn down the world they're born into. And then you'll have some historians down the road say, well, this was actually a good thing, because it was like a lot of dead wood in a forest that needed to be burned down for a new world. world to grow and make progress afterwards. Like I said, it's more of a construct and trying to put things in nice little historical boxes when you're writing about it afterwards. But I may be the first person who called them historical arsonists. Some of the people who get the title, so to speak, they're not nice people necessarily, right? Most of them aren't nice people, I don't think.

Well, it's awful hard to burn down an old world and do it in a very nice and easy way. And even people who don't really have horrible reputations, like a Napoleon, who has a horrible reputation among some, but in general is not considered to be an evil figure. Listen, if you're on the receiving end of Napoleon burning down your historical forest, it's not going to be pleasant no matter how great the benefits were to civilization afterwards. Yeah, I mean, so another person you mentioned specifically was Alexander the Great. That was one of your early shows. Was he a better or worse person than Hitler? If I'm not phrasing that right, you tell me. It's a strange concept, and it was more of an examination of my own reaction to some work that had been done on Alexander by an Australian professor named A.B. Bosworth.

And Bosworth does what you need these history people to do sometimes to sort of slap you upside the head while you're enjoying reading about these exploits of a guy like Alexander the Great, who's a seductive historical figure. I mean, the stories are legendary. You can really get into this idea of Alexander as a philosopher king with all these pithy sayings and all these other wonderful things. And a guy like A. B. Bosworth, I remember reading his books, and he's constantly trying to remind you of what Alexander must have looked like for the people on the receiving end. And I remember thinking to myself, so if Alexander was considered by, say, Greek folks, because remember Alexander, by some Greeks was not considered to be Greek, he was Macedonian.

And so if they could consider him to be such a negative, force, how did we start thinking of him as a positive one? And if that happened with Alexander, could it happen to people that we consider to be, you know, 100% negative forces today? I mean, in 500 or 1,000 years, are there going to be people talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure Hitler was evil, but look at how he opened up the opportunities for a post-second World War world, blah, blah, blah. And so it was more examining my own reaction to, you know, having to come to grips with how a historical figure's reputation could change over time and change with the perceptions of the people looking back on them.

And then actually, that's an idea that you've since followed up looking at, for example, Genghis Khan, which I thought was absolutely fascinating. I mean, the scale of how much he changed the world, could you just tell me, tell us, a little bit of what you found the most interesting about him? Well, I'm fascinated with all these people. You know, and in a sense, I was trying to figure out why, and maybe there's, this is probably a bad comparison, but maybe not with some of these guys. It's almost the same way you can become fascinated with a serial killer or something like that where you look at people and you wonder how they get to be the way they are. And then like, like if you look at a guy like Hitler, but I think Napoleon falls in the same category, Alexander, a ton of these other people, you wonder where the self-confidence comes from or the ego that will allow you to think you should.

I mean, I try to get your mind around, is it megalomania or are they sociopaths? I mean, there's a lot of different ways you can look at this. And it may be different historical arsonist to historical arsonist. But in the case of a guy like Jenghis Khan, there's no way to get around the idea that this is a very interesting special human being. We don't know enough about him personally to know what specific qualities. If you could have him in front of you, you could say, wow, well, he's really good at mathematical calculation on the fly or whatever the specific traits that. the specific traits that made him able to do what he did. And it's also this combination, this interaction between the superior, interesting individuals,

and the situations they're born in, right? I mean, you can't have an Alexander the Greater or Jenghis Khan do what they do if the stage isn't sort of set. So to get back to the historical arsonousin, this sort of analogy, the wood has to be dry and it has to be soaked with gasoline, and then the right person has to come along to set that on fire. so it's an interaction between those two things. Something that Jason and I have talked about a little bit, and I was wondering if you could comment on to change tracks just a little bit,

is do you think that people can be historical arsonists purely through the power of an idea, say somebody like Martin Luther? Absolutely. I mean, it depends on how we define the term, but I certainly think about it that way. I think anybody who mows down the old world, and that can be a physical old world, or it can be a conceptual one, you could make the same case for people who are inventive and do so through inventions that change

everything. I mean, I love that line from Henry Ford, I think he said, you know, if I'd have left it to the audience or the consumers to decide what they wanted, they would have had a better horse. I mean, sometimes these people have to think outside the box to such a degree that they can destroy the old paradigm. Today we call that disruptive technology. It's interesting to think of disruptive technology and then consider someone like Alexander the Greater Jenghis Khan just another form of maybe, you know, political disruptive technology, if you will. Right. And that makes a lot of sense. And it also sort of goes in line. I was thinking about other figures who are just purely famous for mass murder. So let's say like Paul Pot,

he may have killed a million people, but he doesn't necessarily meet the criteria of the historical arsonist, right? I mean, he's not changing the world. At least it doesn't seem like that to me. Well, for the criteria, as we had set it up for the shows you're referring to, we had said that it can't just be somebody who burns things down. It has to be something that is a prelude to an improvement eventually. Now, that might not have been in that person's mind. They may not have been thinking, I'm killing all these Persians while I invade their territory because I'll make a better world out of it. But that may be the end result. In other words, you know, when you look at, for example, the First World War and you look at the destruction of the centuries-old empires that sort of had

a stranglehold on the great power system in Europe, and then you look at literally, months afterwards and the entire, you know, map has been changed and reset and we are poised for an entirely new century and everything seems almost like it's been a reset. That to me is an important construct. So you could have had all those people die in the First World War and ended up, you know, had you had some sort of negotiated settlement with all those states still in place and the entire system looking pretty darn similar. And then you wouldn't have had a forest burned down to make room for new saplings to grow. you would have just had a lot of death and destruction and a roughly comparable situation afterwards.

Take the violence out of it. You get, I mean, Martin Luther, of course, did lead to, I mean, the wars of religion. I think we're among some of the most bloody that whoever fought, right? But, I mean, then maybe we have Steve Jobs. I mean, is that sort of out of left field? I mean, has he changed the world dramatically? Well, and then it's a judgment call, isn't it, on whether or not it's actually more positive? I think as we look back on things, you know, regular people and historians,

it's tempting to think that anything that moved us along and got us closer to our current reality is progress. But we have nothing to compare it to. We took the fork in the road and anything that got us to that fork in the road is positive. But what if the fork in the road that we're on isn't as good as the fork in the road we could have been on? Then maybe we didn't end up in a better world. And then maybe the people that got us down to this fork in the road are not a positive development, but a negative development. and they steered us down the wrong path.

And sometimes these people who are thought of as historical arsonists kind of feel that too, right? Like I think going back to Martin Luther, he disavowed some of the, like he wanted a Catholic Reformation, right? He didn't want a Protestant Reformation. Well, I think that's part of what makes these people so fascinating to me is, you know, I had mentioned earlier about, you know, it's almost like the Hutzpah to think that they could rule the world or the hutspah to think that they could be the great conqueror. I mean, who the heck has an ego like that? At the same time, and I'd love for somebody, and maybe they've done it, to do a study where you compare the personality traits of a bunch of these figures and look for similarities, a lot of them seem to have this belief in their own destiny. I think you could call it like a quasi-religious belief, but maybe they need something like that to sweep away any sense of doubt or, you know, hesitation or the kind of things that would keep normal people like us from feeling so confident we could just say, absolutely invade Russia. I'm sure it's the right thing to do.

I mean, you have to have a certain amount of just self-confidence or whatever or delusion or whatever. I mean, that's partly what fascinates me about all of these people. They've all got something. I don't know if it's positive. I don't know if it's negative. I don't know if it manifests differently in people that that try to do good things as opposed to people that know they're doing bad things. I think we need some character studies and some psychoanalytical work with these people in the couch to figure that out. It feels like we're talking about vision.

Like these are people that had a very clear vision of what they thought the world could be. And were willing on top of it, they had the ego, like you say, and the Hutzpah, to move forward and not ask too many questions of themselves. You know, I think that's a pretty blanket statement because I think there's going to be a lot of variety between people. And there's a difference between, and I was talking about this with somebody the other day, it's so hard to get into the minds of these people because there's a lot of for example, we were talking about conquerors. So let me stick with conquerors for a second. Seems to me there's a couple of different kinds. There's the kind that consciously decide that this is what they want to do.

I want to take over all of Europe or I want to do this. And then there's the kind that through, you know, all sorts of individual variables and situations. Well, I ended up in a war with Poland and then, you know, we got Poland when we won. And then something else happened. So I ended up in a war with Austria and we took Austria. So in other words, not the accidental conquerors, if you were, but people who ended up with a similar outcome, but it was never part of their goal to do that. And then the people that consciously said, I'm going to create the Third Reich,

or I'm going to create the, you know, the recreation of the Roman Empire or whatever these grand ideas might be. Well, and that's interesting because you, I mean, just thinking about Caesar, I mean, you know, the Roman motto was that they acquired all of their territory in defensive wars, right? They never once launched an invasion. It's funny you bring that up because we were just talking about greatness. and the qualities that make individuals and all that. Caesar is a fantastic example to use.

You know, the Roman system almost had a capitalistic carrots and sticks sort of incentive, disincentive system for the most ruthless, the most gifted, to rise to the top. It was very competitive like a giant king of the mountain game. And the people that got to the top were a lot of times really formidable human being. Caesar was kind of a genius. He used to be able to dictate multiple letters at the same time. He was always in motion.

He may have been epileptic. He just, when you read about his human ability, you know, you combine the brilliance and the artistic nature that you don't tend to find in somebody who was also a doer and a pusher of the envelope and remarkably energetic. He's got a lot of qualities you don't find in the same individual. So it doesn't surprise one to see somebody like a Caesar. You mentioned Steve Jobs. It doesn't surprise people, once they learn a little about the guy, that he did as well as he did. he seemed to have the proper traits in place to succeed at what he was doing. Some of these guys are much more problematic where you just go, who would have seen

Joseph Stalin, for example, ending up where he ended up? And then you have these people, Jenghis Khan's a great example, but maybe even Alexander, where you just don't have enough hard evidence on them one way or another to figure it out. I mean, Jenghis Khan, they don't even know what he looked like. Yeah, yeah, and they don't know where he's buried either. No, you don't. They'll find that one day, I bet, because I bet it's going to be. large.

There was, yeah, there were horrible stories about what happened to the people who knew where he was buried, right? Those are traditional, though. They do those in a lot of places. In Shang Dynasty, China, they used to put the emperor when he was put in the ground. They'd put all his servants and concubines and all kinds of things. I mean, it was a mass killing affair just burying an emperor in some of these places. If you don't mind going back to Caesar for a minute, it's hard not to, for me, not to fall in

love with him. And then at the same time, then you find out just how many people died in Gaul. And it's fascinating to see this man who, as you said, I mean, dictate two letters at once. He could actually read without his lips moving, which sounded, I mean, it doesn't sound like anything to a modern day person, but there was no punctuation in Roman letters. And it was actually really hard to read. I mean, when you look at documents. And he, you know, he could just read right off out loud. I mean, anyway, there are a million different things about him. But then when you see, I mean, just the destruction in his path, I don't know. I guess it sort of goes to with me, it must have been this belief in his destiny, right? This is a problem, especially when you

get to recent histories. And, you know, I'm fascinated with this. And you mentioned the first episode of hardcore history we ever did, where I'm basically still addressing and examining this issue about this dichotomy. And the dichotomy is how can we judge people from a completely different culture and a completely different time in any sort of way that makes sense to us, right? Because, and historians will say this all the time, won't they? Of which I am not one. Let's stress that. But they'll say, listen, you cannot judge people by modern standards. It's not fair to them. I mean, you look at Teddy Roosevelt, who seems to live in a relatively modern time. And then you'll hear people say, well, we shouldn't celebrate him because he was this or that or the

other thing. And you say, yes, but if you take him from his own time, he's actually quite, I mean, one of the knocks on him is that he's he's a racist they'll say and you say but wait a minute but by his own standards of his own time he was considered very progressive on race so you have to sort of grade on a curve i guess you could say but this is where i always get to hitler and i can't help it because if if there's a hitler and if he's this uniquely evil figure which i think he is certainly there were hitlers and people just as bad in other time periods but if once you get past a certain point in time, you can no longer judge them. They have to become value neutral because the culture's so different. Well, then isn't that going to happen to Hitler sometime? Are we pretending he's the only

figure in all human history we won't do that with? In which case, you know, I'm talking about something now. I can't let you know what it is, but we're talking about a situation where you look back and you think the people in this era felt really strongly that there was some really bad person. But if you look back on that person now, historians will say, well, you can't judge them. You're using modern standards. Yes, but the people back then judged them. They judged them the way, I mean, it's a little like, it's a little like saying that down the road, 500 or 1,000 years from now, we won't accept, you know, what Jews had to say about Hitler because they're biased. You know, and that's sometimes what it sounds like people from the past will say about

these other people. Well, you can't, you can't decide what the Greeks would think of Alexander. They were terribly anti-macadonian. Yes, but we could understand why that might be if we look at how the Jews might be terribly anti-Nazi. You know, I mean, there's a logical understanding thing that tends to go away as the emotions from those time periods fade. I mean, what's going to happen when we no longer not only have no Holocaust victims, but no people alive who knew any Holocaust victims? How many generations till that pain is washed away and people are looking at people that we

consider to be evil personified and they look at them without the same emotion and would say something to us like, well, you know, you're really. little too close to it. Well, gee, are you going to get a good impression of Hitler if you take the evil out? Seems to me something key will be missing. You know, what you're saying about the context, I think another aspect of it is just simply what we don't know. I wrote a novel which, you know, sold many fewer copies than people who are actually hearing my voice, and that is depressing. Part of the motivation was there are so few survivors left. And things do become legend pretty quickly, right? And pretty soon, and there are any people who don't believe that

the Holocaust even happened. Right. We're already fighting over what those legends are going to be. Like, those fights are happening now. And we're shaping what our history is going to be. Well, let's ask a different question. How would it look if the other side had won the Second World War and we're writing the histories? How do you put the positive spin on the Holocaust? Maybe that's a historical arsonist. We had to burn down all the Jews to have a Jew-free world and isn't it great now? I can't even think. But I think that's what makes these people fascinating to us. How foreign a mindset is that? And again, it's, you know, there's nothing good about serial killers, but you could pick up a book on serial killers and become engrossed because they seem

almost like they're another species. And sometimes these historical arsonists, either on the positive side, when you look at Alexander the Great and he looks like some philosopher king, depending on whose work you're reading, or the completely negative side with a Stalin or a Hitler. Hitler, they, they just are, there's a reason that just putting a swastika on a book cover will increase the sales of the book because we're fascinated with monsters. We're fascinated with extremes, extremely good, extremely bad, extremely talented and successful, the Alexander's and the Steve Jobses, or extremely malevolent and awful like the Hitler's and the John Wayne Gaseys.

I know you're not, you know, you are not a historian, but what do you do to try to approach the truth? I mean, how do you, what kind, is it just a matter of the questions you ask or is it the place that you ask those questions? Oh, gosh, I think you'd have to ask the audience for that because I don't think I do the best job of it sometimes. I think, first of all, it's, it's trying to come up. We always, you know, there's an idea like the Roshaman way of looking at things to look at, I describe it to people. More people will know this, this analogy than the Roshamon one. There was a Gilligan's Island episode once where at the beginning of the episode, they show some incident.

and then the rest of the episode, you get to hear each person on the island's personal viewpoint of how that episode played out and everybody's got a different viewpoint. That's what's fun to do with history if you have enough sources to say, okay, here's from this viewpoint, here's from that viewpoint. And they're all biased, but as you put them together, you begin to construct a bit of a mosaic that has multiple shades, none of which might be true, but gives you a more multi-layered ability to sort of pick and choose and go, I see a little bit of this. or I think I see a little bit of that.

It's not as good as having one person telling you the God's honest, you know, confirmable truth. But when you go back to these periods where everything is shaded and hard to figure and hearsay, the more sources you can find the better. And also I think there's a part of this that's Socratic, asking the kinds of questions we've been talking about here. Do you get any insight into these things when you wonder about, you know, why can Alexander not be seen as a Hitler today?

Is it just the time has passed or are they fundamentally different? And I think sometimes you stumble towards the beginnings of better questions. Maybe that's better than saying answers. The beginnings of better questions when you begin to dial it down, Socratic style and try to get to the root of some of these ideas and controversies and differences in the ways of looking at things over time. How many episodes have you done so far of your show? I think we're on number 56 of the history show.

That actually somehow makes me feel. I don't know how I just, you know, because it feels like you go months in between releasing episodes, which I know you hear about all the time. Well, they are a lot more intense than they used to be. I used to be able to walk in here and do an episode in a session. Now I'm lucky if I do a tiny little piece in a session. So part of it is sometimes I worry about the people today getting one of our old shows and thinking, what the heck happened here? I wanted my four-hour show and I got a 30-minute or a 20-minute. you know, a mental thought.

Yeah, that's, okay, yeah. So just in case people don't know, your show, let's say you did six episodes on World War I because of the anniversary of World War I, right? 100th anniversary. And the shortest one was about three and a half hours? I actually do not know the answer to the question. I just know that I heard from people after the sixth episode, which is, I don't know how many hours, 18, 19 hours of content, who said it seemed a little rushed at the end.

You seemed to really just try to squeeze it all in and get out of there fast. No, but it's it, I mean, I guess the reason why I was so enthusiastic to have you on this show is just because somehow you managed to make a four and a half hour episode enjoyable. You know, I mean, you just sort of bookmark it and you go back to it. That's nice of you to say, we'll see if we can keep that up. That's always the real pressure around here because eventually we're going to fall on our face and someone's going to go, that was the worst four hours of my life and you owe it back to me. Okay. So, well, let's just ask you, I think probably the most serious question that we have here is, I mean, do you see any historical arsonists working now?

I mean, anywhere in the world? Hmm. You know, this may be. a perspective thing. You don't know how things are going to turn out. This is why they always say journalism is the first draft of history. And then at some point, journalism gives way to people trying to write about recent events. And, you know, I'd love to have talked to some people who would know better than I would, when they would consider it safe to begin writing the very early histories of something. But depending on how this whole war on terror thing's going to turn out,

wouldn't it be interesting if people like Osama bin Laden? And, ended up causing changes. I mean, look at what I constantly, you know, so usually when I'm at the airport and I'm taking my shoes and belt off and everything like that, I'll look around and think to myself, somewhere Osama bin Laden's laughing about this. Look at what one guy, you know, with a lot of money and contacts and all, but look at what he was able to do in terms of changing our world against our will. And you say to yourself, this reminds you that, you know, these historical arsonists or these people who push history are not always pushing it in a direction that we'd like to see go, but you may have to acknowledge their impact. I mean, if there's no 9-11, what's the security

like at the airports today? What's the homeland? Is there a homeland security department at all? Is the United States on the current course of action we're on? Are we in Afghanistan, Iraq? So how much of this has to do with a historical arsonist who might have been, you know, the main cog in knocking down a few buildings on 9-11? So in that sense, maybe sometimes looking at the people we dislike the most is the best way to find some of these people who are moving and shaking things, especially when they're impacting a country like the United States that is so dominant and so, so important on the world stage, to affect us at this point in time is to affect the world.

So if you can change us, you can change the world. I'd say he changed us. What's the line, history is a nightmare that we're constantly waking up from? Or the autobiography of a madman. I like that one. It's the tradeoffs of civilization, right? You talked about the Romans who create a wasteland and call it peace. But then everybody praises them for protecting the trade routes and allowing economics to flourish

and to have one currency system and all these kinds of things. We all benefited ourselves from those conquests and that damage because it helped create the modern world. But we didn't have to pay for it. The people that had to pay that bill were the ones in the path of Jenghis Khan's armies or Alexander the Great's armies or who were in the Twin Towers when they were knocked down. So those are the people who really should be asked whether or not this modern world that you played a role in creating is worth the bill you had to pay for it because we got it for free. That was Dan Carlin. His hardcore history podcast is available on iTunes or at Dancarlin.com.

As far as this podcast goes, we'd love to hear what you think. You can let us know on iTunes or SoundCloud or you can go to the Reuters page on Facebook. Thanks for listening. Next time on War College. The psychological devastation happening to all of these children for whom that level of violence is as common as, you know, for us walking down the street and seeing a taxi cab or something, is just terrifying.