Behind the Bastards - Part One: Alfredo Stroessner: The Luckiest Dictator

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

Robert is joined by James Stout to discuss Alfredo Stroessner.  (2 Part Series)  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell, on iHeart. Mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward, and I thought, what a wonderful way to do it with good friends across a tiny table and just have a heartfelt conversation. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up y'all, this is Questlove, and you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Umpink Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and creatives. People that we

feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down rabbit holes. Listen to the Questlove Supreme on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if the secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Like a hero, Sophie, I deal with all sorts of stresses that you can't

even imagine. Like the stress of writing an episode about Alfredo Stressner, the dictator of Paraguay. Boom! How's that? Also, the episode started like 20 seconds ago. Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. Well, we're doing great. That was perfect. That was such a good introduction. Yeah, I know you crushed it, mate. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. How are you doing, Sophie? You fucking suck. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where Sophie and I banter and then people on the subreddit decide whether or not it's problematic. The moral North Star that is a subreddit. What? I just think it's so, I just, the subreddit is so funny sometimes where they're like, aw, is everything okay there? It's like, yes, but also no. None of it's okay. Yeah.

I mean, the thing is, we love our fans and I appreciate that there's 55,000 people who want to talk about the show in a subreddit. That's kind of amazing. But at the same time, there's like a degree of all of these podcast episodes, everything we do. There's like a script. Today's script for this two-parter is 8,665 words. It's usually between 8 and 10,000 words. But also like a third of the runtime of any episode is just us talking and the amount of fine-toothed comb going over that people do of like a little jokes or like someone will misspeak or you'll transpose a couple of letters in a word. And then there's like 30 people talking about it. And it's like, guys, come on, man, we are recording a conversation. You know how those work.

We've already recorded several other conversations. We will make some gaffes. Yeah. Chill out. Come on, man. Chill out. God bless the people. I know. I love the subreddits, man. I keep in my heart the people who are like, just listening to this so they don't have to be alone with their thoughts while driving or vacuuming the house or, you know, shearing a goat, walking the dog. God bless all of you. God bless you. And God bless us, everyone. James Stout, welcome to the program. Thank you, Robert. And he's glad to be here. Yep. Amongst the goat shears. Amongst the goat shears. James, what do you know about Paraguay?

Relatively little, actually. It's not a big area of expertise for me, so I'm excited to learn. I'm going to venture to say it's not really an expertise for many people outside of Paraguay. This is not a country that gets talked about a lot. It's certainly not a country that like Americans talk about a lot. I had to like really aggressively go into the reading about this to learn much of anything just because like my life, the first 34 years of my life had not provided me with much information passively about the country of Paraguay. Now, Paraguay is, if you're like me and up until recently had not spent much time thinking about the country, is a lovely little landlocked nation bordered by Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina. And it is perhaps the most doomed

little country I've ever read about. Maybe Belgium, but they wound up dooming a lot of other people. And Paraguay never did that. So the subject for our episode today is another little, another dictator, Alfredo Stresner. And, you know, we got to go through some history before we talk about Stresner, because as a man himself, he's not the most like, he's not like Hitler or like Saddam, where his early life as dark as it is, is just this like wacky cavalcade of madness. Stresner is a guy who is an incredibly effective dictator. He might be the best at being a dictator of anybody we've covered on this show. But he's also the best at being a dictator, because he kind of locks into the perfect situation for a dictator. Paraguay is

almost like crafted over the course of about 150 years to be the ideal country to have a dictator like Stresner. I've never really encountered a situation like this in history. And it's fascinating as a result of that. But it all kind of comes back to the fact that Paraguay might kind of be cursed. They have a rough chunk of history after like the liberation from Spain. Like most of Latin America, Paraguay is founded as a Spanish colony in the early 16th century. And up until the last 20 years or so, it was not democratic in any meaningful way. One book that I read, Paraguay under Stresner by Paul Lewis, describes it as an unbroken sequence of dictatorships. Now, that is a nasty way to describe a political situation. It's also worth noting that when we're

talking about the 1800s, that's an accurate description for basically everywhere on earth. Like you could argue it's not that far off from describing the United States in that period, given the amount of people who are enslaved or otherwise disenfranchised. So Paraguay is not alone, you know, in the 1800s and having a bunch of dictatorships. Now, when the country achieved its independence from Spain in 1811, it left behind a obviously Spain, it could be a very brutal colonial master. But it didn't like do so in order to take on a more liberatory political system. The architect of their split from Spain, a guy named Dr. Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, wound up as dictator and that's probably not, was not surprising to that many people. He seems

to have been fairly popular. He spends 25 years in power, which is a substantial reign for a dictator. Stalin and Mao both only get like four years more than that. And those are kind of too famously, you know, and this is 1811, which makes it, I think, more impressive. Yeah, because people didn't live very long. Yeah. So he's in there a long time. And while he's in charge, you know, it is a dictatorship and he brutally purges, you know, any kind of opposition that attempts to form. But for most Paraguayans, it's a pretty peaceful and relatively positive time, especially compared to kind of the previous period. It's worth noting that his official title voted to him by the populace was El Supremo. So they could vote for his title, but not for

his right to be in charge. When I vote, put quotation marks in there. It's like a thing where they've got like a parliament or whatever or a Congress that's like, you know, is basically enthralled to the dictator and periodically he'll have it vote for things, you know, that's kind of the story of Paraguay for quite a while. I don't want to be judging this guy based on his appearance, but this man has a face like a spanked ass. I've never heard anyone describe that way. I think it'll come to you. Because that is, he's not a looker. Oh my God. You need to Google this man. His face does look like a spanked ass. There's no other way. If you put a nose on an ass, that would be his face. It's like the bottom

half of his face collapsed in on itself because he smelled something so unpleasant. Like it looks like he's powerful. His five head is really incredible. What a horrible portrait. I wonder if he killed the person who painted this. That would be okay. I'm just going to say it. Yeah. Having this portrait made of you, it justifies at least one murder. This person struck a powerful blow for democracy. So one of the fun things about Paraguayan dictators is that they all are named like Luchadors. So this guy is El Supremo, his successor, Carlos Antonio Lopez, who's also dictator for life, is El Excellentissimo. Oh, wow. Yeah, I know. These are some good names.

I'm going to be honest with you. He was like, yeah, we got to throw a fucking adjective up on that. Yeah, get that. We'll take it to the max. So if you look at Paraguay on a map, again, it is immediately obvious why the country has had such a tumultuous history. It is landlocked and it is surrounded by Brazil and Argentina, two countries that are famously not peaceful with their neighbors during the 1800s. Although it's Paraguay that's going to be starting shit with them. So the early 1800s are not a peaceful time in South America. And given the fact that Paraguay lacked any natural. So Paraguay is kind of geographically, you might think of them as the opposite of Switzerland. Switzerland is like such a natural fortress that even with very few people,

they could hold off armies many times their size. Paraguay has basically no natural defenses. Other than that, it's hot and there's lots of mosquitoes, which isn't nothing, but like anyone can kind of walk in there and cause problems. And so as a result, it's early dictators chose wisely to invest very heavily in the army. They're like, we're probably going to wind up getting our asses kicked if we don't do this. And by the time Carlos Lopez, that's L. Excellentissimo dies, his son, Francisco Solano Lopez, takes power. And at that point, the little country has a military that is larger and more well funded than one would expect from a country of that size. Unfortunately, Francisco Lopez is, he's going to take an ill advised year abroad to Europe.

It's actually more like 18 months when he's in his 20s. Now, a lot of people go on gap year and, you know, it's, yeah, go to some raves and yeah, be intolerable in Barcelona. Yeah, take some E briefly date a German girl who is has interesting opinions on the moon landing. You know, it's, it's, we all, we've all had good experiences on our gap year. Unfortunately, that is not the case with Francisco Lopez. Because so the, the, his equivalent of entering into an ill advised romantic relationship from someone he met at a rave is he hangs out with Emperor Napoleon III of France. Okay, friend of the pod. And so I'm going to quote from an article in the January 2013 issue of military heritage magazine here. He was taken particularly with

the glittering Marshall Splendor of the court of the French Emperor and Napoleon III returning home Lopez brought back with him several steamships to fill out the embryonic Paraguayan fleet, along with all the guns ammunition and gold braid that his deep pockets could purchase. He also brought back it's a, it's a bling that I'm yeah, he's, he's, he's getting blinged out. He also brought back a new mistress, an Irish adventurous named Eliza Lynch, who like many a gold digger before her catered to her meal tickets, outsized ego, recklessly encouraging his delusions of grandeur and dreams of imperial glory. Now I don't know how entirely fair it is to blame this Irish chick or like what happens next. But that's how that magazine put it.

Yeah, so I can't see military heritage being particularly woke on gender issues. Yeah, that is very likely. That said, she does come up in any write up you find of the guy. I think there's, there's a lot going on. I mean, he's a rich kid whose dad was the dictator and he goes to Europe is falls in love with these European armies and he builds himself a splendid little army based on the solid base that his dad has left him in 1857. He's made vice president of Paraguay and then in 1862, his dad dies in Francisco takes power and he from the beginning, he cannot give up kind of these, these dreams Napoleon had stoked of military excellence. He's a little bit like that doomed Habsburg who's going to get murdered in Mexico

right around this same time period. So this little military, very good military, his predecessors had built was adequate, very adequate to the task of defending Paraguay from intrusion by a neighbor. So he's, he's got this toy, like for him, for Lopez, this wonderful army that his predecessors built is like this big shiny toy and he spends like a couple of years outfitting it and getting it really set up. But he's, you know, the reasonable thing to do if you're Paraguay is just kind of try to keep being Paraguay, right, as opposed to starting a war with the neighbors who surround you and are all much larger. Lopez though, he wants to be a big continental power like France. And so in 1864, he decides to take that leap, you know, to throw

the iron dice. So Uruguay, which is, you know, pretty close is wracked by a sort of soft civil war at the time between two rival political parties. Again, neither of them is very democratic, but one of these parties is backed or one of these parties, which is like the party in power at the time is friendly with Lopez and Paraguay. Brazil backs the other party. And in this kind of internecine struggle, the party that Brazil is backing and arming wins. Lopez takes offense to this. He demands that Brazil stop giving military support to Uruguay. And Brazil is like, you guys are like a speed bump. We're Brazil, of course not. What do you think we're going to listen to you? They are much bigger. So he makes a questionable decision. Paraguay is on this river and there's

like a Brazilian merchant ship that's in port in the capital. And he has his forces seize that merchant ship. And when they do, they find out that the Brazilian governor of the bordering province of Madagrosso is on the ship. So Lopez arrests this guy, throws him in a dungeon and then sends his army and then invades Madagrosso. And like, and it's this, it's a very big sparsely populated province. He basically just marches in, takes the tiny capital town, and then it's like, we own this whole thing. So that is a bold. Yeah, doubling the size of his country in one fell swoop. Yeah. And thinking this will probably be okay. So like, this is a bold move at the best of times. And if he had just wound up going to war with Brazil, that's a tough fight for Paraguay, right?

That's like, that's like Kansas going to war with the entire state of Texas. Like it's not, you know, the kind of odds are stacked against him as he is, as it is. But he doesn't like stop just at taking Madagrosso. Because the next thing he does is he's still pissed that Brazil has backed the side he didn't like in this conflict in Uruguay. So he sends his army to Uruguay to like, take back power for his people. And at the time, by the way, while he's doing all of this, he has a, he has himself get voted the nickname El Supremo. So El Supremo sends his forces off to Uruguay to win some glory. But the problem is that there's like this slice of Argentina. Exactly. And so Lopez like asks for permission to send his army through. And Argentina is like,

no. Hey, what do you, what do you, of course not. We're not going to let you do this. And so he declares war on Argentina too. So great. What a chat. The third thing that happens is that because of everything else we've talked about, Uruguay winds up declaring war on him as well. So this is a, this is a bad situation to be in. And he, you know, he launches a couple of attacks with his well made little army and his well made little army winds up getting just bashed to pieces in large part because he is an incompetent commander. After thousands and thousands are dead, it becomes clear to El Supremo that the population of young adult males is not going to be enough to sustain Paraguay's war effort. So he starts drafting children, creating battalions

of 12 year olds to hold the line and suicidal last stands to delay the enemy. For an idea of how, yeah, for an idea of how bad this is, there are reports of like Brazilian soldiers massacring trench lines. And then when they realized they've just shot a bunch of 12 year olds, like weeping and like just breaking down. Cause like, you know, like that's a pretty bad situation. Don't want to be killing a 12 year old. No, nobody, very few people want to kill 12 year olds. Yeah. So as this war drags on Lopez starts drafting old men and eventually even women, he has them doing a lot of like logistics work in the back. And in 1869, Asuncion, the capital falls and Lopez flees into the hills to fight a guerrilla war, which he is just as bad at as the rest of

this. The last of his forces are surrounded in 1870 and he dies abandoning them, trying to wait across the river. Now that's, that's, that's kind of funny the way this ends. And like objectively, there's an absurdity to how badly this war goes. But like, James, you and I have both reported on and studied a lot of wars. I don't think I've ever read about a war that goes worse for a country. No war. And this goes, this is called the War of the Triple Alliance. So the death toll of the War of the Triple Alliance is comparable to the American Civil War. There is no accurate prewar census of Paraguay. All of the estimates of the percentage of the country that dies are kind of based on calculations that are themselves a little bit of a crapshoot. But I, every analysis that

I've read makes basically the same point, which is Paraguay suffered a higher percentage of its populace dead than any country in a war I can, I can name. The most common estimates say that two thirds of the prewar population die. Some estimates place the death toll. There are estimates as high as 90%, although that's likely high, but everyone seems to agree 60% or 70% of the entire country dead is a reasonable estimate. This includes 90% of the prewar male population. Wow. And so postwar chunks of the country will have a 20 to one ratio of women to men. So that's about as bad as a war could go. Yeah, that's not great. That's a really suboptimal outcome for everyone. Maybe apart from the due to survive, but like demographic collapse. Wow. Yeah, it is. It is. It's like,

I don't think I've ever heard of a war going that badly. Like when you're making German casualties in World War II seem like, well, that's, you know, you can bounce back from that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they didn't even do like 12 year olds at the Battle of the Somme. That is, yeah. I love that the, the, the sort of the misogyny kept on even when they were sending 12 year olds out there. They're like, I'm going to keep women out of the frontline. Can't, can't be having ladies with guns. Yeah. It's, there's a lot actually to say about, because I've read a couple of articles about this, about like the way in which this impacts kind of cultures of entrenched misogyny in Paraguay that I am not really competent to go into. But

there's, you know, a lot, there is a lot written about like, what happens when you're like the first generation of young men after this? And there's like, like 20, a 20 to one female to male ratio and all this attention being kind of like lavished on you because of how badly this war goes and how decimated the, the population of men was prior to this. There, you can find some really interesting writing on this. I don't want to like, we'd be getting a little bit off of of where I feel competent talking to go much more into it, but isn't worth reading that. Yeah. You're going to fuck up your society for gen, like genetically as well as socially. It's really, it's very rarely good if 90% of any group in your society gets massacred.

But like, he's, he's like, he's bested the black death in terms of decimating his own population. Lopez gets our, gets the behind the bastards of award for probably the worst at war. Yeah. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone fail worse at having a war than this. But you know who's good at engaging in unrestricted warfare? Oh, the Raytheon corporation that they are, they are one of the best. And all of our sponsors believe that you can only truly achieve victory in a conflict by salting the earth with the bones of your enemy. So, you know, I get the gold, isn't it? You grow, it grows from the bones. That's right. That's right. That's where gold comes from. And also,

where the best delivered mattresses are forged from. Anyway, the bio mattress. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends. Sugar Steve, Laia, Fontigelo, Unpaid Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS team supreme. They're like a second family to me. You're a fan of deep diving and music, everything, all monacking your musical history

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between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money you took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships,

gaslighting, love bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So, Paraguay just kind of barely eke set out as a country after this. And if you're interested in kind of much more detail about this, The War of the Triple Alliance, which if you Google it, that's also like you'll get a lot of World War One results. But this is a different thing. The Lions led by Donkey's podcast did a good series on this, which you should check out. They go into it, spend a lot more time on it than we are because this is just kind of setting the scene. So, Paraguay in kind of like there's the series,

obviously, afterwards Brazil occupies the country. The people, the countries who would one take about a third of the landmass of Paraguay as kind of part of the war debt. And then there's another like cash war debt that staggers the economy for a few generations. The only reason that Paraguay survives at all as a nation is that Brazil and Argentina are big rivals and neither of them is willing to let the other have Paraguay, right? They kind of like maintain a rump state there just because it's not worth dealing with the conflict over who gets to have it. Now, Argentina in this period had played host to a lot of dissident Paraguayans, members of the old upper class who had had to flee the country when the dictators took over, right, when Spain

gets kicked out. And a bunch of these guys, when Argentina participates in this invasion of Paraguay, they form up and join the Argentine army and like make a unit of like exiled Paraguayans fighting to liberate the country from Lopez. And so after 1870, Argentina successfully kind of helps maneuver these guys into power. And they draw up a democratic constitution that basically existed as an excuse for these people to sell off all of the state's land and businesses for their own personal profit. The British banking firm, Bering's Brothers. Oh yeah, James. How did I know that the British banking industry would get involved? I've just got a remark that selling off the entire country's assets for your own personal profit is a very British vibe. Like it's a thing that we continue

to do. So I was waiting for that. As a rule, if there's like a dictator in the 1800s, there's a British bank behind that. Let's not limit the time period so narrowly, Robert. Very fair. Yeah, we've made a long and proud tradition of doing this for the 20th century. So Margaret Thatcher's kid. So the Bering's Brothers are like, wow, things are going great in Paraguay. Look at how effectively they have taken all of these national resources and handed them off to a tiny chunk number of oligarchs. Here's a couple of very large loans, Paraguay. And the oligarchs say, thank you for the loans that are meant to develop our country. We're just going to take the money, though, and buy houses. Yeah. And so the nation has left bankrupt and in ruinous debt after this.

It's again, not the first or the last time this will happen. So the Brazilian military occupies Paraguay for a while, but they bounce pretty quick and Paraguayans are left to try and navigate their place in South America, bereft of a couple generations of men and also any money. It does not go smoothly, as scholar Paul Lewis describes. Paraguayan governments after 1870 brought neither internal peace nor liberty, although they were still dictatorships. Managed elections or the direct seizure of power was the means by which every succeeding president achieved office. 44 men occupied the presidency in the 85 years between the death of Solano Lopez and Alfredo Streisner's Coupe in 1954, one president every 23 months. Moreover, of those 44, more than half,

24 were forced from office by violence or the threat of violence. Many of the remainder were simply provisional presidents who headed caretaker governments while the real contestants for power fought it out. 16 of the 24 presidents were overthrown, who were overthrown, served for less than a year, and five of them were in office less than a month. Amazing. This is a lot of turnover. The worst is the period from 1910 to 1912. That is a two-year period in which Paraguay has seven presidents and nine administrations. Outstanding. Again, just wait because we could still do that in the United Kingdom. We've been pushing for it. Hey, I believe both your country and my country can have seven presidents in two years. Yeah, we'd love to see it. All it's going

to take is the secret service getting a little bit more into cocaine. And they're already pretty into cocaine. Yeah, no, it's going to be like getting cocaine bar up in there in the CIA. I think it would be nice if our president, we adopted a pseudomistical tradition where the president gets to continue to be president as long as the cocaine bear does not eat him. And when it does, we all agree not to be partisan about it. It's like that, what's its name? Seeing it shadow and deciding we're going to have more winter. It's just like, ah, the bear ate the president. We're going to get a new one in there. He's talking about the Groundhog. The Groundhog. I forgot the name Groundhog. Staten Island, sorry. Yeah, Phil. Yeah, I recently

learned apparently there is another Groundhog called Staten Island, Phil. But the previous New York man dropped it. Oh, that's horrible. Our Groundhog's not drop safe. I think it depends on the height and probably the angle of the fall. This is another reason cats are superior. Yeah. You can drop a cat all day long. Which mare is this, do you know? I'm just going to look at Staten Island. Yeah, I guess it's, let's have a look. Staten Island Phil dropped de Blasio. De Blasio drops NYC. Here we go. Washington Post. Staten Island's famous Groundhog died after Bill de Blasio dropped it. Incredible. Incredible. That's the second funniest thing I've heard all day. He's the Francisco Solano Lopez of New York Groundhogs. Yeah, there were

pictures. Oh, no, there's a picture on its way down. Oh, de Blasio, how far did you drop him? Okay. Was he standing on a balcony? Was he doing a Michael Jackson with this animal? Oh, god. If I had to guess, de Blasio would have been at the top of my list of mares. He's blamed the Groundhog for his unpopularity. Wow. Yeah, man. This episode goes out to that Groundhog. Yeah, this is now dedicated to whatever that Groundhog's name was. Phil. Just Staten Island Phil. Staten Island Phil. R-I-T. Oh my god, de Blasio. What the fuck? This photo is wild. Honestly, also, you can't blame the Groundhog. No, he's another victim of state violence under Bill de Blasio. And I have to say it, another example of classic Groundhog shaming,

which is a plague in this country. So back to Paraguay. In the late 1920s, things are finally starting to improve slightly after that two-year, seven-precedent run. They start things even out a little bit. They get some more competent leaders who start to reinvest. I mean, they're mainly reinvesting in the military, but also not the worst idea given kind of the situation. Because at this point, the late 20s, the only neighbor that Paraguay has not lost a devastating war to, Bolivia, starts sniffing around this region in northern Paraguay called the Chaco. And Bolivians are like, well, the last time Paraguay went to war didn't go good. And like, we could probably take them. And there's this kind of this place, the Chaco is kind of this like wasteland in the

northern significant chunk of the country. It's not a wasteland, but that's how it gets described by people. It's like a kind of desertified territory. It looks beautiful. Honestly, I'd love to go hike there or something, although there's a hell of a lot of skaters. But there's this like, the Bolivia becomes briefly convinced because of like, they find a little bit of oil there. There's not really oil in the Chaco, but they're convinced that like, there's a shitload of oil in the Chaco. And so they're like, let's go invade and take this from Paraguay. And it's kind of obvious for a while. Part of why this is happening is that like, when everybody gets their freedom from Spain, they don't always have like super clear maps of who's is what. So there's like

this long argument about like, whether or not, you know, this chunk of the Chaco should belong to to Paraguay or Bolivia. So they're all arming while this is going on. And Paraguay puts this guy in command of their army in the Chaco called Jose Estegaribia. And he is going to be there are military scholars who will say this guy is one of if not the best field commanders in the history of modern warfare in the Americas. Because the war that's about to result from this is a modern war. They have tanks, they have machine guns, they have air power. This is going to occur in like the early 1930s. The Bolivians put an old German man in charge of their military now. What a time. What a time to be picking old German guy. You're not even ready, James. You're not

even ready because this guy is this guy is no shit real name is General von Kunt. You're lying. No, KU and DT, look this shit up. Get up. Now I know where Robert is happy on this episode. Oh, he's called Hans Kunt. Yeah, Hans von Kunt. I was going to say he was born Kunt. Yeah, this guy from the day he was born was fucked. Look, so this guy, first of all, the von means that he's German nobility. He is a German officer. What does the Kunt mean? Well, let me tell you the rest of the story. So he is a German general officer throughout the First World War in the Eastern Front,

and he has a reputation for two things. One, he is a competent logistical commander. And two, whenever there's any kind of combat, his his go to tactic is to throw every man he has into a suicidal headlong charge. He is a he is one of the worst German field commanders. He is terrible at what he's doing. He gets a shitload of men killed. But he's he's also he becomes, after the war, a celebrity in Bolivia. Now, this is very like, like the question of like, why is this guy so beloved by the Bolivians? A lot of it is that like, he loves Bolivia, like he moves there after World War One, he like gets a job kind of acting as an instructor for the Bolivian military. This is very common at the time, too. I mean, you have to remember that

while Von Kunt is very bad at what he does. I know, I know. The German military has just almost won a war against the world. So all of these little countries and big countries in South America are like, Oh, we the best people we can get to help us reform our militaries is some German guy, right? Because like, they got they came pretty close to winning. So the Bolivians fall in love with Von Kunt, because he's just kind of this, despite the fact that he's shit eatingly incompetent, he looks and talks like this like archetypal image of the Prussian military genius. And they just all kind of buy it. Paraguay's again, Paraguay's army is commanded by Estegribia, who's one of the best military leaders in the modern history of the Americas. And so the Chaco War, which

results when Bolivia invades, is a fascinating conflict. It is going to be a test and ground for a lot of tactics that are key in World War Two. This is not a military history podcast, so we're not going to labor long on the specifics. But there is one key detail I think we need to talk about, which is that when the Paraguayans start arming up in the late 20s and early 30s, they have to make one of those tough decisions that countries who don't spend a trillion dollars a year on their army have to make, which is like, what kind of artillery do we buy? Because we can't afford a lot of it. And we can't afford many different kinds. So we're either going to be getting a few big guns or a lot of little ones. Now, World War One had proven that modern wars can't really

be one without big guns, but big guns come with all sorts of logistical hurdles. And Paraguay did not have the industrial base to manufacture the kind of shells and parts that larger field pieces needed. Artillery was also super vulnerable to air power, and Bolivia had an air force that outnumbered Paraguays more than two to one. So the very savvy Bolivian military planners, or Paraguayan military planners, decided instead of buying a bunch of big, a few big field guns that planes can bomb, why don't we just get hundreds and hundreds of 81 millimeter mortars? We'll just get a shitload of little mortars. And these are like man portable, indirect fire weapons that you can camouflage easily. You can like pick them up and run like a motherfucker

after shooting some stuff off. And they fire a small enough shell that Paraguay could afford to make it indigenously. This was a huge success. Paraguay becomes maybe the first nation to use mortars effectively in a modern combined arm sense in the 20th century. They use mortars very similarly to how you're going to see them used in Ukraine and stuff during this conflict. And they just massacre the Bolivians. This war goes terrible for Bolivia, despite having by far more men in tanks and stuff. And one of the officers who is in command of a mortar of a bunch of mortars during this war, I think he winds up at the end in control of a mortar regiment, that helps to win the Chaco War is a guy who eventually a general named Alfredo Stresner, right? That's the job

that Stresner, the big job Stresner does is he is he is a mortar commander. Now Stresner's father Hugo had been part of the massive German diaspora that had moved to South America in the years leading up to the First World War. Hugo was a Bavarian who'd worked as an accountant for a brewery. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy Paraguayan family of it's actually a mix of Basque and indigenous Paraguayan descent. Yeah. And so Stresner fairly a lot of privilege, you know, but the fact that his dad is German, they have a lot more like money than most people and his mom comes from a family with money to he enrolls in a military school when he's 16. And by the time the Chaco War breaks out, he's 19 years old and had established has established a reputation for

himself as a competent leader who has earned the respect of his men. Paraguayan politics remains tumultuous in the years after the Chaco War. But Stresner succeeded in sliding past most people's radar because he's really fucking boring. We don't have a lot I don't have a lot I haven't found a lot on this guy's early life on his childhood and stuff. But he is it seems accurate to say based on the stuff I have read that goes into detail that he is a quiet sober man whose main hobbies are chess fishing and a weekly poker game. He gets married to a school teacher who's a few years older than him in 1940. They have three children. And most people who knew Stresner at this point in time would be like, yeah, he's a quiet family man. He plays a lot of chess, you know, he's

about as boring a guy as you're going to get. In 1940, he gets picked for advanced training at a military college, and he returns home a major whose superiors call him a complete officer who was discreet and circumspect. Again, everyone everything about this guy is he is quiet and competent and not really worth talking about in much detail outside of that, which is again, we just finished our episodes on on Romania and Chowchescu. You always got to watch out for the quiet guys. You didn't end up so quiet. If you ever meet someone who is quiet and competent, bare mace them. That's the only thing to do. You know, some somebody somebody, you know, changes your your your car oil, you know, quiet and competent mechanic,

may some do it to anybody who's good at anything and humble. That's the only way we can save ourselves from another Alfredo Stresner. So yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's that seems fair. So by down yeah, yeah, by the by the early 40s, Paraguay had taken a kind of rough stab at democratic politics. This never goes great for them. And the parties that they have are never very committed to any scheme that might make them give up power if they happen to take it. The largest conservative party in the country is the Colorado Party, and it has both a democratic wing, which means a wing that cares about democracy and a wing that doesn't so much care about democracy. And in the early 40s, that second wing is run by a man named Juan Natalicio Gonzalez.

Now he'd been involved in a number of violent protests and one failed revolution before for which he'd been exiled and then sent to a concentration camp from which he had escaped. So Gonzalez has quite a background. And he had prior to getting like exiled the second time, he has been he'd been kind of a rabid, almost religious nationalist. And then he gets exiled the second time and he winds up like most Paraguayans who get exiled fleeing to Argentina. And Willie's while he's in Argentina, he meets a bunch of socialists who have also been exiled because they had tried to do, you know, a revolution. And these socialists, you know, even though they're pretty left wing guys, also happen to be nationalists. And so Gonzalez

becomes more and more convinced that the right politics for Paraguay might be some kind of, you'd call it national socialism. Yeah, let's see what this is going. It's bad. Now, James, I know what you're saying, but this is the mid 30s. No one else has thought of national socialism in this period of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is alarm bells are not being rung around the world. There's no there's no evidence of like how this could go badly in the mid 1930s. So Gonzalez is becomes. Yeah, he's he's I we've just been joking about this. Gonzalez

does accurately identify one of the biggest problems with Paraguay, which was the kind of economic liberty, like the economic liberalism that has allowed a tiny number of elites to buy all of the land and natural resources in the country, right? He recognizes this is a huge problem that is just an a justification for the rich to take advantage of the poor. Now, the leader of Paraguay at this point in the early 40s is a dictator named Moringo. In 1940, he had suspended the Constitution and banned political parties like you do. But in 1946, he legalized political activity again and formed a cabinet with the Colorado Party and a Democratic Socialist Party. Now, Gonzalez is back in the country by this point,

and he does not like the idea of the Colorado Party sharing power with a coalition government. So he starts to build a street fighting movement for the Colorado's in order to like, you know, beat and murder their opponents in the streets kind of themed after the essay in Germany. Yeah, little bit of a vibe I'm picking up. Yeah. Now, things come to a head at the start of 1947, which brings Paraguay a fun new civil war called the Barefoot Revolution. The side shook out roughly to every other political party and most of the officers on one side and just the Colorado Party, but a bunch of soldiers also on the other side. And it's it's ugly. It's very short, but extremely bloody. And one of the reasons why the Colorado Party wins this civil war is that

Alfredo Stresner is a general by this point, and he is in command of the country's largest artillery division. And when you kind of just have one artillery division, and the other side doesn't have an artillery division, you know what it's very easy to do? It's just kill everybody. That's a real tough one to overcome. Yeah. Yeah. Now, so Stresner is a big part of why his side wins this civil war. And over the next two years, things do not calm down, though. There are in two years, six coups and countercoups, and Stresner participates in four. So he is by, by like 19, the early fifties, he is like one of the most experienced coupers on the planet. Like this guy could give notes to the CIA. Oh, you guys are doing a coup? No, I've been in a bunch of

those. Let me tell you. Let me walk you through the basics. Yeah. Now, it is a well known fact that carrying out coups are it's like eating potato chips. You never stop with one, right? Right. And in Stresner's case, he does like five. And in 1954, he decides it is his turn to be the man doing the couping. He had succeeded in gaining the support of the military by this point, and Gonzales his wing of the Colorado party. And now I'm going to quote from an article in Vanity Fair by Alec Schumatoff. The coup took place while all of a Sun Tzion society was at the Philharmonic. Legend has it that the shooting started just at the thunderous beginning of Beethoven's fifth. Da-da-da-dum. And everyone thought that it was part of the show until soldiers burst onto the

stage and announced that a coup was underway. This is not a thing that has not happened before either. Like this is a way to do coups. Oh, yeah. Look, if you're not timing your coup with an orchestral presentation, like at the Philharmonic, what are you even cooing, right? Yeah. Come on. It's a coup without culture. And it's not really a coup at all. Have a little bit of art, you know? That's all I'm saying about a good old fashioned coup. It's, you know. You could do it in a in a Mahler piece because I don't know if you've seen Mahler's hammer. No. Okay. It's worth googling. It's a giant fucking hammer that like, I guess like every orchestra has to have one because there's this one piece that he wrote that

one of the instruments is just a dude hitting a wooden box with it, like a comedy sized hammer. And I feel like that would give you some more cover for coups than Beethoven. So they fucked up in that regard. Yeah. Yeah. There's a John Waters quote where he's like talking about today's hackers and the thing that depresses him about the fact that they all just kind of like wear hoodies and shit. And he's like, look, I love what you're doing. But if you're going to like hack into the defense department's computers and like spread top secret information to try to bring them down, you should have an outfit for that, right? You've got like a little panache, you know? That's what you got to respect about Stresner. He's got a little bit of panache here, you know?

This is this is a this is a coup that's got some art to it. Gosh darn it. So you know what else has art to it? Is it gold? Gold is the only real form of art, James, because gold never fades. It's eternal just like this podcast, which will continue from now until the heat death of the universe and the end of all things. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends. Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme like to nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys

and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS team supreme. They're like a second family to me. If you're a fan of deep diving into music, everything, all monacking your musical history and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me. But you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeart Radio app or podcast or wherever you get your pie. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that

stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money he took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from

survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, what a great time. We're all back. We're talking about the beginning of the stressor era. Ah, so the period of time that he's in power, his regime is known as the Strannato. And it's one of those things where, like, a lot of the, this is sort of one of, there's this kind of concept in Paraguayan politics that's evolved over the last hundred years or so called, I don't know how to pronounce this, but M-B-A-R-E-T-E, which is an indigenous Guarani word, meaning, like,

the law of the strongest, right? This is a, like, a strongly believed, this is just kind of like the, I mean, we've gone through the history here, right? This is the habit of the time, right? It's been nothing but strongman dictators. And to be frank, like, you, if you're one of these people who's living through these periods where there's like seven coups in two years, you might just find yourself wanting someone strong enough to stop it, right? Someone who could actually hold on to power so everyone can get their fucking breath. Like, it, he comes to, like, Stresner is, it's not going to be easy for him to solidify power because Paraguay's famously unstable, but also he has this benefit that very few dictators get where everything has

been so bad for so long that people are willing to put up with a lot from a dictator if he can actually hold things together. And like, we talk about how the instability of the Weimar years contributed to the rise of the Nazis. That's not a long period of time. This is like a hundred something years of constant chaos and bullshit. So given the fact that Paraguay goes through presidents like porn directors go through lube, the fact that Stresner manages to make himself dictator is again, not in and of itself impressive. Someone had managed to do that about every year since 1870. What's impressive is that he'd held on to that title for, he holds on to this title. He's in power for 35 years. That is almost unprecedented in world history. Saddam rules

Iraq less than 30 years. Stalin is in power for like 29 years. Mao is in power for like 27 years. It is extremely uncommon for a dictator or a king at any point in history to reign for more than 30 years. Very, very rare. The fact that Stresner does this in a place as unstable as Paraguay means that he's doing something, he's doing something competent from like a consolidation of power standpoint, right? He's good at what he's doing, not in a moral sense, but just in this is not an easy situation to handle. So obviously, yeah, one of the things that Stresner has to deal with as soon as he takes power is the fact that there's going to be a million other people who are already planning to coup him out of power and take power themselves. And I want

to quote now from an article or from that book by Peter Lambert. At the time of the 1954 coup, the different factions within the Colorado party supported Stresner in the belief that they would be able to use him for their own political ends. In the event, however, before 1956 and 1966, Stresner manipulated existing factional divisions to consolidate his own control over the Colorado party. Through skillful political maneuvering, Stresner selectively purged real or perceived party opposition. Epiphanio Mendes-Fleitas, the major political rival to Stresner, was isolated and exiled in 1956. In 1959, Stresner responded to rebellion within the Colorado party by dissolving Congress, sending troops onto the streets and exiling 400 members of the more reformist Colorado

activists. The explosion of his powerful minister of the interior, Edgar L. Yosefnin, in 1966, represented the final move in eliminating internal party opposition and bringing the party firmly under his control. And that's like a kind of good high-level overview of what Stresner does to consolidate power, but it doesn't provide a lot of texture. It's just sort of a list of people who get purged and kicked out. So I want to read another quote from that Vanity Fair article, which deals with the story of a single person Stresner had to suppress. Take, for instance, the case of Napoleon Ortigoza, an attractive upper-class cavalry officer who ended up being the longest-held political prisoner in Latin America. The theories about why he was

arrested are many in Baroque, but some of them involve a sinister plot to overthrow Stresner. When a young cadet, Alberto Benitez, was killed, either by other officers to cover up a homosexual clique, or because he was tortured by the police as encouragement to reveal details of a coup plot, the minister of the interior, Edgar Yusefnin, or so one theory goes, hit upon the brilliant idea of pinning the murder on Ortigoza, who was not actually involved in any plot yet, but was just the sort you had to watch out for. Putting him away would be what is known as an acapete, a warning slap, to anyone who got ideas about moving against the president. Ortigoza's insistence on his complete innocence fell on death ears. He was not allowed to be presented as trial, and one of his lawyers

was arrested and beaten. He was condemned to death, although Stresner later commuted the sentence to life imprisonment after a priest threatened to break the seal of confession and tell who the real murderers were. So yeah, that's Stresner. That's how this guy wields and consolidates power. Sounds like a nice guy. Yeah, that's a pretty normal thing to do. He is such a nice guy that he has given, we've gone through all of these other dictator nicknames, Stresner gets the best of them, because people just start calling him the tyrannosaur. What the fuck? He sounds like reptile. Honestly, though, this guy's a piece of shit, but if that's the nickname that you get, that's hard to beat. That's about as hard a nickname

as anyone's ever gotten. Yeah, it's pretty bold. And they give him that in part because he's in power for so long, right? He's like this ancient, implacable, malevolent force. Now, legally, Paraguay continues to maintain the trappings of a democracy, including a Congress that occasionally gets to vote on stuff that doesn't matter. For example, since 1929, the country had been in a legal state of siege, which suspended civil liberties, including habeas corpus. Stresner continued this, and Congress renewed the state of siege every 90 days. His justification was the threat of communism, which pleased the Americans. Many of the changes Stresner brought were initially positive. The biggest achievement of his reign was simply staying in power, which

put an end to the ceaseless stream of coups and civil conflicts that had racked Paraguay for generations. This allowed the state to actually focus on delivering services to regular people. One example of this would be Stresner's stabilization of the Guarani, Paraguay's currency, which had been essentially worthless for decades. He set a peg for the currency's value at 125 Guarani to one US dollar. And while every other currency inflated rapidly in South America during this period of time, he was able to use the hammer of state power to keep the Guarani locked into place. However, as Alex Shomotov notes, there was a price for all this. When student and labor groups demonstrated in the recession of 59, he crushed them. When the Congress objected to police brutality

against students protesting a bus fare increase, he dissolved it. The downside to order in progress with Stresner was one of the largest military and police to general population ratios in the world, and the highest proportion of unsentenced prisoners in the Western Hemisphere. He purged the old generals and 400 of the old democraticos, and replaced them with loyal members of the bandwagon. Membership in the party became compulsory for military officers and civil servants, and strongly advised for anyone else who wanted to get anywhere. In the various sham elections, he received more votes in some rural areas than there were registered voters. His heavy Leonine face was posted everywhere, and radio stations began the day with the Don Alfredo

Poca. Poca, followed by the message, the constitutional president of the Republic, General Alfredo Stresner, salutes the Paraguayan people and wishes them a prosperous day. So this is like one of the more effective police states I've ever seen anyone institute, and he does it in a he comes to power in a state we're like holding on for more than two years is almost unheard of. And in a couple of years, he has created like the most policed country in the Americas, which is interesting to me. He's he's very he's a very fast and efficient worker. Yeah, that he's like he like builds a state around himself. That's yes. Yeah, around himself and like his his his maintenance of power. But he also gives people

a reason for wanting him to stay in power, which is that for one thing, we're not dealing with these constant overthrows of the government anymore. And as a result, while there's all this chaos in a lot of other parts of Latin America, that's not happening here. And our currency is maintaining its value. It's kind of worth noting, we're about to talk about the US is very involved in Stresner's regime. But this is the only country this is and they're part of Operation Condor, right? But Paraguay is the only country that's involved in Condor that the CIA doesn't do any domestic, like they don't have to fund any right wing rebels. Yeah, they don't have a way there's they don't need to he has such a hold on power. And you know, there's other things that he does during

the early period of his of his reign development projects that provide a lot of jobs for Paraguay and he builds a road to Brazil that brings new options for trade while he has people build that road. And he at like, when he comes to power, there's no storm drains in the capital, there's no running water really, there's not regular electricity, all of those things come to the capital like once Stresner is in power. And a part of that just because like, well, we're not fighting this endless series of coups anymore, so we can spend some of our of our resources on making this place livable. A lot of why he has the money to do this is because he decides to bill himself as an anti communist. Now, there's people who will argue that he was not really ideologically,

he didn't really care one way or the other, he would have been a socialist if that had been the way for Stresner to be in power, right? That's a thing that some people will argue. But he's wise enough to see that like, well, it's the 1950s and 60s. If I bill myself as an anti communist, I can get a lot of that sweet ass America money. And, you know, that's, that's kind of the best way to improve your, your material base in Latin America at this period of time is have you got like the CIA black budget shotgun money your way. So the month after he takes power in 54, US development aid to Paraguay increases by 50%. Between 1954 and 1960, the country gets 24 million dollars from us. And we send advisors and CIA agents into Paraguay to train the police

in advanced torture techniques. Because he's like, we're not good enough at torturing. And America's like, oh, no, we, we got guys who know to do that. We'll get them right in there. And the reward for the US here is a in 1958, Nixon tries to go to Venezuela, he goes to Venezuela, and he gets like pelted with rocks. But then he heads to Paraguay afterwards. And he's like met in the street with a door in crowds, Stresner stage manages it, Nixon gets a great photo op out of the situation. So you know, it's all worthwhile for the US. We got Nixon got a nice photo. Yeah, whether yeah, that makes those styles to do. Yeah, I've seen the photo of Nixon getting pelted with rocks. And I used to live in Venezuela. And yeah, that's a proud moment.

Like I've been showing this photo. Of course, like that is what, what, what could be prouder than throwing a rocket Richard Nixon, not enough people in this country through fucking rocks Richard Nixon, if we're being honest, we should all have been throwing rocks at Richard Nixon. That is beyond debate. That should be a bipartisan consensus on that, I feel like we could get enough people throwing enough rocks at him. The old people of Venezuela picked up where we left off. Yeah, tragically, in Paraguay, Stresner's able to stop any rock throwing. Now that same year, the same year Nixon visits 58, a left wing guerrilla leader attempts to invade Paraguay. He brings with him 458 soldiers trained in Argentina, who attempted to infiltrate the country and

start recruiting for an insurgent war. Stresner's CIA backed security. Basically, the CIA learns this is happening. And they warned Stresner. And he sends 6,000 soldiers to crack down. Most of these guys are gunned down, but the survivors are taken and put into like helicopters and dropped into piranha filled waters. Yeah, it seemed to become t-shirt shit for Proud Boys. Yeah. That said, if you are the kind of person who's willing to play ball with a vicious authoritarian, Stresner's regime is not the worst time that you will have had in your lifetime in Paraguay, right? At least not in the early period of time. However, the fact that he has made his country a stable place that is very friendly for right wing authoritarians makes it an enticing getaway

for a very specific group of people. Escaped Nazi war criminals. So this is... Oh, good. We're getting to a real fun part of the story here. Paraguay's got this fascinating history with Germany. We've kind of talked about some bits of it, right? And this is the whole region, right? You've got like, you've got guys like Von Kunt going over to Bolivia. Paraguay gets its own Germans. Like as we, you know, as I noted, Stresner's dad is a Bavarian. In 1886, Bernard Forster, who is the brother-in-law of Friedrich Nietzsche, had moved to Paraguay. He moves there because he's like, number one, 1886, when Forster moves to Paraguay is like the immediate wake of that horrible devastating war. And so Paraguay is like, we will give Europeans money if they will immigrate here

and help us have like your dude come to make enough people. Like we need your cum, right? We need, we need, we need a lot of, we need all the seamen we can get right now. There are not many of us left. So that's when Forster comes over. And Forster also has cum-related plans, but much more racist ones than the Paraguay in government, because he is a philosopher of anti-Semitism. And to Forster, the primary appeal of Paraguay is that it doesn't have any Jewish people, right? It does, but it doesn't have a lot of them. And he's like, well, since this country is basically free of Jewish influence, we can use this country's policy to move a bunch of Aryans in and create Neueva Germania, you know, this, this, this German paradise in Paraguay. Now, this is obviously a bad

idea. And it doesn't work for shit. Yeah, it is, it is not going to succeed. And I'm going to read a quote from an article by Nick Forizos here. Forster, his wife, Elizabeth, and 14 families from Saxony crossed the Atlantic in the dead of winter and reached Paraguay in the swelter of summer. They carved a settlement out of the rainforest northeast of the capital, Asuncion. But the isolated community was soon infested with bugs burrowing into fingernails and toenails and laying eggs beneath the skin. The, yes. The age of fucking hates an anti-Semite. This next part, James, you're going to really like their indigenous neighbors knew the cure, but colonists, the colonists refused to consult an inferior race. They just sitting there being like, yeah, man,

we got like a plant. We just rub on us to deal with that. Oh, you're dying. That's cool. Foisted on his own petard. We love to see it. The strict colonies, young bucks, pounded nails into the coffin of an unsullied Aryan Neue Germany when they began bedding and wedding local women plagued by sickness and unpaid bank loans. Forster retreated to the Hotel de Lago in the town of San Bernardino in 1899 and committed suicide by shooting up with morphine and strict nine and nine in room 19. So, hey, good evening to this episode. Frederick Nietzsche, shitty ass brother in law kills himself. That's nice. Nietzsche really inspired some great suicide. Oh, boy. We're going to talk more about Bernard

Forster next episode and a lot more about the Nazis, James. We're not nearly done with the Nazi portion of this episode. Oh, good. Great. Good. But speaking of Nazis, I know that's not a good way to lead into plugs. No, not speaking of Nazis. Yes. Yeah. How will you get a plug, James? Oh, yeah, definitely not any Nazis, actually. I've returned to Twitter after my ban. So people for now, yeah, until I post another picture of Mussolini hanging out with his friends and then I'll be back again. That is James Stout. And yeah, I also do a podcast with you and Sophie and several of our other friends and colleagues. It's called It Could Happen Here. People should listen to it. It's got some banging

episodes. Yeah. It's going off. Legendary. All right. All right. Legendary. Okay, everybody. That's the end of the episode. Go, um, you know, don't let bugs and anti-Semites once they eat flesh. Yeah. Yeah. My advice would be if you're too racist to stop the bugs from eating your fingers. Maybe rethink your politics or take a shit ton of morphine. I don't care. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, the morphine in Strict 9 works fine too. If you're a Nazi, I'm fine either way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You won't find me crying. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove.

And, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Umpink, Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors, politicians, creatives, people that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down in rabbit holes. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I am Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell, on iHeart. Mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward. And I thought, what a wonderful way to do it with good friends across a tiny table and just have a heartfelt conversation. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud

part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.