Chapo Trap House - Preview: Hell On Earth

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

Coming Jan 11th from Chapo Trap House: HELL ON EARTH: The Thirty Years War & The Violent Birth of Capitalism In this special preview mini-sode, Matt and Chris discuss their new history podcast series, coming soon exclusively on patreon.com/chapotraphouse.

Hello, and welcome to this very special preview mini-episode, in which Matt and I are going to talk about our new history project. Yes, that's right. Matt and I have a new history series coming for you in January of 2023. It is called Hell on Earth, the Thirty Years' War and the Violent Birth of Capitalism. It's premiering January 11th, and it's going to rock, and listening is mandatory. Hi, welcome to the episode, Matt. Hey, hello.

Matt, let's start off. What the hell is the Thirty Years' War? Well, it's a war that did, in fact, last about 30 years. That's a good round number. It was a massive conflagration in the heart of Europe, Germany specifically, where the Holy Roman Emperor, with his Protestant princes and also countries like France and Sweden, for control over Germany, at a time when dynasties were turning into states all across Europe, and the Thirty Years' War is basically the attempt to turn the German lands into a single

political unit. And spoiler alert, it fails miserably and bloodily and horrifyingly. And so, if you're a big European history buff, this obviously sounds very fascinating, but you're not really into the warring principalities of central Europe in the mid-17th century. Why the hell should you care about this? Well, think of it this way. We had a social, political, and economic order in terminal crisis, with elites locked in conflict with one another while a largely powerless population suffered, all accelerated

by dramatic climate change, which caused a cascade of warfare and communal violence. There's also pandemic illness, endemic financial collapse, a universal crisis of legitimacy among the ruling class of the continent, all of this brought to a fever pitch by destabilizing new communications technology that changed the way people imagined the world around them and imagined themselves in that world, leading to speculative financial bubbles, moral panics, ideological polarization, even paranoid fantasies motivating people at the highest levels of power. Yeah, so basically the way that I like to think about this series is that it's basically

two levels. It's on the ground, the actual people, places, events, things of it. It's basically Game of Thrones but real. It is wild violence between both armies and individuals. It is palace intrigue. It is incestuous intermarriage between dynasties to secure power over vast swaths of territory. That is the story we want to tell on the ground level. And then the top level of it is the sinews and muscles of what we would come to know

is capitalism and states capable of imposing capitalism onto their policies, being knit together out of this ferment of a collapsing previous social order. Even though the people who were doing it didn't even have any idea that that was what they were doing. Not at all. It is essentially Game of Thrones where instead of magic, it's Christianity. Yes, exactly. But it's a similar world where the changes people are experiencing are not being processed

the way we would. They are being processed in a more enchanted world that this conflict goes a long way towards disenchanting. Yes. And one of the themes of it is magic being ripped out of the social ferment and turned into the market. Another way to think about this is if for everybody who listened to Hell of Presidents, if Hell of Presidents to keep with the Game of Thrones metaphor, if that was our Game

of Thrones series, this is our House of the Dragon. This is all the things that would, the entities that would go into building the world that America would then take control of with our own brand of demonic imperial capitalism. This is the story of all those things being first laid out onto the earth. So should we go through and maybe discuss like exactly what the course of the series is? Yeah, let's do it. Okay.

So the Thirty Years War is the centerpiece of the series, but we've got to do a little bit to get there. And so the whole series begins with the man Martin Luther, 95 Theses, the door of the All Saints Cathedral. We got to start with the Protestant Reformation, which is something that we have touched on a lot in both Chapo and Matt's individual projects, the kind of essentialness of Protestant mindset to our current market-driven world. Right, Matt?

Yeah, but as usual, this is something that is not, that doesn't make the change. People don't become Protestant and then decide to do capitalism because they're Protestant. Protestantism is emerging as a way to make sense of the shifting demographics and technological realities of Europe. And then Protestantism becomes a way for people to make sense of that new world that they find themselves living in. And that was all made possible by the patron saint of posters, Martin Luther. So we start with Martin Luther, and then we have to kind of bring us up to 1618 when

the Thirty Years War began. So we, of course, have to cover the Habsburgs, who are huge characters in this, and I think that people are kind of aware of the Habsburgs as the epitome of the inbred, imperial dork commanders of European statehood. Well, yeah, they are very much like the Targaryens, that they love to marry each other to keep the blood pure with some hilarious consequences of that that we will get into. And they were the dynasty that came closest to establishing the dream of a universal monarchy in Europe, but they weren't, for many reasons, unable to do so.

And their failure to secure that guarantees a cycle of medium-sized state competition over, in the little ice age, dwindling resources and dwindling agricultural surplus, which leads to the cataclysm of war that follows. So we track the rise of the Habsburgs to their pinnacle, and then the war being kind of the beginning of their end, as, well, we meet many other of the legendary dynastic figures of this era, including the leaders of neighboring countries like France and Sweden, figures like Cardinal Richelieu, who people have probably heard of through history, or perhaps that one Monty Python sketch, figures like Gustavus Adolphus, the number one swede of all times.

You have anything. He's the top swede. There's no comparison. Other than maybe the guy's people in ABBA. It's unchallengeable. Anything to tease about Richelieu, Gustavus Adolphus, other fun characters in this, like, oh, God, who's that horse lord? Oh, yes, Bentham Gabor.

John George of Saxony, a whole host of interesting characters. Albert Wallenstein. You got the original orb ponderer, Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, who found it too difficult to actually govern the Holy Roman Empire, so he just went into his drawing room and looked at all of his cool maps and skeletons and shit and pondered his orb with the hope that he could gain some sort of mystical control of the world, and he was unable to. And you got guys like Christian of Anhalt, the epitome of a young money hustler trying to leverage his relatively minor noble title in the Holy Roman Empire into becoming the

kingmaker for a whole new dynasty, which is part of what leads to the whole bloody affair. And yes, as you mentioned, Albert Wallenstein, the king of all mercenary captains, a guy who thought for one brief moment that he could lead an independent army outside of any state organization to becoming a real king within a dynastic model. You have people like Bethlehem Gabor, who I mentioned earlier, a Hungarian horse lord who is as close to as any historical figure might ever be to a real life Dracula. Well, other than actual Dracula. Other than actual Dracula.

But you know, he is that kind of figure. He's from the Dracula-ated branch of European nobility. Cardinal Richelieu, a genuine warrior bishop overseeing sieges personally while negotiating palace intrigue with Queen Mother de' Medici's, who was running her own ring of sexual spies. Actually that might be different generations of Medici's, but they're all in there. So you know, we've got all these interesting characters. We have, of course, the Dutch who are sitting in the background in their watery merchant cities, slowly knitting together the origins of things like the joint stock company, which,

you know, again, is something that sounds dry on paper. But think of how many joint stock companies control your lives right now. This is literally where they come from, the demon Dutch in the 17th century. And while all this is happening on the continent, and we will be focusing, the narrative hook is the 30 years war, but we're going to be ending the series by focusing on a country that sort of escapes most of that violence, but is shaped by the same processes that lead to the 30 years war and emerge from it in a position to bring together all of these changes, all of these innovations in culture and technology and finance and administration to create a

model to compete on the European framework and to emerge victorious and to eventually succeed the United States with their DNA and allow it to replicate across the entire planet. And of course, we're talking about the cursed Albion, the monstrous swamp hell known as England, which is able to bring together all of the traumatic changes of the 17th century and knit them into a coherent cultural and economic technology. So yes, after we cover the course of the 30 years war, the results of it, how it affects the rest of the continental powers throughout their next few centuries of history, we will hop over the channel and catch up with the English and kind of run through the track

of their revolution, their civil wars and get them all the way to the glorious revolution of 1688, where they merge with the Dutch and bring a kind of fully formed capitalist state onto the world stage for the first time and set the stage for the rest of modernity. So we're not going to take too long here. Hopefully we're getting across the whole vibe of what we're doing here. It is violence, intrigue, backstabbing, incest, assassinations, magic, prophecy, insanity, blood, death and destruction. And it is the origin story of capitalism. So that's the show. It's hell on earth. 10 narrative episodes. They're all about an hour to an hour 40 each. It's a lot of content. We've been scripting this

the entire year. We're both very proud of it. And that is going to come out January 11th on Chappatrap House's Patreon, patreon.com slash Chappatrap House. Anything else you want to plug about the show before I get into the business at the back of this? Just that it's the most fully conceived thing that we've done so far. All the episodes are scripted for the most part. But we still are able to break for banter and conversation. But we're trying to get across an entire thesis here. And I think we did a good job. Yes. I think we are both very psyched about this. Also, we together while writing it have blown our own minds several times with discovering how all these things fit together as we try

to weave this one story. So it surprised us as we're writing it how compelling the pitch of it is. And as Matt said, it's fun. There's a lot of absurdity and dramatic irony here and great pompous idiot characters and people constantly shooting themselves in their own feet and some of the saltiest letters and greatest historical owns of all time. Lots of tea being spilled in lots of diplomatic cables. Gnarly battles, dramatic deaths, well-timed companies of archibousies, halberd violence. We love a good halberd killing. Getting skewered with a halberd, you can't beat it. And that certainly happens within. So hell on earth. That's the show. But also in this episode, I have some business about how the show will

be launched. Like all of our other bonus series, the first episode will be free to all listeners on our public feed as well as on the Patreon feed. The following nine episodes will premiere exclusively on Patreon, chapotraphouse.com slash Patreon for subscribers only. But if you're interested in subscribing for this and want a good deal, we're also excited to announce a new model of subscription to Chapo Trap House, which is an annual membership. So the idea will be, after we premiere this feature, that for a discount of one month off, you can buy an annual membership to Chapo Trap House's Patreon for just $55. Usually it would be $5 a month, times 12 months, $60. Annual memberships will be $50. But not just

that. For the first week that we are premiering this feature, starting today, that's November 17th and running until Thanksgiving, November 24th. Be thankful for this. We are giving an additional discount, a full 12.5% off of a year of content. Now that's going to give you every weekly premium Chapo episode that will take you all the way through this season of Hell on Earth. As I've said, we've got these 10 narrative episodes. We might do some like interviews and bonus content later. We've been so absorbed with actually writing this thing that we haven't thought about that. But there's some people I'd like to talk to for interviews. Don't you think, Matt?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, we could bat it around. So we might have some additional content for Hell on Earth on top of the 10 episodes we already have planned. Also, premiering today, season two of Hinge Points, also with Matt and Danny Bessner. You want to talk a little bit about this season of Hinge Points? Yeah. So this season of Hinge Points, we're doing more of the beloved Hinge Points that we love. But this time, we're having guests. We're going to talk about different things like what if England had never become separate from the rest of the continent? We'll be talking to Chris about that because it feeds into the Hell on Earth and the rise of England

and just how much their status as a little island out there in the middle of nowhere helped them to create this independent polity as opposed to just being subsumed by some greater empire. But we're also talking to people about what if Nixon had won in 1960? What if Napoleon had converted to Islam? That's what I'm most interested with where that what if came from. Well, he almost did is the thing. In Egypt? Yeah. When he was in Egypt, he weighed the possibility of converting to Islam and becoming the pascha of Egypt. I did not know this. I got a listen to Hinge Points.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the big stumbling points is though, though, is that the local Muslim clerics who were willing to accept him as their new overlord insisted that he end his entire French army, convert to Islam, which meant getting circumcised. That was one of the reasons it didn't happen. But we talked about, hey, what if they could have finessed that? We'll be talking to a bunch of people, a bunch of wacky what ifs. Let's all come with us and swim in the counterfactual seas of history. Great. So that's premiering right now. When you're listening to this, that should already be out or coming out immediately after I publish this. So that annual membership discount will

include this running through next month. It starts immediately. I believe Felix has a new concept for a bonus series next year. I am going to twist Will's arm until he actually produces a bonus series next year. We have some concepts on that. I don't want to make it sound too forced. He has some great ideas. I just actually need to get him to do it. So we're going to have tons of bonus stuff all on the Patreon all next year, making an annual membership very worthwhile proposition. I did some back of the napkin calculations just off the stuff we have planned, which is not even going to be half of the stuff that's going to actually come out. It comes down to like 75 cents an episode, just of the premium

deal. Such a deal. If you do an annual membership. We're excited to offer this. We always love to offer deals to the fan. So that will be available starting this Thursday, November 17th. Hello on Earth comes out January 11th on Patreon and Hinge Points is out now. That's all the announcements for right now. Please tune into the Hell on Earth. Nat and I put a shit ton of work into this and we're very, very happy with how it turned out. And I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

Absolutely. Well, we will see you in January for some hardcore, halberd action. Bye. Bye.