The Pete Quiñones Show - The Complete World War One Series w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

9 Hours and 17 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.This is the complete audio to the World War One series Thomas777 did with Pete.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas' Buy Me a CoffeeThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanuana show. It feels like we haven't recorded in like six months, Thomas, and it's only been a couple weeks. You had a birthday. Let me wish you a happy belated. And yeah, how you doing? Oh, thank you. I'm doing well, man.

Yeah, like I said, I'm not feeling great today. So I want the subscribers and the viewers forgive me in advance if I'm not 100%. But, yeah, things have been very. well. I want to preface this too. This is going to be a long series. I mean, just by nature of the subject. I mean, you could, I mean, frankly, we could, I'm not suggesting we do this, but we could undertake quite literally an endless series on the Great War from this moment now until we die, when both of us are long lived. There still remain aspects that, you know, we neglected to cover in any complete capacity.

My view of the Great War is essentially in line with Christopher Clark's. I don't, and honestly, it's what was the kind of conventional view of the war outside of, you know, the experience of the Second War and the subsequent narrative about Germany is this kind of, like irredentous power that could not be placated that's colored any analysis of the strategic paradigm as it stood in August 1914 you've got to understand the great war as I don't the last thing I do is assign a war guild because it's conceptually that that's asinine you know there's not like warfare's not a schoolyard fight there's not people who started it than people who are victims, you know, nor, you know, like I said, I'm sure people

are tired of hearing it by now, but I reject the Klausovician model of war as this kind of rational process. You know, I view it in classical terms or traditional realist terms is frankly just like arriving like the seasons, okay? Like it is a bounded rationality to it, but its origins are, you know, I have to do with anthropologists. variables at scale and and and things that you know precede rationality and discrete decision-making to accomplish you know um material goals um let's said the uh the conditions that uh created the crisis paradigm orbited around russia okay let's not say like world war what is russia's fault but the russian situation

is what caused it, okay? And the reaction of great powers and adjacent states reacting to the reality of Russian power, actual and potential, as well as, you know, political tendencies that they viewed as emanating from Russia and animating and mobilized, you know, animating, uh, allied, uh, allied society. Slavic populations in particular, you know, towards a grand political enterprise. That, I think that's indisputable. Okay, Germany was reacting at every step of the way, except for 1917. Of course, the final German offensive, I mean, yeah, in every war, every, in warfare,

Every combatant is at times acting offensively and at times defensively. But the only time Germany was really in the driver's seat, as it were, was in 1917. Okay. And it was trying to end the war in one felt swoop. And obviously, what precluded that was, you know, the arrival of the American Expeditionary Force. But this idea of World War I orbiting around Germany and, this kind of like this kind of like moronic caricature of the Kaiser just doing things for no reason or like suing for war just because like that that doesn't really make any sense

and also in aug in uh in the autumn of 1914 summer autumn 1914 Germany hadn't been at war for for decades the franco-pression war i mean that's what there's many people who believe that if Bismar cultivated that war in order to bring the several German states into the Northern Confederation and the crushing victory scored over France

that's what led to Germany becoming a real power and consolidating if that's true that makes Bismar the greatest Machiavellian who ever lived but regardless you know this idea of oh Germany was just helping on militarism

like where was German militarism like one of the reasons they had so many problems in the early stages of the war they had a bunch of their combat commanders who were still in service or elderly men you know you had a bunch of reservists on the frontier in east prussia who were in their 40s and 50s like germany did germany had no idea on a fight of modern war yeah nobody did but um you know that's not uh that's it's a bad faith case to claim that you know Germany simply quote started the second war but But it's at least, you know, you can point to things like a culture of militarism,

you know, an entire generation of men who had come of age, not just in uniform, but in heavy combat. You know, you could, you can suggest, you know, a kind of deforming of the national psyche and not be wrong. But in 1914, I mean, there was, you'd be hard for us to, again, you'd be hard for us to find living men in Germany who, actually heard a shot fired and anger, you know, and I think that's important to keep in mind. You know, this was not, I mean, one of the reasons the war happened is because the 19th century, you know, like I'm always going back to Hobbsbom's description of it as the long century is because nothing really happened after Waterloo in Europe, in power political terms. I mean, all kinds of things happened, you know, otherwise, historically. And the Crimean War was important, but I mean, that was remote. You know, like, that wasn't, I mean, it was a big deal of the men who fought it.

But it wasn't, you know, the people in Moscow, people in London, people in Berlin, people in Paris, that didn't impact their lives in any way. You know, it's not like there's some mass mobilization of male youth or something. You know, it wasn't the one of the reasons why, it's, one of the reasons why, it's, you know, you, there's all these, there's all these European mercenaries, you know, whether you're talking about Pulaski, whether they're talking about infamous people like Henry Burs at Andersonville, or whether you're talking about, you know, the, you know, where they're talking about the executive officer on the, the Confederate Hunley, you know, these were like German, Swiss, Poles, like the reason why they were showing up in the Oregon States is because there was no action

in Europe, you know, so this idea that, you know, what, what was this jerk, supposedly like German militarism built on? You know, like war gaming, you know, like fantasies. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't bear out. Kaiser Wilhelm was not a good executive. And I think there was something brutish about him quite literally in terms of his habits and his aversion to diplomacy of the sort that was called for. And that was easy to lampoon.

But as we'll see, the man who was really in the driver's seat he was Holveig and he was beside himself of what happened um and obviously too you know the war began as a a fight uh between uh the russian empire and and the and the hapsburgs you know Franz Joseph uh who was in my opinion got of the hero of world war one i mean and it's just like a very upright individual and um you know who who came who had a very it had something of a tragic life, you know, capped off, obviously. I mean, he was genuinely elderly by the time the Great War arrived. But it, you know, the main theater was not even the German frontier.

I mean, in immediate terms, you know, like in adjacent and like sphere of influence terms, like, yeah, the Hasbrook Empire was the frontier of Germany, if you want to look at it like that. in like civilizational terms but it uh you know these things are that's uh i just i want to get that other way because i'm sure people are going to pick up on it like the kind of overall theory of the war that i present and uh these days uh it's not i mean people aren't wrong when they identify this kind of like uh reactive kind of like anti-russ sentiment among like a lot of people and I don't harbor that okay um at all and I'm not the purpose of what I've you know prepared for discussion is not like trash the Russians or anything at all um and people who people kind of understand my uh my sort of like my view of kind

of like the ontology of war and peace like won't make that mistake but I'm sure that not everybody who watches these, like, knows kind of what my thoughts are generally. World War I really begins, like, what became, what, you know, what, what, what, what generated the paradigm that caused it originated in Serbia. That is true. Serbia is an oddly situated state. I don't think that needs to be said. I mean, it's obvious, you know.

There was two competing dynasties in Serbia in the 19th century who were both intriguing for serving independence. It was the Obernavich line and the Karadjjordevich line, a cattle herderder, George, or Georgievich. Cardo Jevich literally black George Owing to his not his complexion but his hair and his eyes

and his beard They had driven the Ottomans out of Serbia in the wake of an armed uprising in 1804 so perennially from then on as their fortunes wax and way into the sea

the courage or devich line they had a lot of clout okay um they didn't cut deals with uh with the turks they didn't you know uh they didn't they didn't embrace any any kind of dimitude uh or anything like that

I mean they they had a victory at death like like absolutely like Chetnik sensibility on you know the path forward for Serbia Black George was ultimately driven into exile

and Austria a decade subsequent right around the time of Waterloo, 1813. This was after this massive Ottoman counter-offensive. Now, if you know anything about Serbian society, people say Serbs have a victim complex. I'm not going to be that punitive

about it, but they their lost cause romantics, okay? Black George leading his race to freedom you know from the hated Turks

and then like you know ending up being chased into exile that actually gave him more clout and made his like patriotic credentials impeccable like in the eyes of Serbian society like at all levels you know like he couldn't like his reputation like was unimpeachable

okay now this is when the Oberanovich dynasty enters subsequently and kind of riding this wave of a of resurgent you know kind of a nationalist fervor or you know like the serves one of war-funding obviously because now they're back in her occupation um

a man named Milos Abranovich very much a conspiratorial Machiavellian he negotiated the recognition of the Serbian principality with the Ottoman authorities, which lifted a lot of the more offensive, you know, kind of autocratic trappings of of Islamic rule from Serbia. Okay, so superficially, you know, he brought a lot of like civic benefits to to Serbian people as Serbians, even if in concrete, real terms, you know, they, they were politically totally, you know, like, neutralized.

Now, this becomes problematic when Black George returns to Serbia from exile, he was very quickly assassinated on the orders of Avernovic with obviously the connivance and probably, like, at the demand of the Ottomans. Now, Abernovich was covenly granted the title of Princess Serbia. Members of its clan ruled the

Serbian principality for most of its existence in the Ottoman Empire, from about 18, 16, 17, until the late 1870s. You know, this is very autocratic. this was brutal

this was not something that won any favor with the people um Abranovich Milos Aronovic he managed this in literally Machiavellian terms okay like he stepped

up his wave of repression in the summer of 1839 and then he very suddenly abdicated in favor of his eldest son um Milan who died almost immediately the second younger son Mahalo inherited the mantle

obviously like you know with his father actually controlling the reins of power but under the auspices of these you know abdications and these successions like the appearance of of civil liberties were restored or in superficial capacities. You know, and I said literally Machiavellian because that's that's a page from like the book

of the portions like that, you know, Machiavelli talked about as being this great thing. You know, like act like I'm a level in brute, you know, and then and then either or like a point of man who, you know, who fulfills that role splendidly and instinctively, you know, then either whack him, you know, and because. you know, the hero of the people, or, you know, do it yourself, then advocate, you know, and then install a cipher, ideally, you know, one of your relations, but otherwise, just, you know, somebody's power hungry and has no backbone and, you know, rule from behind the curtain. But, um, the, uh, mehalo, uh, was ultimately deposed, however,

by a constellation of rebel elements um and uh this made way uh for the installation of alexander courageordevich none other than the son of black george um it uh this went back and forth for decades um owing to clan intrigues you know owing to the machinations of mosquist and the Ottomans, or St. Petersburg, rather, and the Ottomans. It, you know, and also, you know, not infrequently, the Habsburgs. In 1858, Alexander was forced to advocate amidst this corruption scandal. He was exceeded again by Mahalo, you know, who was. no more popular during his second reign than his first.

Eight years later, he was assassinated. Almost certain, like, you know, one of his female cousins was instrumental in getting him whacked, and she almost certainly, you know, had been in alliance with the character of Devich clan. But the final, the kind of, the kind of final, or the kind of denouement, like I got this kind of back and forth was Mahalo's immediate successor

Milan Avernovich ruled from the late 80 in the 60s until 1889 1990 and that that allowed kind of like a civic apparatus to develop in Serbia and this becomes important

because before then really the only constant had been the military you know in terms of in terms of kind of like a formal apparatus of state the and in

1882 the Congress of Berlin had further kind of one Serbia you know quasi-independent status that

in the Serbian based understand kind of like the to understand the kind of strange maneuverings of both the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, depending on who held sway over Serbia, either, like, literally because, you know, the Ottomans are occupying it, or de facto because, you know, the Habsburgs owned Bosnia and, you know, had this easily agitated and, frankly, sanguineary Serbian minority. The finding ways is kind of assuage this kind of Serbian tendency towards a national revolution

became this kind of ongoing problem. Like not because Serbia itself is particularly what was particularly instabling imperative terms for the region. But again, I mean, owing the factors that became more pronounced of a kind of metapolitical nature. I don't mean to involve some kind of obscure terminology to describe something that's probably more prosaic than that, but it's the best way you think of to describe it. I don't want us to get ahead of ourselves. You'll see what I mean in the, you know, you'll see what I mean. In a moment, now, serving political culture in the early 1880s, this was the first time that actual political parties emerged, okay, on the modern type. They had caucuses, they had newspapers, they had ideological manufacturing.

festo was the campaign strategies they had uh local party cadres you know like like you know baby germany or serbia kind of entered the the modern age politically very rabbly in the 1880s um now to manage this um and to kind of manage the sort of birth pangs of nascent parliamentarism uh the monarchy responded with increasingly autocratic measures um when uh elections consistently and most notably 83 produced a hostile majority in the serbian parliament and this became such a regular thing um it there's a term develops for it a scoopsina um it you know it means like it It means the monarch ruling is a hostile executive, basically, with like a, with like a, with like a parliament that's just like, that's just like nullifying.

Okay. So, like, the king's solution was to simply refuse to appoint a government, you know, from the ruling coalition and instead to assemble a candidate of civil servants, you know, bureaucrats, like military men, you know, like whoever he considered to be, you know, loyal to the, you know, loyal to the. boil the crown first and foremost um now this sort of be a dangerous game literally

uh I mean to the life and limb of the king the dominant party in Serbia had come to be the radical party um and it was exactly that it was a radical party um

um they uh it was a party of peasants uh if there's Serbs watching this and I hope they'll contribute to the comments if they are I don't want to speak in an incomplete sense

this is kind of the beginning of the modern Shetnik movement okay like what do you think about the radical parties I think of them as like Chetniks as we know them okay I know that it's I know that the roots of the Chetnik identity and movement go way way way deeper than that and I don't speak several creation gym or anything like that but with the limited time we have and just to make things kind of

conceptually you know uh clearer um think think of the radicals as like very very game chetniks okay um they uh the uh this this this kind of this this this this this this It's kind of ongoing paralysis of government. And it's kind of like permanent divide between the executive and the parliamentary organs. Something that dramatically kind of aggravated it. The king, Alexander, he was viewed as basically a fool and a degenerate. The woman he married, he married a much. older woman

who Draga Queen Draga it was kind of like a Wallace Simpson situation like I've got somebody Redwood the 8th but there anybody in public life and particularly

somebody like Edward who is you know burn an effigy people make the most out of any man's frailties in that way but you know there is something there is something unmanly about a guy, particularly a guy in role of authority who's basically like marrying his mommy, okay, and like it.

Draga not only was much older than Alexander, she'd been a prostitute according to rumor. Alexander, when he announced he was going to marry her, some tax official, like apparently, you know, said, and approached him delicately,

you know, and he's like, you know, your majesty, like, I've had an affair with this woman and like half the minute in this room had relations with her, or something of that effect. Alexander slapped him, and that, that was, you know, just things like this happen again and again, you know, and it, it just, he was not a man who commanded respect, even from people who, if you're the monarchy, he has the essential kind of Habesian linchpin to keep the, the entire state together. Now, the kind of crown jewel of the Serbian nation was the army. It was kind of like the Prussian army without the global cloud

and without the kind of stunning genius for war. But in terms of the cultural power and the way people viewed it, like the serbian army was super dynamic um you know serbian serbia as a society it was this it was this very backwards very rural and underperforming economy um if you were a man uh who was not uh you know of noble pedigree you did not have opportunities for upward mobility but you did in the army okay and uh it attracted It attracted a surprising number of educated men from the nascent middle class. And it became a repository of radical thought. Like literally, like they got a thought that formed a radical party.

Okay. It was not exactly easy to get an officer's commission. Obviously, those who were afforded it were those who were viewed as, you know, people who could be trusted with that kind of authority. but again in the kind of climate that was underway in Serbia and with the kind of alienation of the crown from kind of every other aspect of civil society and you know parliament any in any conjugal monarchy it's kind of like the intermediary between the people and the monarch but there's no meaningful like give and take there you know like the monarch's not really going to understand the kind of the kind of pulse of the proverbial street so even if Alexander had been more capable um building a an office or cadre that was basically loyal would have been nigh impossible in my opinion um their uh their preeminence that part owed like um earlier in the century uh they've been like funding had been like lavished on them uh especially by king milan but by a lot of the back and forth uh They're in this back and forth kind of dynasty warring from the monarchy.

Like, the military got what it wanted, because whoever was on the throne was obviously trying to, like, pray their favor. Alexander did, he pursued probably, like, the worst of all possible courses. He abruptly cut back the state's... subsidies the military um not just that but uh he allowed officers salaries to fall into arrears um and uh promotion became uh the exclusive domain of favoritism you know essentially it's i this seems like it if one were like a playbook on how to kind of cultivate um a regicidal sensibility among

your officer corps it's almost as if one would follow this playbook I mean not to be flippant about it but this all culminated at June 11, 1903 um

the Serbian army officers uh you know um animated by the you know the comedy ideology the radical party um they they murdered uhlexander and draga it was uh it was very very brutal it was it was an uncanny precursor to what um happened to the romanovs but uh apparently um

they uh these 28 officers they stormed the palace they shot it out with the centuries um in like a pitched battle they blew the door with a box of dynamite literally they had the effect of knocking out all the electricity in the palace they stormed they stormed the king and queen's bedroom and they found

only like the king's like man servant in there one of the officers put his hand on the bed so it was still warm he said where are they you know after this extended search extensive search there was an antechamber above the bedroom that was hidden where apparently queen draga's like servants had ironed her gowns and stuff they were hiding up there um the uh

the uh the attack force they ordered this man servant to call out to the king uh apparently uh the king responded you know can i trust the loyalty of my office there was like one of the men in nominal command said yes so like the king presented himself with draga they proceeded to shoot his servant in the head uh they shot draga apparently to alexander's credit he did try and stand in front of his wife they like take take the bullet forward snake the leaf um but they were uh they were uh they were uh they were done just like like that apparently uh apparently their bodies were heavily mutilated um they were stabbed with bayonets post-mortem i guess draga was basically disemboweled somebody picked her up and like threw her over the balcony and like her body crashed into the garden and it was just like a like

the the uh the court barber who was also the uh you know the role of de facto corner Like, he said that it was, uh, he said, like, what was done to this woman was just, like, horrific. Supposedly Alexander, uh, when, uh, they tried, when they went, they went to de-frenchrate his body, too, Alexander's hand gripped, uh, a railing, abutting the, uh, balcony. It wasn't clear if this was some sort of rigor, mortise response, or he was still alive. But, uh, one of the one of the one of the one of the one of the officers pulled a dagger chopped his fingers off and then like threw him over as well um it uh so this wasn't just uh this wasn't just a regicide it was like i mean they treated these people with like utter contempt you know like it they to be shot you know then had your corks desecrated you know and then to be dumb slimy with gore basically naked you know like in

into a you know over over a over a balcony where you know you can be viewed by all and sundry and you know the you know in the early morning sun is pretty pretty horrific um

now what these conspirators did um was they immediately they immediately turned power over to an all party provisional government, okay? Parliament was reconvened. Petar,

Karadjvich, he was called back from exile, you know, and he was he was touted, you know, as a returning hero. You know, the Constitution of 1888, which had been drafted,

you know, with high hopes of parliamentarians, but it had never really been implemented. It basically, it basically looks something like the Weimar Constitution in terms of the power of the power of the parliamentary majority

it was renamed the Constitution in 1903 you know the belief was that like you know the problem of a of dynastic rivalry was resolved you know not just

you know not not just because Alexander and Dragha were killed and not just because you know power had been returned to the people but Carajore Devich

he was the last Karadevich air he spent most of his life in France in Switzerland he'd been to Germany he quoted John Stuart Mill like he translated on liberty into Serbore

Croatian, you know, he was holding himself out as like this big liberal, you know, like, I'm here before, and I'm not, I'm not here to, you know, take us back to, you know, to, you know, the dark days of, you know, when, when, when, either intriguing of our enemies or

occupation by, by the Ottomans, you know, called for, you know, the suppression of liberties and in the interest of, you know, our survival politically and otherwise um but this caused problems and these problems endured uh perennially um and interestingly uh on the eve of uh barbarosa something similar transpired and an opportune moment within this series i'll get into that but

If you create a parliamentary democracy, but you do it because a cadre of radicals murders the king, and subsequently this cadre who committed this regicide, they take up key positions in the Apparensive State, you're left with a situation where there's always the understanding that there's a cadre around whom government orbits who's willing to affect a veto by homicide, okay? This isn't a situation like Schmidt talks about, you know, where there's a safeguard within the Constitution that if the constitutional order unravels, or if the moral consensus breaks down, you know, the monarch or the president, you know,

or the emergency executive, you know, acts outside of the constitutional order in order to impose, you know, a new order, you know, based upon a reconstituted consensus. This is people declaring that, you know, they've righted the ship by violence and now things are going to continue as usual. like existentially that's not an open system

you know and even if the best of intentions invest in the hearts that people are willing to commit regicide the fact of their willingness to undertake those measures changes everything it means nobody is going to truly

oppose you know the trajectory of state as ordained by this de facto inner party you know less they quite literally risk you know their own life and limb in doing so

um the uh one of the one of the people who came to the forefront of not just of the kind of nascent parliamentary system, but also who kind of became the man around who this whole kind of constellation orbited was the leader of the radical party. His name was Nicola Passage. He was an engineering. He was an engineering. He was engineer by trade, and he studied

in Zurich. So, I mean, he was an educated man, okay? From 1904 until the very end of the Great War 1918, he headed 10 cabinets. And

he he was kind of the shadow executive of Serbia. You know, before, during and after, the Sarajevo assassinations in 1914, which we're not going to get into today, but we will get into next time. Now,

Passage was key in in attaching Serbia's fortunes to those of the Russian Empire. Okay. During years in exile, he'd establish conducts in St. Petersburg.

He became a very serious player in Pan Slav circles. From that moment onward, not just in, in terms of his values, but in terms of the trajectory of his policy course,

everything orbited around Russia, okay? The popular base of the party, again, like these were people who were basically Chetna, in the radical party they absolutely

embraced this kind of pan-slavism that due to Russia is like the homeland. You know, like a homeland of like the Slavic race. Okay. Now I understand the context of this, like this wasn't some new thing at all.

Okay. Underpinning the modern idea of unifying all Serbs, like this is not just, at this bears into what happened in the 90s, this bears on what happened in the 90s, too, and we'll get into that. But

we're talking about uniting the Serbs in a Pan-Slavic sort of constitution. Like, we're not, we're not just talking about Serbia and, you know, like, Sloss of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Macedonia. In fact, it bears

no relation related to them, like, map as we know it, of what we think of as Serb lands. Serbian interior minister of one of the of one of the Karajadovich regions

a guy named Garasanan. He sketched out a proposal called program for the national and foreign policy of Serbia. This is literally the Magna Carta of Serb nationalism. The historical template for this

is the empire of Stepan Dusan. Dusan was his official title was emperor and autocrat of the Serbs and Greeks to Bulgarians and Albanians. From 1345 to

1371 AD. Okay, this is when this this was the reign of Dousan, okay, for the purpose of what we're talking about. I think he died in 1380. But following the conquest of Macedonia in November 1345, Dusan proclaimed himself an emperor, and he claimed that he laid claim on the Byzantine imperial inheritance. Okay.

This was very problematic for a lot of reasons. reasons and it also raises questions like in orthodox christianity that i have like no standing to talk about and i also don't know that nuances but in any event um this uh du sands empire at consulate it's Serbia like what we know of is Serbia today all of all of present the albania most of Macedonia central and northern Greece um not bosnia interesting and that was very calculated that owed to what we call in the modern era the nationalities

problem there. But the point is basically it's like the Dusan reigned over what was viewed as this as a

as a as a third Rome you know the concerted Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia you know And that's the Serbian vision. You know, it's not, it's not, it's not just some petted nationalist grievance or something stupid. You know, like, frankly, a lot of, like, modern identitarian movements are.

It's actually incredibly ambitious, and within its own rationality, it makes a lot of sense. Okay. Now, Duson, Duson's Empire, uh, collapsed. Duzon died in 1390 thereabouts. Forgive me. I think I said 1380. Duzon Zembar collapsed after

crushing defeat at the hands of the Turks at the field of black birds, like, which people know colloquially as Kosovo Field in 1889. That's interesting, isn't it? So, like, the restoration of Serbia and also

viewing it as the restoration of Byzantium, you know, and also viewing it as, you know, not as adjacent, but intrinsic to the ambition of, you know, Russia entering the modern age, you know, and preserving the Byzantine faith, as well as, you know, the racial survival of Slavic peoples. I mean, this was a huge thing, okay? Like, it wasn't, and it wasn't just something that, you know, it kind of like a fever to imaginings of crazy radicals or, you know, like old peasant men and ladies, you know, who just kind of like did whatever the patriarch said. Like this was, like serious guys were believed in this. And serious geostrategic thinkers viewed this as basically possible.

You know, this was not a joke, you know. And this brings us to, before I wrap up, I want to touched on, you know, what was the Russian situation at the outbreak of war, World War I? Russia had a terrible logistics problem. You know, they were starved for serviceable rail and, you know, things like this. But their forces in being were 115 infantry and 38 cavalry divisions with close to 8,000 guns. You know, 540, which were howitzers

and 257 heavy field guns. This was a huge standing army. You know, that could be mustered on mobilization. You know, and not for nothing,

and I don't want to get ahead of us, but I've been amazed, particularly I noticed, you know, in 2018, there was a lot of fervor about, you know, the 100th anniversary of Armist's Day and things like that. I'd see, like, news people, not just locally, like, an MSNBC dive's talking about, like, you know, the Germans starting World War I. The Russians stormed East Prussia. I mean, that, that was the, that, that's, that was the first engagement of the German Empire in the Great War. And when the Russians assaulted, Maximilian von Pritvitz, he was a general oberst, on the ground, he'd served in the Frankl Prussian war with distinction. You know, he was a combat veteran. Um, he, uh, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he was considering a, um, a strategic withdrawal and abandoning his pressure to the Russian army. Um, like, such was the depth of the, of the assault, you know, um, you know, this was, this was the Russian army moving on, uh, on Europe Central, you know, um, um, as, um, as,

it was Hoffman, Ludendorf Hindenberg himself were able to salvage the situation they stopped the Russian assault within about two weeks and

then the stalemate began to set into the east but again I mean this was you know the Russian army overran half of East Prussia you know and

this understanding of Russia as this power that spanned one-fifth of this planet that had basically limitless resource potential

like the United States did and does and that had in Serbia a client regime that was very game that was populated by Marshall people you know that was literally on a on the border of Vienna's gates I mean this is this is what caused World War I man like it you know it's should be obvious to anybody who's at all

serious about the subject but and I mean there were there were great mistakes made in in Berlin and in Vienna no doubt but it's also kind of the other key

and again like I'm going to leave this for next episode but you know we talked at the outset about the French and that I'm kind of never recovering in their in the international psyche from

being soundly defeated by Prussia you know the French entering into this kind of like secret diplomacy with Russia this was catastrophic and the fact that war isn't what Klausovitz says the fact that it does

arrive like the seasons you damn will better let other you damn will better know your potential average there you damn will better let your potential adversaries know what your intentions are in an event of hostilities because it's not a chess game because it's not bounded by

you know it's the rationality of it is only a bounded rationality you know it's deciding like you know you're going to hold you're to keep your cars close to the chest you know until a mobilization order comes down and then you're going to swoop in and alter the paradigm I mean that that's a recipe for disaster you know like these things aren't just rational

processes unfolding you know the only, like, diplomacy of the alliance kind is only valuable insofar as that there's total information awareness on the part of the adversary in terms of your willingness to go to war. You know, I mean, it's like, it's all of these things. But, and admittedly, you know, my sim of the kind of first, last and always is with Germany as like a people and a culture but you can't

you know the the Habsburg Empire the Russian Empire and Serbia that's why this war happened you know it wasn't and again this isn't like a signing like fault or war guilds because that's nonsense but this idea that you know

it was it was you know the intrigues of the irritances Germans or something that caused this doesn't make any sense but I'm I'm going to leave it at that for today, because I'm not feeling great, and I feel like we covered a lot, even though it's just short of an hour. But we'll, I realize this was like a lot of background stuff.

Like, we'll get into the advent of hostilities in the next episode, because I know that's what people actually want to hear about probably, but it wouldn't have made any sense without the context. Let me ask you something about war guilt. War guilt seems to be, it seems to be, It seems to be a modern, something that's modern. Where did that really start, in your opinion? I think the origins of it are in stuff.

I think it's intrinsic to enlightenment thinking, especially thinkers like Grotius, but also, you know, it's intrinsic to the kind of logic of uh that derived from hobbs you know um and lock and uh in pain like this idea that like discrete decision making uh is you know the cause of political events because like from there then it's like oh well obviously you know if you allow a war to happen it's because you know you weren't acting reasonably i think that was i mean i think that's the foundation of it like because the internal logic of capital of liberalism

refuses to accept that warfare is part of the human condition in terms of when it began in terms of when when people began applying it as this kind of like contrived remedial measure that only really happened in the 20th century and people forget you know what the radical Republicans did to the south like Lincoln had said we're not we're not going to punish the south

you know and after the cessation of hostilities you know that's what grant said like we're not you know we're we're not we're not we're not we're not we're not we're not treat the south you know like like our mortal enemies or something under occupation like the murder of lincoln uh you know the uh the show trial impeachment of johnson you know the ascendancy of these of these of these crazy elements is what facilitated reconstruction you know because even in the even in the even the way of the work with the states like that wasn't That wasn't initially with anybody's contemplation. And I think you'd be hard for us to find precedent outside of the 20th century, in my opinion. You know, and it's also notable. That's one of the reasons Americans were disgusted by the end of World War I. And Wilson wasn't a good president. Wilson was a flawed man.

But, you know, Wilson's 14 points said we're not going to punch. is Germany. Wilson didn't want the reparations regime. Wilson didn't want a starvation blockade. Like the fact that, you know, uh, he was just waved off and mocked, you know, and the British and the French

set about, you know, to, you know, to kind of like pick apart the German Empire and, in, and, and, uh, and, uh, and it poses kind of like genocidal regime on Germany. Like, Americans were disgusted by that. They're like, why, why we go to war? Like, make, to make, to make, make, to make Englishman rich and to, you know, let the French swagger around, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, it's just fucking garbage, you know, um, like, it's not to say, like, the American sentiment before that about World War I was, like, good or something, okay?

But my point is that, um, people, Americans viewed World War I as the country having been duped, you know, that, you know, bankers and, uh, and Anglophone, uh, you know, kind of, um, Blue Blood types who viewed the whole thing as a game, you know, manipulating policy, you know, to their own benefits, you know, like nobody, like nobody, like nobody like nobody like nobody like nobody like nobody like nobody like nobody like nobody started this war. You know, and it was, it was viewed as an incredibly cynical kind of rationale for a lot of really gross abuses. All right. Well, do your plugs and we'll, we'll get out of here. Awesome, awesome episode by the way. Great information. Great. background on that yeah no thank you yeah like i said i'm not feeling great so i was kind of worried i might not perform up to far um you can always find me at thomas seven seven seven seven dot com it's number seven h m as seven seven seven seven dot com i'm on x at real capital r e a l underscore uh number seven HMAS 777. You can find my podcast

and some of my longer form stuff on Substack. It's a real Thomas 7777.7.com. You can find me on Tgram. You know, I'm working on some

I'm working on some book manuscripts. You know, I got all kinds of stuff going on that I will plug on the website and on X I have a YouTube channel is not populated my content yet but it's coming in the next few weeks it's Thomas TV

number seven HMAS space TV please check that out subscribe it'll be some fire stuff there soon I promise that's all I got all right man as always appreciate it until the next time yeah thank you Pete

Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Piquino show. I'm here with Thomas 777 for Part 777. Did I say four sevens? For part two of the World War I series. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm doing well, thank you. Today, what I want to talk about, I want to talk about misconceptions,

not just about the strategic landscape as it existed in the decades prior to the Great War, But specifically, the transfer of power from consular Bismarck, you know, to various successors, all of whom really until Holvig, were very much subjugated to the will of the emperor, of the Kaiser, okay? And this was not a good thing. You know, we talked about briefly, the man of Kaiser Wilhelm, he was. It was very much a brutish person, you know, and this was this was lampooned to full effect by, you know, allied media and things. But it's an oversimplification to just talk about, oh, the man Wilhelm, you know, he

sabotaged what was an imperfect but, you know, workable paradigm of conflict resolution on the continent. Okay, that's not the case at all. and this idea that, again, that London and Berlin were just at permanent loggerheads, that's history through the lens of, of 1939, frankly. Okay, as is this idea that America and the U.K. are simply, you know, axiomatically allied. And there's some just, you know, to historical trajectories and, you know, supposedly shared values, that this is just some immutable thing.

Like, that's not the case at all either. One of the reasons the Great War happened is because outcomes were not things that had been in the contemplation of strategic planners, because as it developed, like, what developed and, like, the deeper paradigm that developed within the general balance of power, it seemed incredibly unlikely that these things would happen. Okay. um really the only really the only um really the only um really the only conflict dyed that was predictable was that you know between germany and france because that's perennial okay um and that agree to which the french political culture was animated by uh you know defeat in in the 30 years war or not that Jesus Christ I'm in my mind in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. And they agree to which, you know, Germany retaining Alsace Lorraine and, you know, some of these other territories that arguably are, you know, ethnographically and historically French, you know, that was obviously not any surprise that, you know, in the early 20th century, a state of general war emerged between, the two great continental powers but the way in which it developed and the alliance structure that it replaced the order that existed until 1890 was very strange and not particularly rational outside of

the discrete moment at which hostilities ensued um you know and like we talked about i i don't want to belabor points to death but you know um speaking of the frango prussian war germany hadn't fought a war in decades since you know at the onset of hostilities so this this idea that you know germany's this irritantous power animated by militarism or you know the caricature of the the prussian martinet who you know has the ear of the Kaiser who himself is this militant militaristic brute i mean it doesn't really bear out you know it's like oh you can't you can't be uh you can't be a a militarist culture animated by sunderveg if you never fight wars i mean that just doesn't you know um bear out

and finally um what should be inarguable i mean like we discussed in episode one The 20th century in power political terms to literally orbit it around Russia. And again, it's not like assigning war guilt or something. We don't do that here. We're serious people who deal with history in a serious capacity. But the emergence of superpowers and in the case of Europe, obviously,

first and foremost in existential terms, what concerned them was emergence of Russia as a superpower. I mean, this is what, this was kind of the axial pivot around which all events of a power political nature orbited. This idea just on its face that, you know, Germany, which is a small country, which at the time, you know, had less than half the population that America did before it, at least before it assimilated, you know, the Volkdeutsch in Austria and the sedentian land, you know, this country of, you know, like 70 million people that, you know, is, for all practical purposes, landlocked, you know, and has to import most of its essential commodities such that it can be strangled by an embargo,

as was the case. Like this idea that, you know, Germany was this nascent superpower that, you know, the world collectively feared. I mean, that's really kind of ridiculous. Like, make no mistake, what was in the contemplation of people like Bismarck in a long view kind of way, like the measures that he considered to be essential, like when he was during his long tenure as consular, he wasn't pursuing some superpower strategy

in immediate tactical terms, but the things he was doing and the alliance structure that he created and it's not overstating the case to suggest that he himself created it. He was one of the greatest statesmen that ever lived in any epoch. You know, it was obvious to anybody who understood the German situation that Europe would have to become a superpower or perish at some point. Okay, and obviously that was what was in the contemplation of Adolf Hitler, a generation later. but as as mobilization potential was in 1914, that's ridiculous.

It's sort of suggests that anybody viewed the newly united Germany as a nascent superpower that within years would be able to project power on the order of the United States or Russia potentially. That's utterly absurd. But today, next episode, we're going to get into the onset of hostilities and the immediate catalyst for that. And also, like, we'll get into the culture, the Habs for Empire, too, because that's important. And I think it's fascinating. People ask me a lot, because we discuss, you know, historical topics and things. You know, like, it was, I think it's not people's minds, too, because in one of the later

episodes of a better call Saul, like Saul asked Mike Urban Trout, like, where he'd go if you had a time machine, you know, and, you know, people ask me, like, where would you have got to get a time machine? I think, I think they're assuming I'd say, you know, the Old West or the Third Reich or something. I mean, frankly, like, I'd go to Pericles, Athens, and I'd go to Habsburg, Vienna in, like, the close of that 19th century. It was just like this Baroque, like, almost like,

fairy tale kind of place, you know, sort of like the zenith of continental optics and things. Which is, like, on the one hand, kind of like exotic and compelling, but on the other hand, you know, unmistakably European. This is incredibly cool. And Franz Joseph, like I said, I think, along with the whole vague, he's kind of the most sympathetic statesmen of the war years. But forgive me if that was a scattershot sort of introduction.

There's a lot here. But speaking of the Francoise War and, you know, the emergency Germany as a United State like what was the strategic landscape after 1870 obviously I mean this put

Germany in France on a permanent on a permanently strained if not outright hostile footing the sheer scale of German victory over the French army that traumatized

French elites and other things and it's something that nobody predicted even the most optimistic war planners and the prussian general staff they you know they they they were gamed extensively um you know and uh such that uh such that military outcomes can be modeled they had they very much were at depth at that and even they didn't predict you know kind of the scope and depth of of of uh of the destruction that the the the you know the the Prussian army was able to, was able to issue to France. The, and again, like the annexation of Alsace, Lorraine, Bismarck had actually, he'd only reluctantly abided that because he viewed it as not particularly strategically important.

The military and the general staff especially, they strongly advocated for it and they made it a point that they were not willing to concede on. so Bismar reluctantly accepted it. And this will become a theme. Bismarck found himself increasingly at loggerheads with the general staff and really with the foreign policy establishment, which in those days was very much, it's kind of a chicken-of-the-egg thing, like whether the military and the foreign ministry was just kind of in the pie. pocket of the Kaiser. Wilhelm, you know, when he took the reins of power in 1888, or if Wilhelm was something of a cipher,

aside from all this kind of bullying tendencies, who sort of like, it just was affecting a role and it sort of taken on, you know, at least in an affected way, the kind of trappings of the general staff's worldview. I mean, it's, who knows, and it's neither here or there, but there was a, there was a constellation of forces of ring against Bismarck at what was arguably the zenith of his power, which is interesting for a lot of reasons, but it also, it goes to, I've always thought the German system in those days was a lot more like ours was in those days than it was like, France or the UK. And that was kind of the traditional view, too.

You know, the Germany until 1945, you know, true sovereignty is vested in the executive. There was a kind of hard-coated separation of powers that made it very, very clear and unsubtle. you know what expressly delegated

powers were the respective branches of the government but that had the effect of you know kind of institutionalizing hostility in a way that in more kind of fluid systems that's not the case

but that's one of the things that made Germany effective I mean just the same as the United States at least after after um 1865 1870 or so but um regardless of like to bring it back regardless of regardless of whether the french were truly disadvantaged by the occupation of ls s lorraine it didn't matter because this is this was a sore point for them and if nothing else it was something that was invoked to inflame public

opinion, okay? And something that's ironic and peculiar about France is that the French should have been the last people, whether we're talking about the friend, we're talking about the body politic, or whether we're talking about elites, they should have been the last people who like clung to this like myth

of petty nationalism. I mean, they I mean, they virtually re-shaped Europe, literally in her own image, you know, under a francophone emperor, you know, this kind of return to this kind of petty cult of the national state and this kind of like utter refusal to abide an understanding of a European order wherein the constituent elements like and, you know, various chauvinisms therein have no place. if or the other reason that

you know as a matter of existential survival you know the 20th century a living 20th century wouldn't abide it it it was catastrophically self-defeating that the French kind of like took on this like this kind of irrational like nationalism

and again too it's it's strangely at odds with what was then you know like their own basically living memory but such that it was though, after 1871, France essentially undertook every possible angle to contain Germany.

I use scare quotes because under Bismarck's tenure, again, like, Germany was, if anything, you know, being unreasonably conciliatory, you know, kind of on every frontier in which it, you know, in which it protected power, you know, as a matter of, as a matter of existential necessity. Now, realizing the reality of this, some people have argued that the European international system that came into existence, you know, largely again, with Bismarger's the architect, that that system itself, like programmed into it was like a Franco German enmity and what I mean by that will become clear in a minute and I don't disagree

with that but again Bismarck or any other statesman takes a strategic landscape as it exists okay um it's an intrinsically reactive enterprise you know um

one can't really you can finesse enmity and you can incentivize abandoning it as a matter of diplomacy you can't really generate it where it doesn't already exist

you know and that's that's kind of that's kind of politics 101 there's probably some Machiavellians who disagree with me but that's a whole other that's a whole other

show if we wanted to delve into that Um, the, uh, the most, uh, the most attractive potential ally for France, obviously, and really its only option would be, uh, would, would be the Russian Empire. Um, J.B. Eustace, who was, uh, the ambassador to Paris um his tenure was over by 1897 but i think it was in his memoirs he said on in power political terms french quote had one of two courses open either to be self-reliant and independent falling back on our own resources to brave every peril or crisis or to seek to make an alliance with russia the only power accessible to her and that doesn't really really

overstate the case um however the specter of a franco-russian alliance presents a catastrophic quagmire for germany in all times um because the only way then to prevent a two-front war is uh is to attach russia to an alliance of its own whatever like you know for Berlin to do so. But that itself is a dangerous enterprise potentially because what's to prevent

what's to prevent Germany's power political capability from de facto being completely absorbed into that of Russia, not just based on mobilization potential or material considerations, but political

ones as well. You know, in such an alliance or even something short of an alliance, you know, a non-aggression treaty or some kind of a limited declaration of rights between the due powers, any kind of deployment, any kind of change Germany makes

in its military disposition unless it's clearly and nakedly a response to a threat posed by France in the Western Theater, or what is to be the Western Theater, is going to be perceived by Russia as an existentially hostile at. Bismarck's solution to this was the Dreykaiser Bund. Known more commonly as the Three Emperors League.

The signatories were the German Empire. Austria, Hungary, and Russia in 1873. What was the Drake Heiserbund? It was an alliance between the Germans, the Russians, and the Habsburg empires, an effect from 1873 to 1887. And again, this was, from 1870 to 1890, Bismarck was fully at the helm of German foreign policies. So that's something to keep in mind, like again, when I say this was, was bismarck's solution it was his solution not the general staff not the emperor um

bismarer realized that any consolation of the hapsburg empire of france and russia um could crush germany if any two of them were allied okay the possibility of the hapsburg empire and germany going to war was remote but that owed to who was sitting on the throne okay that was by no means like a perennial guarantee all right so that's i'm sure that somebody in the comment is going to raise like well why would you think that but um the solution was the ally with two of the three okay and uh obviously for reasons we just discussed any kind of concord with frances off the table um so the solution was this you know league of the three emperors okay I just want to insinuate something

while we're kind of on the topic as we'll see when we get into the relationship between Wilhelm and King George the degree to which royals, when they still wielded sovereign authority, would signal to each other in the decisions they made

and the public statements they issued and the moves they made militarily that can't be overstated and a certain amount of masculine honor and other things entered into this equation and that's one of the things that doomed monarchy to the dustbin in history because by the 20th century you know going to war on grounds of interseen

rivalries and disrespect between royals you know meant mobilizing millions of people and then killing millions of people you know that's not the whole story but that's something that has to be considered and it's not just you know the punitive that's not just some punitive take on that the sociology and the internal logic of that system that system kept the peace really for centuries

you know we remember the catastrophic wars like the 30 years war and these intermittent breakdowns of that system but the things that had been the strength of it became catastrophic weaknesses by you know

by the late modern period so that's important to keep in mind um when people emphasize the hostility like a personal hostility between george and wilhelm it's not that it's not just like you know euros who are like obsessed with you know the the kind of mystique of aristocracy who emphasized that it's a very real thing and it was a causative variable um in uh both direct and indirect capacities but it uh essentially what this three emperors alliance did it was kind of like a declaration of rights as regards sphere of influence it made sure that certain restive and problematic ethnic groups ideally like the polls and the serves would be placated and would be suppressed when need be but it afforded it basically afforded Russia a free hand in deal dealing with, you know, Slavic peoples.

The sticking point, obviously, was the Balkans. Bismar's solution was to give the Habsburg's predominance in the Western Balkans and Russia and the Eastern Balkans, okay, that basically breaks down on, you know, Croatia and the German Habsburg camp, Serbia, obviously with Russia, but like Bosnia, of course, is the sticking point, you know, there are interface areas where, you know, um, such things, it's ridiculous to talk about, you know, finessing things in those terms. I mean, like, by definition, that's what these areas are or places where any kind of consensus, such as that as impossible. Um, there was a second, the first, the first, the first

league of three emperors was, was in effect from 1873 to 78. The second one of the state was in 1881. It only lasted three years. It was renewed in 1884, was allowed elapsed in 1887. And basically the, it owed the, I mean, just irreconcilable conflict of interest between the Hafts Empire

and Russia in the Balkans. I mean, that was that that's an ear, that's a not solvable conundrum, you know, and I mean, then, then is now. Although the, although the bad, although the proverbial and little bad lines are somewhat different.

the uh the second treaty it uh and this isn't just a trivial point of minutia or i mean a minor point of trivia it's uh it's actually important to how the general staff and and how the and how the german emperor came to vizmark the second treaty provided that no territorial change could take place in the Balkans without prior agreement between, you know, the parties, the signatories. It stipulated that Austria, in event of, you know, a critical emergency, war emergency in Bosnia, could annex Bosnia and Herzegovina, at least until the cessation of hostilities. And in the event of war between one party and a great power and not party to the treaty, all signatories

were maintained like friendly status and good offices between each other um now where the rubber meets the road would these trees have been workable in the outbreak of war I'm of the belief in Oliver Wendell Holmes

who a lot of people bash on the right which they shouldn't but uh the few things that he stated about I mean, legal realism has applied to international law. There is no international law. That itself is a fiction. So we're talking, especially

in those days, you know, where, again, like the personage of the monarch, like, you know, carried tremendous force in the actual, you know, conduct of politics. Signing a treaty, such as the Three Emperous Treaty, it was an expression of political will

when you were essentially, like, putting your word, you know, to the express conditions of the treaty. so it indicated you know a clear and present will to pursue peaceful resolutions okay so as a matter of honor as well as a matter of practical security so in that way the idea was that this becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy okay if I want to look at it like that but um I since uh you know since really the since really the 1930s like treaties don't really mean anything You know, so it's important to emphasize that amidst a basic moral consensus, they actually do hold meaning. You know, if not in the traditional sense that we think of as laws within the sovereign, within the parameters of a sovereign polity. But what kind of the last, kind of like the last act. of Bismarckian diplomacy

was what was called the quote, reinsurance treaty. It was only in effect for three years. It's what was devised by Bismarck to, you know,

to quite literally like reinsure the piece, which had been the subject of the three emperors, treaties, which had been allowed to lapse. It,

the treaty provided that both Germany and Russia would remain neutral if the other party became involved with a third great power but that it would not apply if Germany attacked France or if Russia attacked Austria-Hungary. Germany's concession as consideration of the agreement was in agreeing that Bulgaria and what was then Eastern Romalia,

which is now part of Southern Bulgaria, by ceding unconditionally that this was in the Russian sphere of influence and to support any Russian action to keep the Black Sea as its exclusive preserve. Now, when Bismar lost power in 1890, he was sidelined by a constellation of foreign ministry functionaries, including his own son, the Kaiser had come to despise him. And one of the key grievances that was levied was that Bismarck has sold us out to Moscow or St. Petersburg. You know, like he's allowed the Russians to, he's given the Russians to Black Sea, you know, like this, this is peace of the cost of our security because, you know,

Bismarck is, he's facilitating Russia's emergence as a hegemon, okay, and for all practical purposes of superpower, although obviously conceptually people understood that power potential in a basic way, but obviously they wouldn't conceive of it in those ways as a superpower. I mean, they conceptualize it as a hegemon. Now, it was very publicly not renewed by the Kaiser who just Wilhelm

who just you know ascended to the throne he stated very publicly that you know it was too much in Russia's favor it absolutely would not be absolutely should not be renewed but

the actual cancellation of it remains something of an ambiguity something of an ambiguity like there's no like diplomatic statement to Russia formally that like hey you know this is no longer operative we're no longer going to honor it and um that kind of ledgered main by omission that's another thing that really created kind of catastrophic outcomes culminating in the great war you know like we talked about secret diplomacy is totally self-defeating with the exception of very rare iterations of uh of uh of anticipated total war whereby you know you and ally agree essentially that um when war comes and you can say that with confidence because you are planning a surprise attack on your enemy and particularly obviously if nuclear weapons are involved like this

facilitate such things, you know, and your secret ally agrees that, like, they will assault the minute that you do for the purpose of essentially annihilating, like, a third power, okay? But in conventional power politics, it's totally self-defeating to not convey your intention, you know, because, again, capabilities plus intentions are the only considerations in the decision to go to war or to sue for peace, you know, deliberately depriving people at that stage, you know, your potential allies and adversaries alike, of what your intentions are, you're dramatically increasing the possibility of war without any tangible benefit, you know.

but be it as it may Russia saw the writing on the wall they thought they thought Bismarck was dangerously or not Bismarck was dangerously unstable they realized that you know kind of the new culture of the executive branch in Germany

was of a basic hostility to and fear of Russia they realized that they needed they needed a new hedge okay so naturally they made strong overtures to France and

the resulting a Franco-Russian alliance of 1891 to 92 and beyond to, you know, began to take shape. Court historians,

I mean, ones that aren't totally off base, they view the Franco-Russian alliance as an abject disaster and one of the long-term causes of World War I. And I basically

agree with that. It's not the proximate cause. though and uh there's too many intervening causes subsequent that facilitated the war in proximate causal terms just taken by itself um and we'll get into the view from London on all of this in a minute but um on its own terms if uh if the UK had referred used, you know, to abide any kind of strategic concord

with Moscow and Paris, and it either remained neutral or allied itself with Berlin, which as we'll see, was a very real possibility that would not have had the effect that it did. So I think it's important to qualify analysis of the

Franco-Russian treaty through that lens. Now, I think it's important to summarize a bit that agree to which Bismarck's policy model, which wasn't just an enduring kind of power political paradigm that served Germany's short and long-term interests, but this was truly the United Germany's first kind of foreign policy orientation. it was really the founding orientation um so to say that it's impactful in discussing the formative contribution to uh the balance of power as it stood in the decade for the great war can't be overstated um the nuances of balance of power.

And he also had a tremendous understanding of military affairs. That's very rare. And Germany produced guys like that pretty consistently. You know, Klausovitz, obviously, first among them.

I part ways with his ontology, but the genius of him, and it's kind of rare it's kind of rare psychological makeup is noteworthy. Bismarck himself stated in the summer of 1877

he said that his goal was to create quote an overall political situation in which all powers except France need us and are kept by virtue of mutual relations as far as possible from forming coalitions against us.

So essentially, what Bismarck was doing was he ended into an alliance with every major power on the continent and even some adjacent lesser powers that, you know, had outsized influence owing to accidents of geostrategic situation. He found a way, essentially, to make it cost prohibitive for states to ally against Germany. you know even if there was a short-term benefit to doing so um and to be able to sustain that for years let alone decades is incredible um i know i know a lot of kind of traditional realists um in political theory i mean they they abide mr kissinger's example and and they they view metternich is like the greatest statement of all time to me it's Bismarck and

hands down. It's not even close okay if people want to suggest that's a conceptual bias of mine. I mean, okay I mean I now or any other time if anybody wants to discuss or debate a point of interest

in these series we do, I'm happy to do it but I don't think I don't think putting Bismarck on top as the you know most brilliant diplomat of all time

or a you know power political statesmen of all time I don't think that's really controversial opinion but at the same time it's not like I'm hanging around

mainstream academe so maybe it is but the other key to Bismarck's foreign policy is he went out of his way not to alienate London and he stayed completely out of the rush for colonial possessions in Africa and the Pacific.

Now again, this was a sticking point with the Kaiser and the general staff, but, I mean, it was twofold. First of all, not developing a blue water naval capability and not demanding colonies that that wasn't that wasn't really Germany sacrificing to finesse the UK

Germany's path forward was to become a superpower Germany becomes a superpower Germany becomes a superpower by uniting Europe you know not not by cabinet warring and not by demanding you know concessions in sub-Saharan Africa you know that was that was the thinking of the last century so I mean that's important to keep in mind

you know it's like what what um like what I mean I mean, Hitler made that point, too. Like, what does Germany want with colonies? You know, um, and that's, uh, you know,

uh, I made the point, not just in, our first episode of this series, but, you know, during the series on, on Churchill's war and the Second World War,

this idea that the English hated Germany or, like, this bizarre kind of like, bigotry of people like vansart of the germans of this like alien hostile race that is dangerous and they're like the huns like nobody thought that way and um the uk is a is a highly diverse place you know there there's a constellation of many different kinds of indigenous people there you know what you're talking about welsh scots irish english and among the english you know there's indigenous elements,

there's Anglesaxons, there's people who basically, you know, are, or Latin, you know, or Latinized, you know, Norsemen or what have you, but the, there's a tremendous

Germanic strain in the English culture, okay, and people recognize that. And plus two, just owning a geography, you know, England's traditional enemy was France, you know, and it's literally the UK's neighbor, albeit there's the channel that, you know, provides a kind of natural moat.

But, you know, aside from the, aside of the kind of sociological and cultural aspects of any, of any conflict paradigm between England and Germany, it's France who, they need a natural hedge against, not the Germans. You know, that doesn't really make any sense. So the way to look at Bismarg is twofold. I mean, yes, he aimed to avoid direct confrontations with potential adversaries. Well, at the same time, stoking hostilities between those adversaries. do like a complicated net of

diplomacy and um ledgerd main when called for but these things also I mean this is this is what dovetailed perfectly with with Germany's power political needs and it's

and what it needed to prioritize an existential term to provide for its own security um in uh he publicly maintained repeatedly in the Reichstag most directly

in around Christmas 1876 when challenged on the Balkan situation or the Balkan question he said quote or the Balkans are quote not worth the healthy bones of one Pomeranian musketeer now that was not realistic

but the appearance of of balanced diplomacy was maintained. And that was what was key. Okay. He didn't issue some belligerent statement, you know, saying that there's a line in the sand, if any dirty slob crosses it, you know, into

into Croatia or, you know, across the or it comes to the inside of the Bosian frontier, you know, like, we're going to, you know, we're going to, we're going to go to war to, you know, defend our vocalization in the Hasbrook Empire um so i mean again like he was the the point the point's not the merit of that statement or realistic that statement was it was what was he telegraphing the

russians and um the british for that matter too the the british interest in the in the balkans is obviously totally different than that are the russians but um if you can't move in the balkans you can't dominate the Mediterranean. But another big coup when the Russians went to war with the Ottomans

1877 78 that triggered a major international crisis which on the one hand was remote from Europe in terms of the theater in which it occurred, but Europe was impacted in power political terms, directly and indirectly in all kinds of ways.

Bismarck insinuated himself as a mediator over the post-war settlement, and he made absolutely no, he sought no direct concessions for Germany, and he began to hail as this great kind of like man of peace, you know, like, it was a... he telegraphed essentially that European peace and German security were synonymous. And again, this was a perception. Whether you believe it or not, it's not important. Like people kind of accepted, not kind of, people did accept this, this view. You know, that's how they read, that's how they read the outcome as having developed, okay?

And this was possible because, again, by the end, by the last three years of Bismarck's 10 or 1886, to 1890 Germany was tied by express agreements of one form or another whether they were direct military treaties

or whether they were you know treaties facilitating deep interdependence on trade or whether they were you know agreements declaring maritime rights

Germany was tied one way or another to virtually every continental power. The triple most significantly of this era was the triple alliance between Germany Austria-Hungary

and Italy it was codified on May 20th 1882. It provided that Germany and the Hathburg Empire would resist Italy was attacked by France. quote without provocation, in turn, Italy would assist Germany if attacked by France,

and in the event of a war between the Hasbrook Empire and Russia, Italy declared neutrality. Now, the ultimate ambition of this, his Marx ambition, was to bring the UK into this triple alliance, okay? and that always that always was the intended master's stroke of German diplomacy that's what Ribbentrop was trying to accomplish decades later okay and

that wasn't outlandish and I'll get into why in a minute Bismarer was never able to realize that but what he did do the establishment of what was called the Mediterranean agreements, the practical effect was creating an adjacent security concord with the UK. Okay. And that coupled with the reinsurance treaty with Russia when it was in effect that had the effect of freezing France out of any potential anti-German coalition.

Because for it to attempt to develop such competing alliance, like any potential party signatories, it would be a direct violation and frustration of purpose of the expressed conditions of a treaty that was in effect with Germany. And in material terms, it would be self-defeating in various ways. You know, owing to the underlying catalyst for these treaties with those countries that had provided them tangible benefits. okay so again i i uh can't emphasize enough and like what a master statesman bismarck was specifically the mediterranean agreements in effect it recognized the status quo in the mediterranean sea okay um one of the objectives was the halt the expansion of the russian empire

in the Balkans, at least in its ability to dominate the sea lanes and deploy a wartime naval contingent there. It was obvious that the Russians wanted to control the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, okay? And this is why they were always at loggerheads with the Ottoman Empire. This also, obviously, so not only did it, you know, allow the UK to kind of retain its... naval hegemony it preserved it also served to assure the survival at least in immediate terms of the iran empire and and germany relied upon that for uh its global uh security uh ambitions and it also it protected the italian interest from from france and there was uh from uh from uh immediately out of the frango prussian war until really until uh 1945 uh there was profound enmity

of a power political in nature between italy and france and like the the four powers pact uh which was the the third rikes kind of first effort at establishing um like a stabilizing um security paradigm on the continent the subtext of that was an understanding that France and Italy can be played off against one another essentially to the benefit of the German

Reich but that's another issue but the and the benefit of there's a course you know again it didn't just situate it didn't just protect Germany in existential terms.

It's situated Bismarck as literally the architect of the European peace. And it brought the UK into an adjacent situation, if not an alliance with Berlin on key matters of national and regional security. This was tested by what we'd think of in America as small wars, but in Europe, small wars become big wars very rapidly. There was a series of crises in Bulgaria, the most critical of which, in the mid-1880s, a Bulgarian-era dentist movement seized Eastern Romania, which was then under

Ottoman rule direct Ottoman rule and the answer creation of a greater Bulgaria the Russian government opposed this interestingly like despite how tight the Russians claim to be with all of the eastern and southern Slavs like they

when those interests clash in a direct capacity you know that that sort of claimed the universal brotherhood of of Byzantium or whatever. Like, I'm not trying to be flipping or mean, but it, you know, these things seem to like rapidly deteriorate and lose their significance. But the, you know, this is a prime example of that the, it, it brought Bulgaria closer to the Bosporus and Constantinople, both coveted by Russia. And the last thing the Russians wanted with some lesser power, you know, to be capable of kind of like brokering benefits.

by playing both, you know, the Ottoman Empire and Russia, you know, not even just against one another, but, you know, just by the ability to deprive them of strategic objectives that both correctly deemed essential. The, this was, the problem came in, the British government, you know, was constantly at odds with the Russian Empire in Central Asia during this period. It immediately ordered its consuls to recognize the new Bulgarian regime. And then finally, the Serbs invaded Bulgaria in November 1885, and this like ill-fated kind of Byzantine. crusade. The Serbs were

beaten back, but then the Hasbury Army had intervened to prevent the Bulgarians from occupying Belgrade. So this potentially could have deteriorated into a situation such as that which touched off the Great War.

I mean, obviously, that's, I assume people realize that's where I'm going. The compromise that was that followed though um it uh bismarck was able to finesse the russians into agreeing a uh a a personal union of the monarchy between the northern and southern ottoman parts of the country um as well as a guarantee that

there'd be no direct Russian intervention um you know short of uh That which was, you know, precipitated by, you know, an attack on Russia herself. And essentially, again, like, Bismarck was only able to accomplish things like this because of, like, the inherent, like, the inherent confidence, not just in his abilities, but in his integrity as a statesman and his, his, the perceived personal honor that prevented him from making hash with what their to for, albeit in the bounded terms of a real politic, was, you know, the moral consensus. I can't, I can't only think of anyone else in living memory, like a single man was able to, you know, kind of like pull off that many, that many coups.

But the, uh, what this did of the effect of, though, um, the Pan-Slavic press, uh, which had great cachet in places like Serbia. They started casting Germany as these, you know, kind of like highly racialized aggressors who would intervene to, you know, basically as a guardian of like Austrian-Volkdeuts interest in the Balkans,

you know, like regardless of, you know, the competing in legitimate rights of the nationalities, like, you know, who are not vocdeuts or adjacent. allies and that kind of thing became just kind of like mainstream Russian opinion by the outset of World War I or by the evil World War I

okay the degree to which that was a spontaneous and deeply felt sentiment as opposed to something that was exploited because there already was like kind of lore in literature in extremist circles that suggested that narrative

you could argue that either way, but that was not within the contemplation of most people and certainly not within, you know, Russian Tsarist circles at that time. I can tell you that. And part of this out again, Bismarck went into full diplomacy mode and again aimed to seek good offices with Russia at all costs and try and mute. conflicts of interest at all costs and you know reiterate guarantees of you know the impossibility

of war between Germany and Russia and things like this um you know and that largely I mean that largely I mean that did hold until until Bismarck was forced out um now again uh

like we said not everybody in Berlin was convinced to the wisdom of the Bismarckian

course especially given you know the aggressive tone of the Slavic press subsequent the Bulgarian crisis Bismarck's son

Herbert he was the secretary of state for the foreign office he was in what became like Bismarck's role for practical purposes okay He basically said in public, you know, my father's allowing the Russians to disrespect us.

You know, he said the latest rounded trees to Russia. He's like, you know, if the worst came to worse, we could probably, we might keep Russia at bay for a matter of weeks. Within the military, a real sense of existential dread, if not paranoia, developed. There was guys in the general staff who started calling for a preventative. of war on the Russian Empire, okay, and these guys very much got the ear of the Kaiser, okay, and this being the core of the anti-Bismarck faction. You know, now again, this was a very misguided sensibility, you know, this idea in 1890 of some among the general staff and, you know, perhaps.

and the contemplation of the Kaiser himself, this idea that, you know, we should preemptively assault Russia and just knock it out for all time for clearing the possibility of a two-front war and then, you know, Europe belongs to us and where Napoleon failed, we succeed. This viewpoint was not what went out, okay?

I want to make that clear. That sensibility yeah, I believe among the Prussian general, I believe among the general staff was Prussian dominated. I believe among a lot of a lot of loyalists of the emperor

there was a sense of that and there was a sense of Bismarck as a weak intriguer who was more interested in personal clout than the existential security of Germany and the protection of the Germans as a race and a people.

but again, this idea that there's close to 25 years intervening between Bismarck's dismissal and

the onset of hostilities. So, this idea that a radicalite general staff and the crazy German emperor just like made this happen immediately after sandbagging Bismarck, that's

not right. That's totally off base. The big critics of, in more moderate circles, you want to look at it that way, who came out against Bismarck, because it was something of a pile on, as often is the case, you know, when a once-beloved statement is unceremoniously dismissed.

I mean, the basic rebuttal to the Bismarck paradigm was like why you know why why why why do germany have to on the one hand undertake to protect austria-hungary but on the other hand is to make all these concessions you know why why do we always need to be hedging and balancing you know nor their power as to behave like this you know like why why can't you know pursue a peace through strength orientation you know zealously and violently defend what's ours when necessary And, you know, unqualifiedly, unashamedly, you know, pursue a course of benevolent when required self-interest on the world stage. And, of course, the response to that would be, you know, the geostrategic situation is what it is.

and it's accidental this is the reality of German political life because Germany was bordered by two great powers for all practical purposes that's why but this was the climate that

emerged Bismar's successor as Consler was a Leo von Caprivi and he the reinsurance treaty you know unceremoniously lapsed on deliberately you know on his watch and again and as we raised a moment ago um the the Russians weren't informed any official capacity of its rescission it was just this kind of like it was just a kind of like increasingly ominous sort of like coldness like emanating from

official quarters in Berlin. And I'm not, I'm not trying to be impunitive against the Kaiser Reich or something. I, you know, I've got great sympathy for Germany in all times, and I think anybody who follows us should know that. But the, um, it's also, you know, um, is Aura Alexander, the third, the tragedy of, you know, of Nicholas, the second of his family, kind of overshadows Alexander. He was not a particularly palatable ally for the French, and he was, he was quite belligerent. It's an interesting question. Had he survived or had even succeeded by a man,

of similar disposition if France and Russia could have ever reached any kind of real concord. On some questions, Russian and French interests were literally diametrically opposed.

A French standing policy was to block any Russian claim or design on the Turkish straits that would ultimately compromise France's both of this political influence and its ability to deploy it in the eastern Mediterranean, for example, okay? And superficially, it was difficult to see why Russia would want to compromise their good relations with Germany. I mean, admittedly, after Bismarck's dismissal, they were not as robustly amiable as they had been,

but they certainly were not yet categorically hostile. And, I mean, frankly, at the end of the day, like, the only real kind of sticking point in objective terms between Russia and Berlin was, you know, it was on the status of Balkans and, you know, Russian rivalry and hostility to the Hapsar Empire, you know. But this is why Alexander, he basically turned a deaf year to the Pan-Slavic press. I mean, that never really had the kind of momentum in Russia that it hoped to. But, you know, despite his kind of hardness of heart and his willingness to go to war, you know, for Russian honor and things, you know, he was kind of willing to turn a deaf ear to a lot of this kind of bellicose rhetoric. coming out of Russian quarters and

adjacent and from adjacent you know the media cultures of adjacent nationalities like namely Serbia you know as things kind of deteriorated in the post Bismarck era but I'll wrap this up here in a minute

but what's key what is the key to the Great War to Britain and at least in my opinion I don't think I don't think that can be denied

but to bring it back first so why, given what I just said about this situation in Russia and Alexander's unwillingness to kind of abide this kind of

this kind of emergent, you know, like Neob Byzantine sentiment. Like, why the Russians welcome French overtures in the 1890s towards a security concord, like an official security

concord? It, uh, there was still a pro-German foreign minister in Russia he realized presumably there was some kind of leak

in the German foreign ministry Nikolai Gears or Gears he was the Russian foreign minister he knew that the the reinsurance treaty had had been discussion about it

it had been allowed to be deliberately but it allowed to very deliberately lapse, okay? He approached the German foreign ministry. He offered him improved terms of all kinds, you know, if the treaty could be reinstated and he was greeted with a deafening silence, okay? That, I believe, was kind of the nail in the coffin, or that was what, that was what a heart

in Russia to the possibility of a of a concord of Germany and that's what put them in causing to adopt a footing that made possible you know like a formal alliance of France

like I think of as that might have been only a few years ago I that seemed like a strong case to make for a minor point of interest but frankly there's nothing else okay there's a there's a bill in 1890 which increased the peacetime forces in being of the German army by about 18,000 men.

But, I mean, that's a drop in the bucket, okay? Especially when you're talking about, you know, the potential, the mobilizationation potential of the respective states, you know, Germany and Russia. but some people argue that France had a lot of money France was still very much a lender nation at that time one of the ways they did business with military allies was by extending them loans and credit on very desirable terms

but what really changed everything was Russia believed that the UK was going to join the triple alliance in Germany and the UK were going to dominate the world.

Like I'm not kidding. That's what they thought. The early 1890s was a high point of what appeared to be a true Anglo-German reproachment. There's a Helgo Land-Zanzibar Treaty where the British and the Germans they ceded various African territories.

between each other. Germany was granted the concession of the North Sea Island of Heligoland. St. Petersburg viewed this as a future

base of a Blue Water German Navy that the British were going to utilize to embargo Russia in event of war, like as they managed their holdings in the east with the Royal Navy. when and to give you an idea

this wasn't just the Russians kind of in their fevered imaginings developing a narrative that had no basis in reality crazy as it seems to us because everybody I mean even people who spend time with history in a serious capacity

their view of Anglo-German affairs is so tethered to this like 20th century perspective but when the Kaiser visited London in 1891

and he was greeted like a hero and like one of their racial brethren the morning post said it referred to it referred to it referred to Kaiser's visit

and Germany and the UK is quote friends and allies of ancient friends and allies of ancient standings who quote and quote future threats to European peace will be met by the Union of England's naval strength

and the military power of Germany like people are openly discussing this you know like in in a British media the the French ambassador in St. Petersburg around the same time, that same summer, he apparently advised his counterpart that some kind of reproachment between, you know,

Berlin and London was imminent, you know, that the, that the Germans are going to give Britain like a free hand in the Balkans to do whatever the hell they want, you know, to to keep, to keep Russia permanently out of the Mediterranean and to basically, you know, force them to contend with, you know, not just, not just the Ottomans, but, you know, with like a true military, British military presence in their frontier, like all, all kinds of things like that. And that's what, uh, that's what, uh, what ended up being put to paper, roughly translated it was a series of agreements between Russia and France called the

definition of understanding or definition of understandings and this directly referenced the supposed threat presented by British ascendancy to the Triple Alliance as if not a former member like an adjacent power that was fully allied with Germany so a French Russian military convention followed on formally on the 18th of August, 1892. And then two years later, there's the treaty everyone knows about, which was like the alliance of 1894. But again, it's this, the 1892 predecessor document,

it specifically mentions that, you know, the UK is our enemy and they are now aligned with Germany. So essentially, as we'll see, the alliance that probably more than other caused the great war, you know that between like russia and france it was premised upon the idea that the UK was going to rely with Germany and attack them

like that's like something funny about that but that's absurd you know but it goes to show you how how murky world war one was you know and how its origins are not are not are not uh

are not well understood um I'll wrap up now but I want to include this because I know someone's going to raise it. Benjamin Disraeli, one of his most famous speeches was on February 9th, 1871, for the House of Commons.

This was only three weeks after the official proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, okay? Disraeli, he was reflecting on the Frankoprussian War and the Declaration of the German Empire in this whole speech. Okay.

People grossly misunderstand. understand what he was talking about in his speech. He started by saying that the Francoe-Russian war was, quote, no common war. You know, it wasn't even, like the Crimean War doesn't even measure up with significance. He said that it was a greater political event than the French Revolution because he said, quote, there is not a single diplomatic tradition, which has not been swept away. The balance of power has been totally destroyed. And the country which suffers more and feels the effects of this changed,

is England. He goes on to kind of describe the situation as a stance then, contra before the end of hostilities between France and Prussia. People read this to like a Churchill lens.

They're like, oh, Israel was talking about the German threat. He was not. He was saying that this changes everything. Russia is going to view Germany as its mortal enemy. Russia is an nascent superpower. And we've got to rethink a relationship with Germany and France

in order to meet this challenge. That's fundamentally important. He wasn't talking about, when he's talking about the German Revolution, he's not talking about the threat posed by the new Germany. He's talking about the global consequences of a unified Germany and what this massive Russian state is going to do about it when they modernize. You know, like that is key.

He was not having like a Vance de Tart moment about how like the evil hunt is going to kill us all. you know and that's um like in context what i'm saying is an arguable i know somebody's going to like try and claim otherwise but um we can return to that at some point but i i'm gonna i'm gonna wrap up now because i think there's like a lot there that i put out there um and uh we'll get into the nitty-gritty of the immediate catalyst for the war next time and like you know the battlefield situation as it developed as hostilities jumped off but trust me this background was essentially even if people find it boring otherwise anything subsequent we're going to discuss

does not make any sense. Well, I think you made everything pretty clear. I don't have a question. So give plugs and we'll get out of here. Surely. As always, you can find me on my website. It's Thomas 777.com. That's kind of like a one-stop location for all the things I do.

It's number seven, HMAS 777.com. The podcast, season two is dropping on Halloween. I appreciate everybody being patient for the arrival of fresh content. I'm working hard on the pod. It's time consuming because we're upping our production game. I've also got a whole lot of footage for the channel that's currently being edited. The channel's Thomas TV on YouTube, number seven, HMAS space TV. You can find the pod

in some of my longer form of writing at Substack. It's Real Thomas 777. That's subsdack.com. I'm on X at capital R-E-A-L underscore number seven, H-O-M-A-S-7777. And you can find me on T-Gram and Thomas Graham. That's all I got for now.

All right. I appreciate it, as always. And until the next time. I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanuano show. I haven't talked in a while, Thomas. Yeah. Yeah. It feels a little while.

Yeah, yeah. It's been like 10 days or so. But a lot has happened. We want to get into talking about a continual World War I. But I thought I'd just give you a chance to comment on the news that's happened the past couple days. Yeah, it's, I mean, these developments aren't, surprising to me, and I don't want to take the discussion too far afield in terms of depth and

complexity, but it's important, it's important people to understand that what Israel's unconditional support for the Ukraine war effort, and that support acting as a catalyst for the escalation of hostilities when it happened that that was an extremely tethered in causal terms to the defeat that was issued due America and Israel and in Syria. Okay. And I mean, that was very much a proxy war between, you know, the Russian Federation, Hizbollah, the Syrian Arab Army, America and Israel, and a various constellation of jihadist proxies, okay, as well as some other as well as some other non-state actors like you know they like like like like these Kurdish um malicious and things who uh and that that's a that's a very contrived phenomenon but

i mean they do field men under arms but uh so i encourage people not to treat this in isolation and i don't want to come off like i'm preaching or something so and i don't want to make what sounds like an ideological point, but I will say that, I mean, if people don't have an opinion on power political affairs, I mean, that's fine. But don't, don't pretend to have an opinion and then pretend that

there's just some like brushfire war and you're you know, you've got some like cool-headed perspective by which you quote, don't care about the combat. It's not a question of caring. And when the state of Israel goes to war, considering the reality of of um of political life and of american power and of the zeitgeist and of world order

and the ethical assumptions that underlie its structure since 1945 you kind of like pretend that like israel's a meaningless country and it's meaningless when they go to war okay um and the right the entire rationale for israel's existence um is not what people purport it to be um Ernst Nolte made the point emphatically. And interestingly Martin Vain Creveld who's an Israeli

he stipulated the basic merit of this position. Israel, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich were totally abnormal states. I'm not saying that in like value neutral terms

and okay like they and they also emerged in dialogue with like the causes from where they emerged quickly were in dialogue with

with one another okay and obviously the only one of those states that still exists is Israel but it's not when people talk about Israel is that it's a democracy like it's not at all it just objectively it's not not in like the Aristotelian sense

not in kind of like the the the um in the liberal globalist sense like it is there's nothing in common with with with a normal state okay in terms of it's and i'll talk about like you know the way it's like legislature is structured or something i mean in terms of like it's raised on detra in terms of like um like the underlying mythos of its founding and and what it considers to be like its mandate like on earth to like engage in in high politics okay it's it's not at all remotely um you know like, like Japan or like South Korea or like, you know, some EU state. I mean, it used to be different because it's, it's been socially engineered in discrete ways since the end of the war. But, I mean, you know what I mean. So it's important to keep these things in mind. And when people speak emphatically about, myself included, about what's significant

about this or troubling about this or impactful upon us like I'm not just like saying things I'm not just trying to you know throw shade on on peoples or things I don't like I mean that's not I mean I don't see how this can't be clear to people

but um you know one of the reasons why America has become so insidious is that there's a naked irrationality to the way it behaves. And it has the Zionist perspective It's kind of become more insinuated Into

The policymaking establishment Like you see that more and more You see this with the Ukraine war Like everyone feels about However anyone feels about the Ukraine war Like A rational actor aims to end hostilities

As soon as possible In terms most advantageous Like he doesn't say that He doesn't scream over and over That his enemy is evil and the war must continue in perpetuity. That's irrational. You know, like, we don't fight wars to, like, see how many bodies we can stack up,

or, or so that we can, like, shriek with moral righteousness at people we hate over and over again. Like, that's, that's not, um, that this is basic, uh, this is basic real politic, okay? Um, and there's not military solution as the political problems generally. so there's that. And I will say, too, again, I mean, I know, I mean, if people want to, if people want to be bigots towards Mosulans or Arabs or Persians, I mean, that's pretty lame if you're going to just, like, take on, like, the prejudices of Zionists when you're just like some random guy and, like, the side of you, like, hate people because, I mean, if you think you're cool or that makes you look a badass, I mean, that's pretty fucking basic. But I'm going to be, like, a bigot, man, like, you have a bigot on behalf of your own people, like, not on behalf of Israelis or something. You know, the situation in Gaza, this isn't hyperbole, despite the, or perhaps because of the policy of disengagement in 2005, Gaza's quite literally an open-air prison. Okay, like Rashid Khalidi described it as an iron cage.

Like, these people live in what amounts to a giant open-air concentration camp of source where the deprived of access to. the commodities and resources and the liberty to move about freely in a way that people would really consider unacceptable for any for any other population, I think. Now, I'm not saying you need to feel bad for those people or that you should like cry about that or something, but there's obviously going to be, there's obviously going to be, you know, active hostilities emerging from those conditions, okay? And so pretending that, you know, these people are the epitome of evil for, you know, not being willing

to tolerate that or for identifying the Zionist state who ethnically cleansed their forebearers, which is why they're situated in Gaza as they are. Like, make no mistake. And Israel prely admits that. You know, don't

pretend, don't pretend that your outrage that, you know, like your enemies shoot back. You know, bullets don't only go one way, man. You know, like, you don't don't become an outrage. when like you know there's there's incoming as well as outgoing you know i mean so i find that kind of offensive and i mean frankly like most people have no political opinions and if that's you just like don't pretend to i don't weigh on quantum physics because i don't know about it you know

like just just hold your fucking peace man don't like say things like that some sputtering zionists told you on msnbc i mean i but the um where the rubber meets the road and in kind of war-fighting terms, there's long been a suggestion, and not just by like crazy lecrued guys or by these kinds of corny stratfort types, that at operational level, there's been deep integration between Hamas and Hisbalah, and that the sectarian divide has somewhat been healed in this regard, which, I mean, that raises a lot of me. interesting questions is the degree to which this kind of thing really was being actively stoked somewhat artificially you know during um during um during the iraq education and things and that that's kind

of a different issue but be as it may um Hamas or his bill isn't arguably uh a very very capable infantry element okay um and they they they fought the IDF to a stance so in 2006 And, um, the thing that Hamas is performing as well as it is, at least at company level, um, that would seem to indicate they've gotten their, they've gotten their act together. Um, so that, you know, it's, um, something, um, I mean, the point's been made before, um, you can't, you can't literally be at war with the world. You know, like, Israel is, kind of incredibly managed to make an enemy of literally everybody like Shia, Sunni, Christian, Eloite, you know, Arab Persian, Azeri, and other, I mean,

you can't, you can't, um, like, it's just not feasible. You know, and nobody else thinks like that other than Zionists. Like, I made the point people compare the strategic situation of

South Africa to Israel. And that's not like misguided. They, culturally, historically, in the foundations of these respective states ideologically do not have a lot in common, but in a purely strategic paradigm, they have a lot in common. But, you know, like Clive Dervy Lewis pointed out,

there wasn't just like white people and black people in South America. There's dozens of ethnicities, like some of which the Afrikaners allied with. with, some of which they were actively at war with, some of which they had, you know, some kind of neutral, uh, they found this little neutral footing with, but, um, I mean, this is just pragmatic, okay? And I mean, even in a truly grand apartheid state, like South Africa was, you know, during the kind of long emergency of the Bush War, other than maybe like some unhinged cranks, who didn't hold any real power. Like nobody in South Africa was running around saying that, you know, we will not give one inch and we are at war with everybody else on this continent. I mean, it's just not feasible. I think the Zionist state is going down, not in days or weeks, but I don't see how this, I don't see how this, I don't see how this, I don't see the 20th century ends with Israel insisting that it has a quote, right to exist as this bizarre, like, hyperracialized state that refuses. do abide um you know sacrificing this like artificial majoritarian status of uh of ethnic jews and

nobody else like i don't see how the century ends with that intact you know um and these people in gaza it's to say nothing of these people in the levant in jordan in soudi arabia and Iran like like they're just going to disappear okay I mean you have to like rational people understand like you've got to deal with other people in some basic capacity like even if they're enemies you know like Zionists don't think that way you know like E Michael Jones makes that point a lot like this is the way people the way they think this is the way people thought 10,000 years ago like saying like nobody else is actually human everybody else is always wrong 100% of the time and not just wrong but evil everything I do is correct. like nobody thinks that way like especially not in like war and peace terms like only american israel think that way and um you can't you can't see a policy through i mean that there is no policy there you know it's um it's not uh something that's sustainable so and finally i mean people tell me they hate me and i'm a terrible person all the time but like the big thing now and i don't know how people can still be susceptible

of this stuff. There's some horrible stories circulating about Hamas, like kidnapping and raping women, and, like, make no mistake. Like, sexual violence and horrible stuff related to that, like, happens in every combat zone.

But, when there's these kinds of, like, lurid, pre-made stories that suddenly appear, you know, like, I remember exactly like 33 years ago, Remember the Naira testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Human Rights? Like, Naira was talking about the Iraqi soldiers, like ripping babies out of incubators. But then it turned out Naira was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and she had connection to the royal family.

Like, this whole story was confabulated by some, literally by something like Madison Avenue PR firm. Like, I don't, like, again, you don't need to summarize with Hamas, but saying, I'm a terrible person. and Arabs all need to be exterminated Because on the internet I saw this found footage type horror video Of Arab guys kidnapping pretty girls and raping them Like that's not Rational adults shouldn't think that way

And Even if that kind of thing is 100% documented That's obviously inexcusable But that doesn't sound like shut down conversation On the nuances of the war you know I can I can pull out

horror stories from Vietnam including the incident on Hill 1,92 like I mean did that like shut down all conversation on the Cold War like did it in its epoch

like oh people doing bad things in a war zone you know if you can like the guy who photographs opt for doing it first like wins because he's right like that's

I guess it's incredible to me like you know decades into the you know consumer internet um being basically like ubiquitous like people like still um you can basically like show them a movie and then they'll decide that a political issue is like reducible to like what they saw bad guys doing like on an internet video like i find that incredible but i guess um you know um propaganda is effective because it it doesn't like really take much, you know, other than a kind of rudimentary

level of competency. But that's, I mean, that's just, I forgive me if that wasn't particularly coherent, but that's, like, at a glance, like, that's what I see. And finally, and then we'll get on to, like, the subject at hand for the day, which is the Great War. I,

people here in, not here, people in this situation and, and, um, Gaza they're like saying the same with the things they did like when the Ukraine order had to escalated like

as if there's like some some potential for like catastrophic global escalation like this isn't the 20th century like that's not possible anymore and frankly that's never really possible the 20th century was totally abnormal

and there's not really much you can extrapolate from it in terms of precedent because it's so it was so at odds with what is the status quo generally. You know, I mean, there's not this idea or this paradigm of, you know, the world being

hyper-mobilized on what amounts to hair trigger, nuclear alert at all times, between two camps, and, you know, there being a handful of conflict dyads and such that, you know, and such that integration, interdependence in strategic terms is so deep. You know, that any kind of like brush fire war on the periphery could potentially lead to like a general conflagration and then like nuclear war. That's not possible. That's not politically possible. It's not psychologically possible. The forces in being don't exist. That kind of mobilization paradigm doesn't exist.

I don't even think people know how to do that kind of thing anymore. Okay. Like, I mean in technical terms. Okay. So that's, that's foolish. And we will talk that way. Like, I don't even know what they think like. World War III would entail.

Like the, like the, like the, like the, like the, like the, like the, like the, like the, like the, like the, that, like the, it's gonna, it's gonna lead an assault followed by, like, soviet tank columns and across the fold of gap, like what, it's, it's fucking stupid. Um, um, but yeah, I mean, that's, that's basically, um, you know, but like I said, this shouldn't, this shouldn't, this shouldn't, this shouldn't surprise anybody, um, especially like I said, it's, um, it, it warrants so longer form treatment. either in like essay forum or in like a dedicated pod or stream as to what exactly the relationship is between the Syrian war um you know the us like the design of escalation and ukraine um and um what is happening now um but it's complicated but these things are very much connected okay they're they're not happening in isolation and they're not um you know um there there's a common like causal nexus okay and that's not My pet theory, it's irrebuttable, but that's all I have on, like, the state of the world situation. Your neighbors aren't reading your memes. If you want to counter demoralization where it counts most, your community, you're going to have to bring it into meat space. Get your counter-propaganda gear at mostly peaceful.com, made especially for people who did have breakfast this morning. Mostlypeaceful.com has merch for the dissident right, recovering libertarians, and your

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This message was not approved by the ADL or SPLC. All right. I appreciate that, and I'll probably clip that and release that separately. So people can... Oh, no, no, whatever you want to do, man. Like I said, right away. Yeah, I'm just...

But you get into the war? Not quite yet. And I know people are trying to get the bit for, that but I I don't want to have to backtrack and um and um and and address things that I forgot to kind of flesh out because that I like to and unless it's warranted for not just for narrative purposes but for causal purposes to demonstrate something essential about the events under discussion I like to proceed in linear terms and um like what I'm doing now I'm attempting to create like paint a picture of the strategic paradigm as existed you know at dawn of hostilities in 1914 but also i want to i want to i want to convey like a conceptual picture of you know the the constitution of each country you know like culturally politically um what the like the personalities of of mars and men in executive roles um i think that's fundamentally important and um

we uh we will um next episode we're going to get into the hapsburg empire and we'll segue from there in that episode like into the onset of hostilities but today um we're not quite there yet but i think people will see why i consider this imperative to cover you know as we get deeper into the series and kind of into the dynumois many moons from now but uh as a brief side note we discussed um and then this relates to the way the view from london which we got into in depth last episode okay and this is a point it can't emphasize enough and we got into it a bit in a world war two discussion but the degree to which um the anglo-japanese alliance was the linchpin of world security, like literally, um, specifically in the Pacific. Um, and as an essential feature

of, uh, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of national security strategy, or like imperial strategy, rather, as well as a, um, a guarantor of, you know, um, world stability, like, the significance of the Anglo-Japanese treaty, like, can't be overstated. And the fact that the English just, a abruptly trashed their alliance, literally, you know, not even a generation subsequent, and adopted, like, an enemy footing with the Japanese that completely defies reason,

like in every conceivable sense. But the existence of that alliance, and when it was added to zenith, I think, in terms of, you know, political will as well as, you know, it being kind of fresh the minds of the signatories as an essential feature of, of, you know, the paradigm of a, of a, of a, of a stable, if not lasting piece, um, is, uh, is something I think that's important to convey. And, um, the, uh, like we got into last time, the, the, the core, from Britain's perspective, the core of, of their, like, security problem, after the, the turn of the 20th century was the growth of Russia against its power and influence that's indisputable particularly Russia's ambitions as they were perceived in Asia

China was in in commercial terms was infinitely exponentially more important to Britain than even uh than even Africa okay like potentially okay and Russia posed a direct threat to British interest there okay this was exactly exacerbated by the fact that in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, the Russians had exploited that

as a pretext to insinuate themselves into into garrisons on the Asian mainland. Okay, and this was very much cause for alarm because if you force the British to fight on land, they've got a problem. Okay? That

goes without saying. and the the fact that I mean Russia couldn't rapidly reinforce those elements you know on the Chinese mainland but they could reinforce them and they could do so basically indefinitely

okay albeit the logistical infrastructure wasn't what it was even 20, 30 years subsequent but the point is the British couldn't do it at all okay um it was hard uh and given given given given like just the this the vastness of the russian empire

and this geostrategic location their preponderance of lands forces and like the sheer size of their um forces in being to say nothing to their um you know potential as regarded uh you know trained reserves at least not only trained reserves and men annually you know reaching military age um There was a tremendous vulnerability being exposed here, and it was hard to see how the UK could, if there was a general Russian push in the Far East, like on land, like how the British could resist it. Russia also, I mean, obviously since mid the mid-19th century, it seemed to be pursuing a basically anti-British policy in Central Asia. You know, like the British and the Russians are not friends, you know, like remotely. the the Franco-Russian

alliance that we talked about too I mean that further aggravated the issue but it was also there was a major there was a major concern I mean mightiest the British

Empire seemed I mean the British at this point run beatable on the water but they you know the jewel of their empire was India but if India came under general land assault, there's no way they could defend it.

As we'll see in a minute, we're going to get to the Boer War. You know, there was a very real potential of the British being dragged into kind of like an endless, you know, quagmire in South Africa. I'm speaking of South Africa. You know, this is how, this is, even empires that do everything right, you know, and don't have a kind of suicide moment,

like the UK did a generation later you know they when I say death by thousand costs it doesn't imply like a long and even agonizing process I mean you're going to happen in the blink of an eye

you know it can happen rapidly and it does this was such a concern in August 1901 the intelligence department of the British War office it's its report what was quite literally titled quote

military needs of the empire and a war with France and Russia okay so I mean it's this I point this out a lot I mean not as because it's essential to understand you know like the degree to which the the alliance system and kind of the assumptions that went into its creation and kind of the blind spots, particularly relating, again, as we talked about, you know, with secret diplomacy and it being totally self-defeating, you know, I raise all that stuff because it becomes clear, like, you know, 12, even 10, 12, 13 years prior to the onset of hostilities, you know, there was no, there was no sense of Great Britain in the German Empire, just, you know, being like an axiomatic waterheads, you know, in fact, act they're um they they like they viewed the primary threat they probably they view the

primary existential military threat you know to be their future allies okay so this this kind of thing um i i raise it too because again like i think it stands and start rebuttal to the this kind of court historian view that like oh it was this erudence to germany that was been on world domination so naturally you know the the kind of pragmatic and fair-minded and basically moral British Empire, like, had to stop this. Like, that was not anybody's contemplation, um, other than, um, you know, people were kind of, like, uh, had, like, like, were constitutionally, like, committed to, like,

though, that prejudice, you know, um, or, uh, you know, people have become swept up in, in the kind of, um, you know, in the kind of, uh, in the kind of, uh, in the kind of stilities that often emerged from like, those have been all of events. And that's exactly what happened between the UK and Germany, in my opinion. And the degree to which the Boer War, as we'll see in a minute, was approximate cause or what it came to represent in the respective public minds of the British body politic and that of the German Empire, like can't be overstated.

But in any event, British policymakers and the foreign office and the military and everywhere else, they responded to the Russian threat. by basically pursuing like a two like a two track like policy if you want to look it like that first and foremost you know there was the

there's the alliance with Japan and when Japan and Russia went to war in 1904 905 and the Japanese utterly devastated the Russian Navy like this this this

basically like everybody everybody in the bridge of establishment who backed you know the policy of you know essentially like unconditional report from Japan like felt totally you know exonerated and validated yeah

Japan also was a they were a burgeoning land power and which had come as no surprise considering when they rolled a muster you know in 19301 and about 1940

but they they meant that when Japan in 1895 about about a quarter

a quarter million Japanese troops that ended me in Sharia and they felt that I mean not just was that you know

kind of like a flex on like a demonstration of deploying capabilities but like the the British very much felt that like, okay, like these kinds of forces in being, it very much offset like any vulnerability to India, okay? And they were absolutely right.

And, of course, like the Japanese Navy, even before the Russo-Japanese War and before they were battle-tested, you know, it was, this would absolutely, like, relieve the strain on the British to maintain, you know, like a two-fleet Navy, you know. It was a long process. there was something of an unhappy history, to say the least, you know, between the Occident in Japan and particularly between the British and Japan.

But despite, again, you know, the Japanese are saddled with something of the same somewhat defamatory. I mean, that's somewhat like it's very much so defamatory. They're very kind of unflattering and our defamatory perspective. tends to accompany any discussion of the Japanese in history

as these kind of like crazed war mongers or these like anti-modernists like out of time like the Japanese foreign policies to happen is very pragmatic okay and the fact that you know they they basically get their way like on every well

sacrificing nothing in this like in this angle of Japanese treaty other than the promise that like essentially they'd go to war with Russia like if Russia went on the march which they do anyway so it's yeah I mean, I think, I mean, don't get me wrong, because we just established this, this was a master's joke for the UK also, but it's, I mean, the UK was, I mean, they were the empire, Japan was not at that point, you know, and they, they were in Occidental Power and they were probably the closest thing. This was like a pretty superpower era, but, you know, Blue Water Navy's in those days, that was, that was the most, that was, that was the most powerful. strategic element one could muster okay um it was the equivalent of of nuclear weapons of their day

i mean not equivalent in terms of destructive power and and existential dread accompanying them and everything else but my point is that you know a truly like blue water navy um with uh with service dreadnots um it could uh could could could could cause like utter devastation okay um So my point being, the British Empire making any, like, concession to the Japanese was, I mean, obviously, like, you know, the Japanese were perceived just in terms of, in terms of, in terms of, in terms of, in terms of, in the kind of power relationship paradigm, we perceived as, like, the big winner in, and, and, in those outcomes, or that outcome. but um the the the japanese the old tree was renewed about

it was renewed in in uh it was it was augmented in 05 then renewed in 1911 and then I mean from 2011 onward I mean it like again it was a feature of the pre

of the international system you know it was considered an essential staple um of a world order um Britain is seeking an understanding with France.

It was a bit more tricky because France, obviously, among other things, not just only the geostrategic situation, you know, as we discussed, there's nothing, I mean, Britain's natural rival is, frankly, Russia, like, or not, it's France, not Germany. I mean, you know, Germany, if anything is, is a United Germany, if anything is a natural hedge, you know, the traditional enemy, France. And, um, Rippintraub himself made that point a lot, because I think we got into, to some weeks back, but um, the, uh, aside from all of that, um, France was Britain's direct rival in, in the, uh, in the colonial, um, enterprise, you know, um, and, uh, obviously

one of the, one of the tragedies of great power politics in, in the colonial era, when, um, you know, modern warfare became truly devastating is that, uh, you know, The, the, uh, the obstacles to European unity and integration, you know, like as like, as, as a gross rom power or as a, or as a superpower. Um, you know, the, the European states, I mean, there's not much in Europe, frankly. It's an impoverished peninsula, basically. You know, um, the Europeans had to go abroad in search of, um, essential commodities, uh, or die. Okay. Um, the carving up of the, uh, uh, the planet didn't just occur i mean i'm sure today's people are people believe it's because like europeans are like mean and racist and stuff um but there's very much i mean nobody nobody takes on nobody takes on that they kind of nobody nobody takes on some centuries long enterprise um literally planetary in nature um you know and in and in in in the centuries we're in the period we're talking about you know the like the like the five six hundred years we're

talking about you know these are the most primitive of conditions by our standards like nobody takes on such endeavors just like because it is there or to be like a faustian um you know like world creator or something like i i'm the first to you know praise the faustian spirit of european man but these kinds of the kind of sacrifice and sort of like um labors at scale required to accomplish with something like a successful colonial policy nobody undertakes such things like unless it's an absolute necessity of

survival you know like physically and existentially or like as a race and as a people as a culture okay so in order in order to in order to achieve any kind of

reproachment with France you know like real concessions had to be made this came in the form of, Lord Salisbury had already kind of opened the door to that in 1896. The British had basically abandoned

their claim on, on Indochina, like, outside of what they held in Burma, which was essential to their like rubber plantations mostly, but other things too. Like in the Mekong Delta region, this why France became

totally dominant in Vietnam, for example. And, Vietnam's not, like, strategically worthless, despite that being the kind of refrain of people, you know, throughout, um, the Cold War and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, it may, um, it, um, it, uh, the France came out a big winner in Indochina owing the British concessions, and basically, like, London was able to buy, buy French goodwill in that way, okay? Um, but I mean, at the same, so I mean, these, um, what, what became the Antant Cajal, uh, I'm sure I butchered that, as the French called it in 1904. This wasn't primarily like an anti-German agreement. Like, I mean, the French based, and the French realized that, I mean, for the preceding, you know, for the, for the preceding millennia. I mean, it was they were intermittently at war with, with Britain. Um, you know, there's

there was always that possibility immersion, you know, like it wasn't I said it's important to keep in mind of the juncture. You know, like this wasn't, the British were not seeking some kind of anti-German agreement. And nor is France really.

I mean, again, like it was kind of a way of shoring of stability and you know, especially you know, as in 19th and the 20th century, there was a lot of uncertainty. I mean, in all kinds of ways. I mean, um, in the, like, like, literally like the entire like human zeitgeist in, in the

accident was, was, was, was being altered. Um, that's just a bit more philosophical, I think, than what we're up on in this series. But, um, the, uh, the French perspective was also that, um, and this is very French, Delcasse, or Delcasse, um, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the French foreign minister. He had an idea that oh, one of the good offices between France and Russia that were already existing, the Russians have looked at it as something of a benefit

despite the hostility to Britain that, like, France had this like cordial intent with London. And, you know, and that's, that, then I think he was right, okay? And it, and the view from Paris was that the sort of a moderating influence on Russian ambitions so as they're not like throw the baby out with the bathwater and um you know I'm a fancy about like the delicate minuet required by these constellations of alliances you know I mean that's like that's real

state craft and like the complexity of it you know the need to have a strategic mind to be able to perceive a storable phenomena as they're emergent and the most impersonal the most impersonal phenomenon as well as having just like a remarkable insight for human sociology individually and at scale as well as the psychology of powerful men who find themselves insinuated into such roles where hubris is not just common but perhaps it's axiomatic i mean i find this fascinating um and i don't think i'm just being some you know romantic soul or something in viewing it that way but the uh quite literally um the the the sentiment from the british foreign ministry um and specifically a guy named lord uh land zone was that quote um a good understanding with france would not improbably be the precursor of a better understanding with russia okay so i mean this was this was not a war alliance okay this was not there's not some

Churchillian, like, anti-German alliance. That sentiment did come later, but again, it's important to keep in mind that that was not the impetus for what we're talking about at this juncture. Now,

what actually was happening in Germany at this time, okay? The aim of Bismarck, I mean, like I said, I think people people like Kissinger you know they claim like Metternich is you know like the greatest

like statesmen who ever lived in in the era of you know like high politics and cabinet warring and like intrigues between the European powers I'm something of a Germanophile I mean I'm an Am one I'm not you know I don't run from that

but in Brat purely brass tax terms I think the title belongs to Bismarck However, the problem is that Bismarck is something of an impossible quagmire because the core aim of a Bismarckian foreign policy and the core aim of a united Germany, which he had managed to pull off, which, I mean, as we talked about, makes him, in my opinion, like, the most brilliant Machiavellian of all time. I mean, if you accept that, you know, if you accept that he was, you know, if you accept that he was

able to orchestrate events that brought the northern confederation into alliance with prussia which then became the german empire but um his uh the first last and always his mission had to be to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition of great powers against the against the right um now inherent and latent tensions between rival states um made that objective if not easy to accomplish, you know, like more feasible than it would have been otherwise. But at the same time, the sheer complexity and kind of like balancing of interest and kind of like the promises when we would have to make both, you know, in terms of open declarations of rights as well as secret diplomacy, there's something paralyzing about it.

You know, like the man who hedges literally like all of his, all of his potential bets or moves you know, with guarantees, you know, to all adversaries at actual and potential, like, he finds himself unable to move without sabotaging, you know, like, that kind of splendid, that kind of splendid safety net in which he's arrayed around himself. And that net, like, seems to become something of an objectively gilded cage at some point. What, uh, the way you Germany managed, the way Bismar managed this, I mean, he basically turned his attention to the Haftsburg Empire and courted them as something of a proxy, particularly in the Balkans. And from there, obviously, like, this opened the door for, you know, Germany to kind of develop

a Velt-Politique with the East, you know, particularly you know the iran empire which then was although in precipice decline like a real power but the um you know germany frankly they could they could afford uh they could afford to stay out of the great game of colonies um but uh you know in in like in like in purely material terms but in terms of global prestige number one And in terms of power projection capability and being able to demand equality of status, not being in the colonial game, placed them at some disadvantages. This is something of a complicated issue.

And it's interesting how Hitler had absolutely no interest in this. Because, say what you want about Hitler, like, he was incredibly forward-looking in terms of his geopolitical orientation, as well as just kind of understanding that like that that you know the era of like petty cabinet ring was just like dead like not like even if the will somehow like the will for to try and revive it was emergent like it would not be possible but um the uh such that Germany developed in like a colonial imperial policy um basically Germany would have to play the margins as they existed between britain france and russia like when they were at odds you know um that that created like

a little bit of like wiggle room but um it but frankly i mean it always required it always required the germans to punch below their weight you know because like again um if you're uh if you're kind of just like taking the leftovers and you know you're your um you like the way you assert like a veldt the way with certain veldt politic claims um it's like waiting when your potential adversaries are you know distracted in the business of uh of hostiles with one another i mean that's not that's not the way great powers behave you know great powers assert themselves on on on terms of equality a formal equality as a matter of status but um the uh this really this really this really reached a this reached like a genuine crisis point um in in in in south

africa which seems incredibly strange that south africa or the trans of all um south african republic um contra the united kingdom cape colony like what would like it seems bizarre that, like, basically, like, a proxy war between, you know, like, you know, mostly Dutch Calvinist pioneers and British privateers would sour, you know, relations between great powers. But the symbolic significance of these things is always outsized. But before we get into that, I just wanted to add, too, that the something I noticed, even when I was in Europe, you know, like in the 90s, you know, like, in the 90s, you know, like, And, I mean, obviously, you're up now, I can get whatever it needs, but especially, you know, willing to, and especially today. I mean, because of, you know, logistical chains are such that, you know, you can anyone get, like, anything to their door in the developed world, you know, within a day or two. But there's always this kind of, like, understanding of shortage. That's the only way can, like, explain it. Like, I'm not talking, like, you know, the mind's, like, everyday people that they wouldn't characterize it that way. I'm sure you'd be totally cognizant of it, but. nowhere was this more present than in, you know, the 19th century. And this idea Europeans had, you know, like what I mean is like the middle classes

that were like basically engaged in the political process. This idea that, you know, things would be easier if we were able to capture real estate overseas. It's kind of like the myth of El Dorado almost, you know, like this loomed like very large. And, you know, Bismarck, I'm sure that people, court historians today, I'm sure they continue to pretend that he was some, like, mad dictator who was not accountable to anybody, like, he was like their version of Putin or something, but, you know, there's no, there's no, I mean, first of all, Germany was, was, um, what, was as democratic as any other modern state at the time, but, but, I mean, even, even were it not, like, there's no, there's no chief executive who's, like, not at all accountable to the body politic. That's ridiculous. So there was, you know, there was, there was pressure not just, as a matter of pride and prestige and equality of status, there was pressure from people to say, like, why, basically, like, why do we have to settle for second best? Like, why can't we get stuff we need even when we have, like, money to spend, you know? And that, that, um, I mean, people take that stuff seriously, man, you know, like, um, and especially a state like Germany, which, even though, you know, the starvation embargo was, um, a decade and a half off.

I mean, the possibility of that happening, like, even though it hadn't happened yet, I mean, was something that existed in people's minds. You know, they didn't have any illusions that, you know, a, that the continent could become a prison without a true, you know, power projection capability at global scale. So in part, in part the, in part the solution of this. was the uh was the was the seek out uh was a seek out forces in africa i mean not just because it was huge and because there was plenty of i mean there's probably just like a lot of opportunity there you know to get rich as well as you know um it wasn't even clear um yet you know like what the actual resource potential was the dark continent but um anytime uh anytime the anything that germans approached the foreign ministry about um you know

working out arrangements in that regard or some kind of declaration of rights you know uh in terms of like where germany could move in africa like they they you know they were they were met with at best condescension and at worst like outright contempt and um not lost in the german of this time the Germans always respected the Japanese, but the Japanese were a non-white power. So there was a sense, at the end of Bismarck's tenure, like, so the British are willing to cut deals with the French, as well as, you know, the Japanese, but, like, they're going to treat, you know, us, you know, we're not, not only we white European Christians, but we're the preeminent continental power, and, like, we're being told, like, we don't rate colonies, and, like, we're not on the same level as the United Kingdom in France. like that that was a slap in the face um and um such that it was um a a lot of german um there's a lot of wealthy german um merchant types wanted to buying land um nominally for discrete commercial purposes particularly in southern Namibia but also in the transvaal um these guys were very connected

They were insinuated into government circles, but that wasn't entirely clear at first. So there was kind of a, there was kind of like a shadow colonization policy pursued by Berlin during this time. And by the turn of the 20th century, you know, Germany was insinuated into Africa, but not. in ways that would allow them to assert sovereign political rights and Bismarck

after one of the kind of fruitless negotiations with the British on this enduring kind of a sore point he lamented like the British just declared

like I'm a row doctrine of Africa like that's preposterous you know like you can you you're in a certain sphere of influence within reason you know basically like anywhere in the continent you occupy like now the british are saying like the seas belong entirely to them like the largest continent on earth belongs entirely to them like that's that's preposterous you know there's there's an arrogance there that needn't be abided okay um and it's um i mean frankly there's there's an aspect of that like in the american mind too like that's not that's not the way you do things um you You don't go out of your way to disrespect people, particularly when it's imperative that they believe you're treating them as equals, especially when you're not. Okay, I mean, this is kind of like power politics 101, but it's also, when one considers the situation of the empire and the precarious position in which it was and the rise of the cold colored world, as was referred to. you know, in less delicate times. There was something kind of stupefying about the fact that the British were treating Germany,

like, not just like a secondary power, but it's this kind of like alien elements. So, and it's something very worked about it, I maintain. Bismarck was forced out in 1890, and we got into that and kind of the constellation

of forces that, selected that, but this kind of this led to like a real policy adrift. The kind of nominal reasoning for forcing out Bismarck was to

throw off the shackles of the self-imposed constraints of Bismarckian policy and towards that effect, Germany immediately abandoned the reinsurance treaty with Russia in 1890, which was a dumb move. Because, again, you don't, you don't flavorantly repudiate treaties unless you have to to make a statement. So they set about, you know, striking immediately antagonistic posture towards the Tsar. With the departure of Bismar, there's the appointment of Leo von Caprivi. chancellor um who was very much um overshadowed by the kaiser velhom who also ascended to the throne

that same year um velhom had a tendency to overpower people he was a bullying figure like subsequently chancellor holveg was not a was a very strong executive and as they indicated a very kind of tragic figure but the preview was anything but um and the new course of the of the post bismarck era it was less a matter of concerted design than it was but again it was like a lot of drift you know like a scattershot irresolute um it uh the chief of the foreign ministry was frederick van holstein um hosting such that there was uh like a real like policy vision um was responsible for formulating it

he doubled down in reinforcing ties with the Habsburg Empire and sought to balance some emergent risks in the Balkans that could lead to war with the UK by approaching London directly

and he was largely repudiated he didn't favor a full-fledged alliance with Britain nor do you think that was possible but um he uh he he saw it writing on the wall and he realized that at the core his thinking was um was was was that was that germanyed to act before the united kingdom um you know it became became an enemy okay essentially um the uh the price for that superficially seemed to be based on the kind of signaling from uh from london was a a formal renunciation by germany of any claim to colonial acquisitions

and caprivy and um frankly bismar too at that juncture seemed willing to pay that um what really changed things again was uh in 1894 95 just about three years subsequent um to this kind of like you know not quite concord but understanding with the UK that um you know so long as so long as Germany repudiated any any claimed sovereign dominion in in Africa or any of the other colonial domains whereby

the United Kingdom was the sole colonial authority that they at least have some kind of like informal guarantee that regardless of any preexisting alliances that London entered into

like Germany first and foremost would be afforded equality of status and, you know, negotiation would occur an individual turn between London and Berlin amidst any any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, what happened was, like I touched on a minute ago,

there'd long been strange tensions, anglo-german tension relating to the, the Cape Colony, the British Cape Colony and its neighbor to the north which was the Trasval or the Boris South African Republic the Transvaal was

internationally recognized including by Britain as independent Cecil Rhodes who was the chief executive the procurator of the Cape Colony get every intention of conquering the Transvaal

he believed it was rich in gold deposits there was vast gold reserves discovered in the 1880s since this became an inquisitive fixation okay the backbone of the transvaal was German settlers again there'd been this informal kind of policy of colonization

by capital fully fully like one-fifth or something of the foreign capital and this is the transvaal was German the Germans naturally took an interest in maintaining the Borough Republic's independence and the Boers themselves they were reformed they were Calvinists they were a pioneer people I mean like us

they were mostly Dutch but there was Huguenots like Scots Anglos among them but they they were very they were Germanic people okay and very very racially aware where only their congregational reformed faith very, very focused on on communitarian concerns. You know, like very, very racialized

like warrior, like Germanic people. Okay. This kind of like very strong affinity developed, okay? And of course, you know, like these these, these, this kind of German like capitalist class that settled there, you know, like

they married the dogs, the boers, things like this. Okay. So the post-Bismar Berlin regime developed like a very strong interest in the transwall. Berlin planned to build a railway linking the transvaal with Portuguese Mozambique and specifically with the Loga Bay. this caused London to go berserk and issue formal protests and when the Germans refused

to abandon construction of the project the government continued the London considered quite literally assaulting the Loga Bay annexing it destroying the in-situ construction of the railer up to that point and essentially like laying everything to waste okay um what their solution was

wasn't quite that catastrophically severe but it was probably one of the worst possible courses um around this time too uh sir edward mallet um who's the british ambassador in berlin when he started openly speaking of the transvauls a trouble spot in german relations ankle german relations and just kind of casually like just kind of flippantly declared that you know if there was going to be like any possibility of war between between countries it would be in the transvaal it would be because the germans you know were too pig-headed to back down so like a perfect storm kind of um of of of ill will began developing here you know and again other than Ruther Clark, I don't find historians

who really emphasize this. And, like, it's, to me, it's so obvious. But, um, once, uh, this caused something of an infrastructure race with the Cape Colony,

um, roads had been, um, intending to build a railway, a railway line of, uh, of his own. um to johannesburg um and it was in part rerouted to try and uh get as much of the railway

traffic um as as possible from the transvaal by like like reducing its rates to near nothing and you know i mean all kinds of all kinds of like dirty business okay um the uh the transvaal republic uh responded um by by by levying huge tariffs on the parts of the Cape County Railroad. They ran through the Transvaal. In answer to this, the British started disembarking their goods. Once the railroad crashed, once the cargo passed the Val River, they'd, like, unload it.

They'd load it on to Bees of Burton and literally take it by Beast and Wagon, you know, to the border, then, like, reloaded another train car to, like, avoid having to pay the train. which is kind of like Monty Python-like and funny but like you know the Germans and the Boers didn't think it was too funny

um Paul Kruger um who was a chancellor of a of the Transva Republic and it was a fascinating guy

like a real, a real hero and Kruger Rans or Kruger Rans because Paul Kruger's faces on them as people probably know but I don't know if everybody he does um the uh paul crew reacted by blocking access to the transvaal and uh closing like literally uh like like closing like um ingress at ingress access rouse on uh on the cape

side um this uh this let cecil roads he'd be getting seriously he'd get seriously lobby London for like a formal assault occupation and annexation at Transvaal. There's like the hell with it. Like let's just fucking tell these people. Let's conquer, you know, the Transvaal. We're all going to get rich anyway because

those crowd bastards are just sitting in a bunch of gold and they won't give us any. What this culminated in was what's called the Jameson raid on December 29, 1895. Roads had been steadily importing a

instead of like aspiring to conquer the transvaal the way of Udlanders. Utlunders is a boar Dutch literally for outlanders, foreigners, like white people who were generally English, some of which were like bona fide settlers, but a lot of whom were mercenaries and just kind of like privateers and, you know, like, you know, like outlaw types who, you know, we're going to ever going to find their fortune and, you know, if that entailed, you know,

go to war against, against the Boers, you know, we'll do that. Rhodes was conspiring the orchestrated conquest to transvault by these guys, you know, and try to maintain this kind of plausible liability. You know, like, oh, hey, like, I, you know, I've got no control of these people, and they certainly aren't here on the best of the crown, you know.

but um the jamesman's forced the minute they crossed into the transvaal they were tracked by the boars who you know were basically like as deadly as a patchy like in their own turf um they basically encountered immediate resistance um there's a brief exchange of fire and and the boar just freaking clobbered him. James sent immediately surrendered, like, local commandant, like, a surviving man were, like, thrown in the Frateria jail. And, um,

you know, Prover made a big deal about this. Like, basically, like, you guys are fucking idiots. Like, you're never going to, you're never going to, like, you're never, like, you're, you're never going to take the transvaal, you know, um, the aborted attack, though, it caused an international incident.

You know, I mean, like, uh, there was, like, I mean, like, I mean, it's funny, the whole thing's funny, but like people didn't think it was funny, like in, you know, I mean, international incidents are like often funny in actual terms, but like, they lead to like not so funny shit. Yeah, the British government, you know, they insisted like they, you know, this was not sanctioned or anything, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Berlin was like, demanding, you know, some kind of like formal apology. Um, it, uh, it, uh,

the uh it began appearing in uh in in in in in in german dailies basically that you know like like look at these fools like i mean first of all they're band-aids they've got no respect for the rule law despite them insisting that you know they uh they've got a scrupulous they scrupulously honor you know like the laws of of of white christiandom even like in these outlying domains you know like basically um all the kind of hostility that had been brewing relating to you know germany's um need and kind of desire to assert a gross rom um felt politic kind of came to a head owing to this incident um now what really kind of made this infamous, a lot of people

have heard of the, quote, Kruger telegram. Wilhelm, he sent a telegram to Kruger congratulating him, wishing a happy New Year and congratulate him on, quote, having quote, defended the independence of your country against external attack

without appealing for the help of friendly powers. So basically, Valhom was just openly said, like, yeah, you know, like, if you go to war with the British Empire, you know, you need you like the german army will be there if you need us um which was an incredibly stupid thing to say you know for all uh all kinds of reasons and when the boer war did uh pop off uh this this really this really constrained like germany's freedom of action and it

hurt the boers frankly like there was not funny about it but it was also just uh it was also just obtuse. I mean, like, it's not even, um, there's really nothing to be gained by that, especially in those days when politics, particularly between monarchs, like, truly was personal in a matter of masculine honor, especially in the colonial dominions, which literally bore like your name, you know, as like your sovereign dominion. Like, it's, you know, you don't, um, you, you, you should always give men, like, a way out, unless they're truly your enemy and you're, there's no coming back from the enmity between you. Like, whether you're talking about business warfare,

you know, something as grand as high politics or as banal as like an interpersonal problem. Like you, you always got to give other men like a way out. You can just like disrespect people and, you know, grand and like hope for the best and like gloat about it. I mean, you can, but it's a terrible way to, it's a terrible way to go through life because it tends to be incredibly self-defeating. But, um, this, uh, This caused it, this caused it like huge outrage in the British press, as well as in the British street, you know, and more than anything, frankly, in that era. And even later, man, even during, like, the Churchill era, like, this, this, this was really the only time I think the British street was really soured against, like, the German Reich, you know, in genuine terms.

ultimately Berlin accepted some perfunctory diplomatic concessions short of an apology but you know enough of a the crown here to genuflect enough

to Berlin that they felt like they could claim victory but what they extracted was concessions that excluded Germany from any further involvement in the political future of southern Africa And to the disgust of the German nationalists, the Germans refused to intervene on behalf of the Transvaal during the Boer War, which was a horrible war, a genocidal war. And the Boers were literally locked in concentration camps. That's not war propaganda. That happened.

Okay. I mean, that's well documented. Like, regardless of age, sex, overall health, you know, like women, like little boys and girls, like old people. war wounded, I mean, they, they, they looked like skeletons, and they, they were, they were treated as, um, as categorical, um, enemies. Um, but that, um, but I mean, that goes to show you, too, like how, how, how much Wilhelm just, kind of acted on impulse, you know, I mean, if you're gonna, particularly, um, particularly, the concern of, the situation of the Boers, which way was a David Goliath situation, contrary to the British Empire. Issuing this telegram

which amounts to a guarantee, like basically like a war guarantee, an event. You know, these people go to war with the crown. Like poisoning uh, poisoning relations with, with London for a

generation and then completely abdicating the guarantee for the purpose of of sustaining the peace, you know, while the Boers essentially um, well essentially like the doomsday scenario ensues

vis-a-vis the the, um, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, reason, as we're always, a reason, as well, and we'll get into the wise, there's a reason why Hitler denied the Kaiser estate funeral and basically, um, there was a, uh,

Shustafel guards, he died in exile in the Netherlands, but he, you know, he was not, like, treated as some, like, honored dignitary by the Third Reich, and Hitler held him in, in genuine contempt, which I think was well-placed. It's easy these days, particularly in America to, like, lampoon monarchs or kind of, like, burn him an effigy, like, oh, we know better now. But in the case of Villanelma, he really was... an ugly personage every uh every um step of the way um from uh there's a sentencing until a cessation of hostilities um i'm uh frankly getting tired so i think i think uh i'm going to call it quits for now man um and at long last we'll get into like the guts of of the onset of hostilities next episode we should talk a little bit about the blue water naval race but that's kind of a

that that won't take long but yeah we'll dive into the good stuff next time I hope I didn't bore anybody to death this stuff's really important I find it fascinating but for background and context it's essential I think people really enjoy the bore and the transvaal stuff Yeah, I think it's fascinating

And like I said, along with I mean, I identify struggling with people in Ulster. I mean, it's part of like what I am. I mean, blood-wise, I mean, but it's, but Afrikaners are like, if you're like reformed and you're like light and you're, you know, pioneer stock. I mean, those, they really are like our people.

Like there is like, you know, there is like a Protestant diaspora. discernibly. It's not just, you know, some kind of construct of historians or sociologists. But yeah, this was great, man. I hope it needs, I hope it lives up to your expectations as well as the subscribers. Always, always. Do plugs and we'll get out. Yeah, man. For the time being, I'm on Twitter. I got banned from Telegram again. I don't know how I find telegram

I'd be horrible frankly I only I only sort of fucking with it again because people like really like it and they were like begging me to start a channel again but they it's run by these like these like yuki sickos

who literally like do stuff like posting like snuff porn but then they like banned me for like saying like fairly innocuous like shit about Ukraine or like sometimes Israel it's like literally insane

so I'm not on there anymore I'm trying to get the chat on my substackle more live. On my substack, that's what a podcast is. That's where a lot of my longer form stuff is. It's real, R-E-A-L-Thomas-777.7.com. Season two of the pod is going to drop right around Halloween, at which time, all season one con, it'll be free. It is only five bucks a month to subscribe.

I'm going to make it totally free as soon as possible. As of now, this is the lowest I can go. without, like, eating a loss on it. For the time being, I'm on X, formerly Twitter. It's real capital, R-E-A-L-U-L-U-S-N-R-E-A-L-U-S-N-N-E-A-L-N-S-N-E-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-E. You can always find me at Thomas-S-S-S-S-M-S-S-M-E. Again, number seven-S-N-S-E, that's kind of like a one-stop spot for like just like stuff that i'm doing and like and kind

like photos and shit if you like that kind of stuff um people seem to dig it and uh the kid who maintains the website for me is a great guy um and uh the the asylum meg run by my dear friend giles i'm gonna have another piece appearing there soon um i'm working on steel storm three i'm working on some Mother shit. I got a lot going on. It doesn't seem like it. Not I got a lot going on. I got a cool, busy life.

Like, I'm doing a lot of shit, like, kind of wise. It's just not going to drop for a minute. But rest of sure, I'm not going slack. That's all right. Yep. Until the next time. Thank you. Thank you, Pete.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. We are back here for part for the World War I series. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm doing well. I wanted to apologize the last recording session in particular

there's a little bit more dead air on my end and pauses that then I usually you know that I usually

am afflicted with like I have not been feeling well this winter man that's not that's not some like old lady lament I when I'm in that

kind of shape and like on like little sleep and like medicated I'm not at 100%. But I prefer to power through rather than canceling stuff, because if we cancel stuff, every time I don't feel well, like,

nothing gets done. And I realize that sometimes I perform better than others, so just keep that in mind. Like, don't spare my feelings with feedback. But I just wanted to make that clear, and I apologize to in advance of sometimes, like, I'm not listenable

because of shit like that. But today, we got to get into the murder of France Ferdinand that's what we're going to conclude with and then at long last we'll get into the battlefield situation and how such things developed but you know honestly the first world war like the war between the states

the battlefield dimension is tremendously important because literally in the course of the conflict the entire conceptual landscape changed about how land war is conducted like you know 100% one started out is what one started out is basically I mean not basically like like conventional cavalry

like thought of combined arms role at the outside of hostilities like by the end by the end of the war like mechanized war had arrived that's just the way you know people conceptualize land warfare you know and just like just like the war between the states like started

as you know not not particularly distinguishable from you know the crime in war or even like the later Napoleonic wars. But by the end of it, it was like a World War I type engagement. Okay, but aside from that, the political situation is what matters in World War I and the bizarre convergence of circumstances that led to what happening in the first place and the fact that, you know, nobody like in situ or like in the epoch could even really point to what was the absolute imperative to go to war.

You know, this isn't just like fog of war stuff. Or, you know, like I'm always reiterating. I'm the first to acknowledge emphatically that war arrives like the seasons, not as a result of conspiratorial designs or things like that. But World War I is a particularly odd case of politics and pretty much pure politics leading to a disastrous outcome of endless battlefield violence. And it's not really precedented. And in the Second World War, like the political, it was clear like what the political division was.

you know, for a decade previous, if you cite the onset of World War II at September 3rd, 1939, I mean, it was clear for a decade what was underway. Okay, World War I was not at all like that. And that's why I focused so much on on the political aspect.

It's not just, I try to give like military guys like equal conceptual time. I mean, not just because they have interesting things to say. So when they suggest things to me or like you know when they let me pick their brain i very very i hugely appreciate that and i'm i always check beforehand that i'm conveying what they expressed to me accurately but the fact is like i'm not like a military guy okay at all um you know i'm not i'm not like prior service like i'm just not i think i know something about uh power politics at scale

and uh like the war and peace aspect of that obviously but i'm the kind of guy who read stuff like Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn and, you know, like Klausowitz. I very much I part ways of Klausowitz and I mean, stuff like that. You know, I'm not a guy who pours over like battlefield maps and, you know, it's not like I can draw upon, you know, some like, you know, some like experience of infantry combat or something and, and, you know, convey that to people. So I think what's important as historical writer, you know, not just to stick to the evidentiary record and pretty much that alone, but also, you know, not to hold forth on. aspects of it that one is not an expert on. And to be like misguided for me, like, hold myself as a military expert

anyway, okay? That's what I'm getting at. But I take people's point. I'm trying to get equal time. I mean, look, this is a huge topic, okay? I promise that by the time we're done dealing with the battlefield aspect of World War, and you're going to be sick of hearing about it. Okay? So I'm not just going to

I'm not just going to be talking about a bunch of boring royals and their intrigues and then, you know, it gives like a little bit of time to things like, you know, poison gas and machine guns and what these things do to human bodies and how awesome it is. I'm just kidding. It's not awesome. But it is cool. And you're lying if you don't think so. But today, like I said, we're going to get into the murder Franz Ferdinand, which is a pretty horrible homicide in all honesty. And Ferdinand is kind of unduly maligned. He was one of the better royals, that final kind of coterie, as was Franz Joseph. And we'll

into a little bit of that, too. The Habsburg system, however dysfunctional it was, you know, however much it's kind of raison d'etra in practical terms, had long since evaporated, you know, and, you know, kind of like washed away by time, as it were, like the Habsburgs themselves, they were a hell of a lot more admirable than, you know, their counterparts in London and Berlin and elsewhere. And people forget, too, one of the things that was truly perverse about Colonel House and these guys in Wilson's orbit who ultimately started to, you know, shrieking about like we've got to fight for democracy other than France every every European power was a monarchy you know in some of those states like Russia was was a true

monarchy like the czar was the czar and we'll get into that too and like the impact that had on the political situation and ultimately the resolution of the of the crisis but uh you know you're talking about uh Europe the European political landscape was populated by nothing but monarchies you know in the french situation it uh like the absence of one or the absence of a successor executive you know that had um that that had the confidence of body politic in essential ways you know france was a basket case was essentially racked by perennial gridlock um in political terms there was no momentum one way the other and arguably the reason why france became so committed to pursuing the war effort is because it finally provided a trajectory by which the kind of machine

could lurch like one way or another, you know, pursuant to the kind of subconscious desire that, you know, some momentum or movement is preferable to none. But I'm getting ahead of myself. When we finished off last time, and I will not dwell on this, but we spoke with the fact that at the turn of the 20th century a blue water navy that was the equivalent of nuclear weapons okay i mean obviously like adjusting for destructive power and scale and you know um not in material terms but also in conceptual terms like the psychological impactfulness of these things but a true world power you were not a world power unless you had a blue water navy and a fleet of service battleships to the

era could it could um they could uh they could deliver devastating firepower okay so one of the big criticisms in the epoch and now like i said other than christopher clark there's not much thoughtful scholarship on the causes of world war one that brings something new to the table you know kind of the fallback is either german militarism which has which i've been dealing with really is a myth i mean it's not some that's not some germanophile cope i mean it really is the Germany hadn't been at war for decades. Europe had been at peace other than the other than the Crimean War, you know,

and the Frankoprussian War, which was which by that, which by the outside of hostilities was, you know, decades in the past, you know, I mean, so it can't be said to this kind of culture of militarism supposedly, I mean, who was sustaining it, you know, a handful of men in their 60s and 70s, but in any event, like kind of

one of the main supposed concrete examples of Germany's provocative disposition with Germany pursuing a blue water and navy. Okay, now for any world power, NASA or otherwise, you know, that there was

nothing outrageous about believing that one would not be taken seriously in power political terms unless it acquired a credible naval capability. Okay? Now, as we talked about last week, you know, London not only had welcomed the

naval treaty with Japan, but it'd become literally a staple of regional stability in the Pacific, which indirectly facilitated continued British egemony over the high seas, because what truly mattered was the Atlantic Fleet, okay, in power political terms. And the British, they had no problem affording Japan, you know, a non-white, you know, a colored power from that kind of, you know, equality of status in basic terms. but they retain this kind of masterful and highly disrespectful tone with Germany. Like in 1897, the acting German ambassador in London was Eckertstein, Baron Hermann von Eckertstein.

One of the reasons why he was favored by the foreign ministry at that time, even as, you know, the post-Bismarck regime, course, of policy was kind of adrift. Eckersstein, you know, the traditional process of selecting your diplomats is you find a man who's both, like, well-liked by the host country in the right circles, and a man who, and a man who understands the hosting culture. And Eckertstein, he was just in the Tories Anglophile. You know, he spent basically all year-round in the U.K., he was this kind of womanized. He would hang around London clubs. he literally dressed like Edward the 7th, you know, he, he carried on like in, like, like, like in, like in, like in English fop at year, okay? He was the one who approached, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the undersecretary of the British home office, who was, uh, Francis Bertie, who was known to have particular clout in, in naval matters.

Um, there was something of a meritocratic. culture to that and that which is interesting how Churchill became insinuated into into a maritime role when he was completely unqualified but that was the exception

in any event Agosteen approached Bertie you know in kind of softball terms about whether there some kind of concord could be reached on the African cape, you know, particularly in the matter of the transvaal, you know, so that however unlikely

a general war might be between powers, you know, such, such misunderstands could be avoided. Bertie's reply was that the British government would stop at nothing, you know, even a full declaration of war to repel any German intervention in Africa, you know, any deployment of German forces, the German Imperial Force to Africa, you know, to, um, that, the threaten the, um, the, the Cape Colony be treated as an assault on, on the UK herself, which was a crazy thing to say, you know, but this was a man who spoke for the high seas English fleet. And he's doing two things. He's, he's taking a, he's taking a friendly diplomat from a fellow white European power, a nascent world power at that, you know, who's approached him somewhat beseechingly. And, uh,

he's slapping him in the face proverbially while also declaring that he's going to go to war quite literally for a fairly meaningless colonial holding that only really became contentious owing to the

foolish posturing ultimately of a German emperor who is known for saying foolish things all the time that nobody took seriously. It's like this idea that you know this idea that, you know, kind of unified Germany, like the kind of nascent German empire was this ridiculously bellicose state that just nobody, you know, who's kind of like

aggressive posture, nobody could abide as nonsense. I know for the record, too, I mean, this was, this was the, this is like the Roosevelt, they were like Roosevelt the first, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, like the rough riders and all that, you know, of America, you know, America provoked a war with Spain, you know, essentially to like grab up, but remained of Spanish holdings, in the Americas. I'm not saying that's wrong at all, but I mean, this led to a disaster for in the Philippines, for the Filipinos. I mean, America certainly kicked a lot of ass, but he killed about half million people. You know, the, um, not during the war between the states, which was still within living memory, you know, um, there'd been some incredibly bad blood, you know,

between the union and, in London. They'd been the Trent affair where the secretary that, the U.S. Navy had said, you know, we've got to think, we've got to think seriously in the future about, you know, considering the British Atlantic fleet is our main enemy on the high seas. So, I mean, this idea that Germany is saying, like, hey, can we find a way, you know, A, like we want a blue water navy like, you know, Japan has, but not nearly that scaled.

And can we find a way to, you know, defend our own interests in southern Africa without going to war? And, like, being treated as if, you know, such things are just beyond the pale of, of diplomacy as it stood then, you know, let alone precursors to it. precursors the statements or

conduct giving you know that could be interpreted as acts of war is and that's completely absurd and it's um Clark as well as AJP Taylor a generation before those that don't know Taylor

I'm sorry I'm in a lot of pain Taylor wrote um Taylor wrote the origins of the Second World War that's kind of a seminal book okay um he's a revisionist of a sort absolutely you want me to pause no no it's fine um but i think of though but he uh you know he became the origin of the second world war was was tremendously impactful in academic circles okay um

he was norman davies um mentor in a lot of ways okay it also like norman davies but he um he he wrote a lot of shorter form stuff on the first world war and like i said chrysiver clark is a contemporary historian who's one of the best historians of modern Germany, I think, who was active today. Those are the only two historians who are well-known and that I've come across, who raised the point, you know, again, you know, in trying to kind of identify and aggregate statements by Wilhelm himself, who again said a lot of stupid things, as royals tended to do, or by the German foreign office, or by men in the German Admiralty, like Terpets himself, that could be interpreted as, you know, bellicose posturing

or threats to the status quo in power political terms, or, you know, things that by their tenor or implication could be interpreted to be unacceptable within the culture of European public diplomacy that stood. You just don't find these things. So there's not really concrete particulars people can point to when they talk about this like German belligerence. It's just not really there. Now the rebuttal of that is that, well, you know, the German Navy and they're war games, they openly identify the hypothetical adversary as the Royal Navy. It's like, yeah, but in a general staff system where, you know, you've got a permanent professional class, the staff officers who plan for military contingencies and exigencies

they're in, you proceed with your war gaming in based upon capabilities. Okay, and that's it. I mean, like, who would the German general staff be wargaming against in their, in their, in their scenarios? You know, I mean, like, it's, this should be obvious. You know, I mean, I, I know there's like foolish rhetoric on Capitol Hill these days, but the U.S. Navy runs war games where obviously the op four is a stand-in

for the chinese okay that doesn't mean americans imminently going to assault china you know um but that's kind of the uh you know and especially too like a culture like the uk which is true like a maritime culture i mean they didn't they didn't have the same kind of staff system that prussia and then germany did but i mean you better believe that they you better believe that uh they gamed possible scenarios in their own way. I don't really understand a lot about that, where the rubber meets the road in terms of naval combat, it's extraordinarily complicated. Then there's

variables that somebody like me who's like literally like never been near like a ship just doesn't understand. I know there's people who claim I mean, and maybe they're right. There's infantry officer types who say that, you know, armored combat in the open desert is somewhat like naval warfare. That may

be true, okay, but I haven't found the concrete particulars and the variables identified and those kinds of scenario is to be like unintelligible in the way that I have with these like intricate like naval games but I mean the point being you know this is not this is not some this is not some gotcha whereby oh the Germans were planning to fight England I mean it's that's not how things work you know but um he as in May uh the uh the uh by the same I mean, it turned about being fair play.

Until the signing of the Entente Cordial in 1904, you know, between the British and the French, you know, the French talked about ways to, or they gamed, you know, ways to blockade the English channel, you know, and essentially systematically starve out. the british ability to to wage war and um you know what was called the new school in continental naval war planning was a the jeune equal i'm sure i'm butchering that like i do pronunciations but they'd envision the systematic use of blockade coupled with and this is the pre-aircraft area

like fast ships you know they could chase down vessels quick enough to uh you know to bust um to bust through the cordon, okay? I mean, this was not, and this was, again, this was the late as like 1897, 98, 99, the French were talking this way. And then, and of course, too, would ultimately, one of the, one of the things that loomed so large in the German public mind,

not just among military types, but I mean, among just regular people, and we'll get to this in our series. The British blockade against the Kaiser Reich was devastating. You know, the continent truly can be locked down in a kind of quarantine. You know, and the European continent is not the United States. You know, it's a peninsula that truly is starved of essential commodities. And this had not happened before.

but the Germans saw the writing on the wall and if there's a pragmatic if there's a determinative pragmatic impetus again like notwithstanding you know ideological cultural or moral

in general terms impetus for you know Berlin cultivating the United Kingdom notwithstanding any of those things, the possibility of a true starvation blockade being implemented by the UK and the Royal Navy specifically

was something that people realized was very, very possible and which would be entirely congruous with then developing war doctrine. But also the Germans had lost the naval race hands down. If we didn't say that a naval race was underway. The number of German surface battleships

rose from 13 to 16 between about 1895 and 1905. Meanwhile, the British Battlefleet more than doubled, or almost doubled from 29 to 44. Terpitz's, Admiral Terpitz, his ambition had been at the outset set of the Blue Water Navy

Blue Water Navy program was a ratio at one German battleship like surface warfare battleship for every 1.5 Royal Navy battleship

but that I mean but that never is it is it is it when I remember I met the road that ambition was ever close to being realized not just in in concrete terms of what was built

but it was not it was not taken seriously by the Reichstag and I don't think by the rest of the military establishment but by

by 1912 I mean part of this was political because traditionally German general officers abide the will of political leadership

turbits and part of this was I'm sure a face-saving measure but turbits declared that based on capabilities inherent to then like new weapons platforms that had been

fielded um he declared he was happy with the ratio they accomplished um and so i mean essentially like by 2013 germany had had abandoned if there was an england german arms race at all it had been abandoned formally by 2013 and meanwhile the british never scaled back the production table at pace that they pursued for the preceding nine years by that point So, I mean, sometimes the truth is in the numbers, you know, where is this German arms race? Or was this Anglo-German arms race, supposedly initiated by Germany. You know, it was, you could say, well, that's, like, Webb declaring that we need a 600-ship Navy to defeat Warsaw Pact, and we didn't get close to that.

It's like, no, but a 400-ship Navy, and when you pull your, when you pull your Iowa-class battleships out of being mothball to make them, like to make them like nuclear battle cruisers like that sends a kind of statement that um it doesn't when you simply when you know when when you simply declare yourself satisfied with forces and being okay i mean that's um people can argue this all day but i don't believe that german service ships or somehow i don't see how they somehow like superpowered or what have you and that you know they're they can be said to just by existing you know make up for make up for numeric disparities of you know two and three to one but um that's kind of the other i mean the other than emphasize i'm trying to bore everybody to death with uh the minutia

and trivia of naval warfare but there's like a big issue that is like thrown in the face where a vision is like oh what about what what about this naval arms race that was that was instigated by you know by by by vilhelm and turpice you know my my rebuttal is that it did not exist okay um And it's also something to keep in mind about all this talk that was bandied about threats, you know, strategic threats and what kinds of primary threats and what sort of budgetary allocations had to be rendered. This was the emergence really kind of the managerial state, even though as we talked about at the onset of this episode, outset rather. you know, European political life remained populated by monarchs. These monarchs were increasingly kind of self-conscious, like, self-consciously like obsolescent. You know, you had these, you had legislatures that to somebody or another were all accountable to the body politic.

You had formal lobbying structures, you know, that represented heavy industry, trade unions. um discrete uh discreet um military industries you know that quite literally relied upon the ability to present a cognizable you know strategic threat or challenge in order to survive you know and also when politics becomes and this was the lament of of karl smit and everybody else in the vimar era you know politics um you know that the modern parliamentary system it's not just about, you know, it's not just about it's not just about whether or not there's perverse incentives, you know, the parliamentarians to act correctly or whatever.

And you know historical terms, what have you, in the way that, you know, the ancient regime will not perfect, at least, you know, theoretically was constitutionally structured to do so. There's the issue of, you know, populations becoming, you know, massively scaled in the tens of millions, which was an issue of first impression most place. places, you know, the true onset of actual media, you know, not just, you know, an occasional newspaper where, you know, five percent of people can read. You're talking about, like, a constant

transmission of radio. You know, you're talking about movie houses where people develop their conceptual picture of the world, you know, from like these two-minute, like, shorts. You know, war and peace questions get reduced to slogans then, you know, and if you want to survive in the parliamentary system. If your opponent, you know, if your opponent takes the floor and says, you know, I'm going to meet the German threat, you know, without exception, you know, whatever it takes.

Like, what's my opponent going to do? Like, you can't take an hour and explain why that's a fucked up attitude and that doesn't make any sense. Your neighbors aren't reading your memes. If you want to counter demoralization where it counts most, your community, you're going to have to bring it into meat space. Get your counter-propaganda gear. at Mostlypeaceful.com made especially for people who did have breakfast this morning.

Mostlypeaceful.com has merch for the dissident right, recovering libertarians, and your based uncle who knew about them 20 years before you did. Featuring apparel, hats, and stickers that piss off all the bad people and make the right people laugh. There's plenty of Uncle Ted stuff, Kildozer, Waco and Ruby Ridge. There's even a Rhodesia designer, too. Most of of it has been banned from the big marketplaces and led to PayPal and Shopify suspending accounts. If you're more Bill Cooper than Alex Jones, more Pinoche than Prager You, stop at mostly peaceful.com and start shirt posting. Use code Pete to save 20% off your order. This message was not approved by the ADL or SPLC. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, with the level of

propaganda we've been seeing lately with this thing in the Middle East, would you you say that World War I was probably the premier was like the true start of war propaganda in history or on a wide scale. I mean, obviously there was propaganda before, but it was limited how much it could be generated. In Europe, definitely. I think the war between the states, one of the reasons why I like a disease in the public mind by Tom Fleming.

I mean, Fleming was a great historian and writer. I mean, he was also like, he was also like a very objective voice. He wasn't some lost cause historian. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm something of a loss cause story myself. But he was like this Irish Catholic guy from the northeast. So it's not like he's carrying water for either side. But there was an outsized literacy rate in a lot of places in America, which, uh,

where, we're political authority kind of concentrated. And for about 30 years, there was this constant stream of, abolitionist adjut prop um that was just like unending okay um and some of these people were true believers you know like people like john brown like john brown was a terrible person but he wasn't he wasn't just like saying things he believed everything he said you know like he thought that he was ushering in this kind of like racial apocalypse that would that would cleanse the land like insane as that sounds but john brown didn't just think this up all by himself You know, there was a lot of guys and some ladies, you know, who were basically literate, you know, from having learned to read scripture.

And, like, all they read, like, all they read was just, like, crazy abolitionist stuff, you know. And, yeah, that's different than a radio broadcasting all day, you know, more immersive propaganda. And it's certainly different than, like, you know, a movie house blasting out the same. same stuff with a visual element, but it is, um, but that was the first example at scale, I think. E. Michael Jones he makes a big deal about, um,

the Jigwin revolution. I see his point, and he makes the point, too, about like, the side was like exploiting pornography, like literally, like dirty pictures to kind of insinuate a revolutionary sensibility into people and not to be crude, but kind of

like getting people to think with their dick instead of their mind. Like that stuff is true. But in terms of like a concrete, like coherent, if insane, conceptual narrative, like over years, you know, and in the America's case, decades of the South is, is Gamora, it's totally evil. These slave masters are, are butchering blacks and taking black women as these concubine slaves. You know, it's going to get struck down by God. Like, do you want to get struck down with them. No, stand up and liberate these people. And the

black man is an innocent primitive. So, you know, he's the richest in the eyes of God. So you've got to lead him against Mammon and Gomorrah. Like, that stuff is really, really, really powerful. You know, um, so that's my take on it.

But yeah. And, um, in the terms we're discussing definitely. And it's also too, just this converge unfortunately, the cause relationship or the common causal nexus is complicated, but there was some relationship between the onset of conditions that led to the war itself and, you know, kind of modern as we know it, parliament parliament, parliamentarism. So this kind of

endless discussion whereby, you know, kind of like your trump card is to say like, oh, you're not meeting, you know, XYZ strategic threat, or you're not willing to address these things, you know, in a responsible capacity, yeah, that definitely created a perfect storm. It's also, too, like we talked about, and this doesn't excuse the cravingness of parliamentarians, but the last European war, anybody was alive who fought in, really was the Francoxian War, and these were guys in their 60s and 70s, you know, and it was, there was a handful of officers still in uniform who'd been there,

but your average parliamentarian, your average, you know, your average, uh, fire brand, uh,

you know, party whip or whatever. He had, he had no idea what modern warfare was like. He probably thought it would be like the Crimean War and there'd be some, you know, there'd be some deployment to the frontier of hungry or something.

And for a few days, you know, there'd be like some token casualties. And then everybody would save face. and like things will go back to normal. I mean, that's ridiculous, but people are ridiculous. You know, they had no concept. It, even, I think in the German general staff, they did,

and I think there was British Army types who I think were serious. But they'd also, one of the things that killed the British Empire, I mean, it was, it died a bizarre and natural death, only to Churchill and that cotery. But one of the things that was hurting it, managing a truly global empire, you're constantly dealing with these weird intrigues on the periphery of it, and you're constantly having to kind of finesse various factions, both of whom are kind of grimy, but you have to take a side just because, you know, the balance in your outlying dominions demand it. you know and it's not the kind of thing

it's not really the kind of thing you can sell as a parliamentary program or as like a defense policy you know and you can discernibly identify and Orwell got into this

in Burmese days but I think it's by far as best book at some point in the 20th century like around the Edwardian era like policy in the colonies and these outlying dominions in the Orient and the British

Raj, you know, in Africa, just started becoming, like, visibly senile. You know, it's like people couldn't, like the white man couldn't keep it together anymore the way that he had to. You know, it, um, you had these ambitious guys who wanted to kind of put in a couple of years

as, you know, like a constabulary policeman in Burma or in Uganda or something. But they were just kind of pretending that, you know, things were like they were back in London or I don't care of. about these darkies and their intrigues anyway, you know, I'm just going to get paid and get out. You know, it's not, that's not the way you can conduct things and rule the world, literally.

So I think that's part of it too. You know, you had these guys who were like, oh, nobody can beat us in the colonies anyway. What about this German problem? Like, that's a way that you can actually, that's a way that even dumb, there's a concept, even dummies can understand. It brings money in. It gets, you know, kind of the, it gets kind of like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the frozen gears of, of, of, of, of a, of the establishment moving, you know, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, it lets you grandstand as, as some kind of defender of the realm. You know, I'm not even saying people, like, consciously do this, although some do, but it, you know, that, um, even if you try to explain to people, I'm, I'm no, like, political genius or some guy, like, in the order of, like, Metternich, Bismar, or Kissinger. but I do know something and when people approach me

I'm talking about like in the real world okay and they do a lot believe or not I mean God help us right but um like ask me something about you know like what do you think the situation

is an XYZ and I'll be like well like my opinion and I'll start dropping on them what I think the relevant factors are you know in terms of the players and um the kind of power political nuances is

and like their eyes literally like glaze over like people don't want to think about that stuff because it's boring or doesn't make sense. Like, I'm not denying it. I don't know why I, these are my skill set lies as analyzing these things. I'm not pretending it's like, you know, but. Everybody wants, everybody wants a checker's answer when it's a chess, when the, when the

answer is in chess. You know, what's also, I mean, just look at today. And I'll get back, um, I'll get back to the, the subject of the hand. You know, I'm not saying this to stroke myself or say, like, oh, I'm so great. I was right. But I said at the onset of hostilities. that Israel's in grave jeopardy with Netanyahu at the helm. And what Netanyahu should have done is assaulted immediately.

Like, I mean immediately, okay? Basically before, you know, world opinion had a chance to even kind of piece together the variables. Instead, you know, and in weird ways, it's kind of like, it's almost like how the, how how the heat of passion defense that traditional common law was accepted, you know, incident to an accusation of unprivileged homicide.

You know, if you're, if it appears that you're returning to serve in war and peace terms, you know, you're afforded a freedom of action that you're not if you wait for some kind of quorum to develop or if you wait for permission,

you know, the way that really is true. Okay, if you're going to go to war, act immediately. Do not ever wait if you're going to go to war. And if you're not going to go to war, do not ever say you are going to and then not do it. Okay. Um, this isn't corny like stuff that like that like fucking fairies who like in on Wall Street will like read a book of five rings say like this is, this is like very precedent and it's a human nature. And the way the international system works. Um, and it's just the way it is. Like you don't give, if you have to go to war,

you, um, particularly stay like Israel, which is not. particularly well situated i mean due to its own this is completely its own doing but it's not it's not it's not particularly you know well situated in terms of the ability to defend in depth or anything approaching that but i mean this is one of things that as we'll see this is one of things that led to the catastrophe of the great war um there's literally a month between uh what amounted in my opinion to a uh a nakedly brutal and and and truly truly grotesque political assassination by a gang of real brutes. I'm not some bigoted

asshole. I'm not saying like, I'm not like putting out Slavic people or Serbs. But the people in question here, as we'll see, we're not admirable people. Okay. If the Habs were getting pirate acted immediately, you know, it's not, it's not like the Russians, like, went all in, you know, in Bulgaria, like,

you know, was, was, went to war with Turkey or something. You know, like, don't get me wrong. There was a special relationship between Serbia and Russia. I mean, to this day, but again, reacting immediately to a provocation is always the proper course. I'm not saying you should always react, but if it's essential to react, you must do so immediately. And that will place you not just in the optimal strategic and tactical position, but it also will give you a lot of wiggle room in the court of public opinion.

opinion. And nowhere, and a world opinion does actually matter, as we talked about. But I'll, uh, I'll try and wrap this up meaningfully without, like, rushing through, without rushing through anything unduly. The, I think kind of the final, um, kind of the final, um, kind of the final aspect of inventing the, the German strategic threat, or inventing, you know, kind of the idea of a German hegemon looming. The United Kingdom, as empires are often at their apparent zenith, at least in terms of their ability to project power, and in terms of the sheer scale and vastness of territory, they directly control. you know the British Empire was frankly on the decline it was not its economic model was robust in basic terms so long as the political situation globally was was was basically stable but it had really kind of exhausted its potential for real growth okay um in 1862 when Bismarck became the minister-president of Prussia. The manufacturing regions of Germany of the German states accounted for the fifth largest share of industrial production. Britain was well ahead.

Britain was on top in the 1860s at 19.9%. Between 1880 and 1890, Germany shot up the third place. behind the United States and Britain. By the eve of war, 1913, 1914, the United States was well on top. Germany's share of World Industrial production had

quadrupled, and Britain had sank the third place and declining. And obviously concomitant with that Germany's share of world trade, like it's export, finding, you know, destination markets globally had dramatically increased.

They were on par to overtake the UK by 1913, which had shared shrunk to 14.2% of exports, with Germany holding at about 12, 13%. The German, and Frederick List, obviously, was like the, his ideas of, I'm, of this economic architecture. You know, he was very much was a Hamiltonian. Like Papua Cairn used to make that point a lot. But the point is like Germany was becoming a superpower, okay? That's an arguable.

Like Germany slash Europe. I mean that the writing was on the wall. Okay. Now, if there was some sort of possibility of London fighting a war with Germany, you know, in 1914, or in 1939 whereby some kind of declaration of rights

subsequent was implemented and the world was literally divided up, you know, between powers, okay, fine. But that was never on the table for all kinds of reasons. You know, it's this idea that Britain had to literally burn Germany down, burn

Europe down, bring the United States and the Russians into the heart of Europe and you know Britain had to Britain had to be willing to become Airstrip 1

but ha ha I know the Germans no longer on top that's literally insane I mean that's the way people think you know but it's um I think there was some aspect of that with Churchill

who among other things didn't give a fuck what Britain's fortunes were but like I said I think with other people who were you know insinuated into high places i think it was kind of the the ongoing illogic of the things we discuss and the variables emergent related to parliamentarism and the changing world situation that you know men in executive roles or proximate to executive commander in chief role simply didn't understand anymore you know this kind of illogic taken to its taken to it some kind of inevitable conclusion, you know, like led to these terrible policy outcomes, you know, particularly as regards, you know, power political hegemony and things.

But, I mean, that's a question. There's a metaphysical aspect of this, too. Like, it's, it's heavily psychological and sociological. It's, you know, requires, you know, a deep immersion in the process of history, which, which I think accepting there is a process of history is a prerequisite to what we're doing. I don't someone disagree, but there's also a metaphysical aspect as the cunning of reason, you know, which maybe prefers the hand of God, but I know some people uncomfortable they hear it so described where they just tune out when anybody invokes the G word. So I don't deny Christ, I don't deny God, but you know what I mean? like there are times

I think euphemism is an order so people don't think that you know they're tuning into a Sunday sermon but um the uh what I want to wrap up with here was uh because we do have to get into the the conflict itself

and what remains in terms of addressing and explicating the political cultures of combatant states and the personages that helmed those states will do that as we discuss

the decisions rendered that led these states to battle specifically in thinking of the Hathburg Empire and Franz Joseph as well as Hoveg and the Tsar, Nicholas. But

like I said at the top of the hour you know who was Franz Ferdinand Ferdinand had a peculiar ascendancy to becoming heir he was born in Gras Austria he was the eldest son

of Archduke Carl Ludwig who was the younger brother of Franz Joseph the half-spring emperor when when Ferdinand was 11 years old in 1875, his cousin the Duke of Modena died, naming France

Ferdinand as his heir. And subsequently in adulthood, Ferdinand went out to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He was a very cunning businessman, in addition to other things. One of the reasons I say Ferdinand has been unduly maligned is because he was the right kind of noble, okay, and the German

system produced some of these guys, the German and the Hasburg system. Okay, dysfunctional as the Hasberg regime was, it produced some, it produced some men who really shine, okay? And, and Ferdinand, he was worldly in the right kinds of ways, he understood business.

He understood, you know, he understood the emergent, you know, industrial economy, at scale and the role of like literally the role of money they're in but um what really altered his fortunes or like his life trajectory which is often the case with great men in uh 1880 in 1889 um Franz Joseph's son uh crown prince rudolph committed suicide at his hunting lodge which is somewhat of a tragic thing like you

I don't we're treated like we're treated to like we're treated to idiots like that like that freaking sin who goes on making a fool of himself with that Megan Merkel woman

but like actual royals of actual responsibilities and particularly a man I think Franz Joseph was like I said I think he was I think he was a great man and something of a tragic figure,

but having him for a father wouldn't have been fun. I speculate Crownburn's Rudolph saw the writing on the wall. Not that he could have predicted by some augury the Great War, but what he saw waiting for him when he became emperor, right? I don't think he saw anything he liked, okay? I don't think people generally kill themselves flippantly.

And it's important to recognize, too, you know, by the outbreak of hostilities, Franz Joseph had been on the throne 66 years. The guy was in his 80s. You know, I mean, it was, this was, this was, this, this, this, this, this, this was bad. You know, and we're getting ahead of ourselves, but, um, the Crown Prince killing himself. This left France, Ferdinand's father, you know, the emperor's brother is first in line for the throne. Um, but he dropped dead, you know, a few years later.

So, Franz Ferdinand, you know, this kind of guy from Graz, this guy was a big, big guy, outdoorsman big hunter you know big businessman his wife too there's not going to make sense anybody but europeans of a certain ilk and i'm not being mean but um ferdin married a lady in waiting and this like scandalized everybody but this lady was a royal herself she just didn't have like a height of pedigree to marry a hepsburg which is i mean just like but ferdinand like gave no fucks about that kind of stuff this is like a woman he wanted and she was very beautiful So he's like, you know, he had to agree to forego any, like, he had, he had, he had to agree to, like, um, forego any claim of his errors to the throne, which is incredibly petty. But, uh, you know, he did what he wanted, you know, he married the woman he loved, you know, so.

And he, uh, he had a reputation as being a hardline, uh, sectarian. Very proud Austrian, very staunch Catholic. You know, he had, he had, he had no. time for Orthodox. He had no time for Lutherans. He had no time for Muslims. But behind that hard talk and kind of pride of Ross, he favored very much granting the minorities, particularly the Slavs, you know, the South Slavs, and Habslands, you know, limited autonomy. You know, generally murdering a chief executive doesn't lead anything good

I refer people to the murder of Abraham Lincoln well murdering France Ferdinand didn't do anything good for the Serbs and arguably they it was totally self-defeating but we'll get into like how this all developed one of the key is for the next episode

but one of the key things to consider the Tsar and his cabinet were utterly convinced that the Habsbury Empire was threatening to go to war with Serbia as a, you know, at the behest of Germany as a kind of cipher to draw a rush into the conflicts that Germany would have a pretext to assault it.

That's incredibly paranoid. It also doesn't make any sense. But this was, um, I put that out there kind of in context to see the sort of outsized impact this this murder had but it was on its own terms pretty horrible unfortunately what uh the hapsburg army which uh was this highly ceremonial it was a highly ceremonial aspect to it i mean europe of the era was like there was like military pageantry everywhere. This was misconstrued by people like Colonel House when he visited Europe.

So they're like, you know, militarism is a cancer there. It's like, he didn't get it. You know, like Royals all were military uniforms to these, you know, ribbon cutting events. You know, armies on parade were, was a thing, you know, but it's, uh, for it in himself,

uh, had been a colonel in the Hasbro army. I'm sure a lot of that inflated rank was nepotism, but, you know, the guy did, He had trained as an imagery officer. He wasn't just pretending. Unfortunately, the Hasbrook Army's summer maneuvers in 1914 were held in Bosnia on an ill-chosen day.

That being June 28th. June 28th is the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Field. in 389. So the Habsburg Empire showing up in Bosnia with France Ferdinand, you know, who's notorious for issuing

you know, rather niggily sectarian statements was not was probably not the best idea. But at the same time he was trying to send a message that he wasn't afraid and he wouldn't be cowed by threats, which again, I think he's a point in his

favor um honestly and um in this case uh the kiltine that was in place it was five five ethnic serbs and one bosian moslem i believe and traditionally everybody accepted this this moslem guy was was there for cosmetic purposes and um the umbrella organization that call itself young Bosnia. Historians these days, and it's not just like Chetnik types or like Zionists, they claim that it's some bigoted statement

or scapewinning myth. They claim young Bosnia consisted of radicalized Serbs. They claim that, oh, there was Croas and Bosniaks in its ranks two who just believed in Yugoslavianism. Like, nobody believes in Yugoslavianism. Okay, these Croas and Bosniaks who were in the ranks,

they were either anarchists some of them strangely enough were almost undoubtedly um like radicalized Muslims who despite the fact that um you know there was absolutely zero love lost

you know between the Orthodox Serbs and Muslims they had some actually they hated the Habsburg regime and they just clicked up with whoever was going to kill it you know but this idea that this wasn't this wasn't the a Serbian endeavor is

preposterous beyond belief for that you know you murder an heir to the throne you know for the sake of you know some like bureaucratic apparatus that you hope is emergent that's like declaring that like there's men who like commit suicide bombings like for the greater

for the greater glory of like Ron DeSantis like there's it's like literally that fucking stupid but as Ferdinand and um and his wife made their way in their motorcade to the

residence of the provincial governor a member of the a member of the kill team Young Stony Kavanaulich he threw an IED at Ferdin's vehicle but

it ricocheted off and then exploded under the car following and wounded the officer at the wheel the imperial party proceeded apparently ferdinand upon arriving at the governor's mansion said you always welcome your guests with bombs a gallous humor um about an hour later um the caravan be detoured to go to the hospital to look in on the victims of the bombing which again in my opinion fernand looks like better and better during his last janor is okay the driver and the lead vehicle hadn't been informed of this so the caravan had to stop

and a reroute and as they stopped to correct the wrong turn and and reversed several of the cars stalled Now Gavrella Princep by chance who was part of the kill team he was sitting literally across the street at a cafe

drinking coffee he was armed with a browning 380 it was of European manufacturer but it was a 380 okay this was a model for gear queers what became the Walter I don't know when the Walter When 3D Walter first appeared

But this one was based on it was a browning platform But it was manufactured in Belgium But I mean a powerful A powerful handgun So Gabriel Princep literally looks over And he's like That looks like Ferdinand That is Ferdinand

So presumably he racks around He literally walks up the Ferdinand's car At point blank range You just started shooting and he was you know immediately tackled um and subdued um Franz Ferdinand he was shot in the neck um his wife Sophie got shot in the in the abdomen and um I find this really sad like like a lot of Sophie was wearing this uh this really like ornate you know like like like royal dress kind of thing and you know like women of those days they all um you know they all wore those

like girdles that like you know they could hardly breathe in that like acted as a tourniquet for a minute so like so we kind of like lingered on in agony and and then like succumb to she succumbed like internal injuries where they got to the hospital but like basically like that kept her from like bleeding out but i mean she knew she was going to die and um the ferdinand um ferdinand was gushing blood um count harrock uh I guess, like, blood splattered from, like, Ferdinand's wound, like, on to Count Harrock's face, who was standing on, like, the running boards of the car. Harrog pulled out his hangar chief and, you know, tried to press it onto Fernand's neck.

And, uh, Harak, uh, said, you know, for God's sake, are you okay? um Sophie then I guess fell to her knees either from shock or you know blood loss or whatever and uh

Harrock originally thought she'd only fainted then he realized like she'd been shot um Ferdinand apparently was still lucid at this time he turned to Sophie and kind of like

picked her up up and said, if I butcher this, forgive me. I'm leaving for unsick hinder. Sophie, don't die. Stay alive for the kids. I guess, after a minute or two, according to Hark, Fernand fell down, like into a seat from blood loss. I guess, like, these green feathers in his plume, like, fell over his face.

And, um, there's a bunch of green feathers all over the car floor, like, stained with his blood that, like, people took. Either, I mean, which is, I, people who strange things, like, when, when people had murder scenes. But that, I found that, that's, like, something you'd seen a movie. But, um, the, uh, you know, Sophie died shortly thereafter and apparently, you know, a few minutes

subsequent, you know, Ferdinand died. I mean, he had, he was literally shot in the neck and gushing everywhere. The, Prince was arrested on the spot, obviously. the fate of prince that was too horrible to think about he was literally like chained to a wall for years and

and like left to rot like literally I'm not saying people to feel bad for him but that's no way for anybody to go like it's something out of a horror movie but um the uh investigation revealed that

um all the all the numbers that killed him were off of the subjects I mean which is no surprise I mean they were they were Bosnians but It was proving it was that they'd been armed in Serbia. They'd been smuggled across the border by Serbian nationalists, many of whom were also in the Serbian army. Okay.

It was determined that not just by Austrian investigators, but by neutral parties, that Nardonia Arbrana, literally national defense, it was just going to shadowy organization that was set up in 1908 to work against the incorporation of Bosnia into the Habsburg Empire

a tenant of its mandate and based I mean like a tenant of of Chetnik ideology today and I mean always and again I'm not saying this to be punitive towards Serbs or anything this is just a fact they're the Serb nationalist creed is that

Bosnia has historically Serb and it belongs of the Serbs as a people, you know, like it's, um, and that's, that's indisputable. Um, the organization that plotted the assassination was the, was the union or death, commonly known as the black hand. Um, there was a lot of men who had membership in, in, in all these organizations um and that's led a lot of people then as now to say like oh it can't be identified if there was any sort of control element related to the serbian government um that's really not true um nadonia udbara at the operational level they were intimately involved with the black hand and the man who wielded ultimate authority over it was uh

The Raghuddin, Demetidijevich, also known as Apis, after the Egyptian god or demon. That wasn't just his codename, that's what people called him. He was a terrifying individual. For those familiar with Archon, Apis was kind of like Archon. Apis had been part of the death squad that murdered King Alexander and Queen Zaga. he'd taken at the entrance to the royal residence he'd taken three rounds like to the chest and stomach um so he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger and killed alexander and the queen but i mean he was he was the only reason he wasn't is because he'd been he'd been shot and those those rounds

were never removed from his body but he was the he was the commander of the intelligence section of the serbian army's general staff and like we talked about last episode so you have in Serbia you have a government where the uh like literally you have a government a national government where the men in command authority roles over the military intelligence apparatus have committed murder like extrajudicial murder and not just that but of uh of a sitting monarch and had a state and his wife and you know look i'm the last person to, you know, opt for like pearl-clutching condemnations of

the reality is the wicked world. But what these people did to Alexander and Drega was pretty it's beneath the identity of a white man. This woman was in her underwear. They gun her down in front of her husband. They gun him down. Then they disemboweled these people and violated.

their corpses and then threw them out, they defrancerated their remains for people to mock. I mean that, this is not a good look. You know, so such that such that people want to say like, oh,

Serbians are given some kind of bad rap, and sometimes that is true. Okay, I'm not going to say that it's not. But these are not men who collectively were conducting politics in a way that was inclined to inspire goodwill, okay? Um,

and, uh, again, I think, uh, I think when Serbia is truly threatened in geostrategic terms, I think Russian intervention is inevitable. However, it's not, it's not as if,

uh, it's not as if Moscow, know, and historically Moscow and St. Petersburg are so axiomatically driven, you know, to intervene on behalf of their brother Slavs or something, you know, no matter, you know, no matter what they cost. I believe, I believe that, um, had, um, had Franz Joseph assaulted immediately and what could be argued was, you know, the heat of passion in the wake of a grotesque assault

upon an heir to the throne, but also one of his relatives, and by men who, in the past, you know, despite their claim to legitimate office, you know, carried the stain of homicide, literally on their hands. I think that would have put the Habsburg regime in a far better position than what they opted for, which was weeks of fruitless negotiation and threats.

And finally, an ultimatum, the kind of preposterousness, the kind of prima facie of preposterousness of it seems tailored to provoke hostilities and nothing else. But I'm going to, uh, I'm going to, uh, I'm going to, uh, I'm going to, to wrap it up for tonight um i uh no go ahead it was great it was great do your plug so we'll get out of here i know you're uh i know you've been uh feeling it physically yeah no no i appreciate you man and i'm on the mend and we'll we'll get into the fireworks of the great war in the next episode i promise i'm pleased to say that uh my dear friend giles at the asylum meg he's requested that i write another essay for them I hope that'll appear in the next few weeks.

I'm writing it literally as we speak. Season two of Mind Phaser is going to drop Halloween weekend. I'm very excited about that. You can find my podcast. Some of my short and medium form stuff as well as just kind of updates on what we're doing. Like we, I mean, like people in my, people in our orbit and like in our thing, you can find a lad at real Thomas 777.7.com

you can find kind of an aggregate of my content of all kinds in my website. It's Thomas 777.com number 7-H-1-S 777.com

I'm on X, formerly, Twitter. It's Real capital R-E-A-L underscore number seven, H-O-M-A-S-777. And I'm going, like Ethan Ralph invited me on TILLStream again this week. So I'll be doing that.

Joel Davis was kind enough to have me on his stream the other day. You can find that on YouTube, I believe. A lot of really good stuff is afoot. I realize I don't look well and I don't sound well, but I'm on the end and good stuff is happening. All right. Well, I appreciate it. And until the next episode, thank you, Thomas.

Thank you, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnonez show. I'm here with Thomas, and we are going to continue the World War I series. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm very well, thanks. I want to talk about the constellation of political factors that led to the formal onset of hostilities because there's a lot that's misunderstood here, even by people who address the matter in good faith. And something I want to make clear also

This is something that's sort of conspicuously absent From both mainstream histories and revisionist treatments And I don't think it's deliberate I mean it isn't the case of people Who suggests that the dividing line In terms of You know characteristics of the Of the central and allied powers

you know, was democracies, representative governments versus autocratic dictatorships. There's obviously like a value-loaded suggestion there. But this idea that these European states, whatever their configuration, and for the record, by far the most autocratic combat in a state was Russia. That goes without saying, okay?

It was not remotely, quote, democratic or, you know, a system characterized by balance of power, especially not in executive terms. But there's this idea that, you know, that the United Kingdom or France especially were characterized, we're like the United States or something. Like there's a clear separation of powers.

The authority to make war or to choose the suit for peace was expressly delegated, you know, to an executive you know, be it a prime minister or somebody in a consular role, that was not true at all. These European states, they'd been a very confused, convoluted, and literally violent, in many cases, transition from monarchy to, you know, these mixed systems of government that were forced to balance emergent bases of power that were forced to, you know, to deal with scenarios and, and data exigencies at scale that they were never designed to do so. The complexity of variables, as well as the sheer volume of inputs that had to be dealt with in dealing with high diplomacy and war in peace questions, it's not something that could possibly be put to a referendum in any meaningful way.

So there was confusion as to who actually had authority to act. You know, and that's one thing, particularly in the case of the German Empire, and I'll get into some anecdotes here from which people extrapolate this sort of punitive myth. It's claimed, oh, well, you know, the, the, you know, the, the German general staff was constantly overreaching and subjugating civilian authority or nominally civilian authority to its whims. That's not really true. there was a given take and there was definitely a kind of agonistic pluralism some of which was built into the system some of which was incidental but it wasn't clear who had final authority on on the decision to make war i mean yeah obviously the kaiser and only the kaiser could sign off on like a war declaration um but it's you know he he he wasn't studying war and peace questions

all day like he wasn't you know he he there's the reason that there's a foreign ministry was to that you know these matters could be addressed in a truly contemporaneous way like up to the minute as much as was feasible but there wasn't there wasn't some there wasn't some specifically drafted constitution you know with an eye to to manage these things and you know the u.s constitution like there's nothing nothing is worse than midwitch who worship the u. constitution because that's fucking retarded in all kinds of ways and it's just not like a it's not a magical scroll or miraculous document it's basically a miniature code of criminal procedure but it's also its delegation of power is uh is very clear and very concise

and particularly on article two questions of war and peace it's very very clear that the president does in fact the commander in chief that's expressly delegated the war powers act and attending legislation, it's not worth the papers written on in real world terms if it was ever challenged. I mean, in my opinion, it was challenged during the Reagan administration, and nobody pretended that it had forced a law. That's way way outside the scope we're talking about. But that's the degree to which this contributed to confuse signaling and bad decision-making really can't be overstated. And I'm not one of these people who thinks that, you know, in the post

war years, post-1945, obviously. I don't, I know these people are going to suggest that these IGOs like the United Nations were some great thing that had all kinds of potential at all. But there were conventions both formal and informal that basically everybody abided in both camps. And obviously, it simplified things that there was this kind of single,

basic ideological divide that you know created a kind of bipolar a series of diads I mean that that has to be accounted for but there was there was there was

basically a formalized structure a conflict resolution it was flawed and it certainly was not there certainly weren't any like built in guarantees that it wouldn't be neutralized by the emergence of, you know, deep strategic parodies and things, but it did exist.

And the Soviet Union, in war and peace terms, was somewhat like the United States. It was pretty clear, even though Kremlinology, you know, like men's formal titles often didn't indicate what their actual authority was. It was pretty clear who was in charge of the Soviet Union at any given time in war in peace terms so you knew who to negotiate with and you knew who to who to watch for personal um signaling um amidst a crisis to try and determine what future moves would be like none of this existed in 18 okay um like nothing remotely like it and also and i'll get into the meat of what we're talking about today in a moment but again and i realize i'm probably belaboring this point

but it's important. You know, contrary the claim of German, quote, German militarism being either like a cause of Belie or this ongoing sort of structural problem, you know, again, Germany hadn't fought a war in decades, you know, like what militarism are we talking about? One of the reasons why, as we'll see, there was not inherent caution to the ordering of mobilization protocol to be implemented is because people really didn't have an understanding of how devastating combined

arms were, okay, because they hadn't been utilized at scale before. And some of these technologies hadn't been utilized, period. Okay, at least not at the caliber, literally, and scale that was to be, you know,

that was to take the field in 1914. So there's that, too. I was reading just the other day I mean in part only is something I'm writing but in part in preparation for our series you know even one of the things

one of the reasons why Celine you know like called his protagonist Bartamu you know and he was always talking about like you know the endless walking and like and like a you know the burden of the infantrymen and stuff like that um every combatant state uh their infantrymen packed a load of around 60 pounds of gear uh that's incredibly burdensome you know and that's i mean there's even

something as small as that like you weren't you know that nobody nobody was packing a load like that during the crimean war like the war between the states you know like everything like every facet of every facet of combat had had become altered you know um and as us you know

and that's that's something that um obviously it there's no comparison you know between the the nuclear age and uh you know the battlefield of the

early 20th century where in you know like the strategic air power hadn't even emerged yet. But, you know, the, there is a common, the common theme is that a lack of ability of existent structures, you know, to adapt to emergent technologies and, you know, destabilizing influences and complex parodies. they're in

so it's something to keep in mind every step of the way here and as well as you know like again I realize it sounds like I'm suggesting war guilt be laid at the door

of the Russian Empire I don't believe in war guilt conceptually at all I reject that conceptually outright it doesn't feature into my political ontology why is that because it's because it's just misguided it's like saying that like war is an or more planned or devised than you know national economies are planned and devised you know

I mean that's not to say that there's times where chief executives or men insinuated into roles where they're able to influence policy decisions at critical junctures that's not to say that such people do not at times sue for war and you know either only to some kind of clouds of witsy and logic where they believe that it's the most profitable option in literal or figurative terms

but no no man or men or government or nation is capable of just devising conditions wherein war is emergent. That's not the way reality is but that's a whole deep philosophical question but

in any event at a key juncture, Russia's decision to mobilize is what set World War I in motion, or what set the nexus of causality in motion that caused the onset of hostilities. However, I understand why Russia, within the bound irrationality of, you know, strategic thinking, particularly as... particularly on to certain factors emergent, you know, in August of 1914. It's understandable why they did that. Their grave strategic error was believing that the Habsburg Empire was quite literally a proxy of Berlin,

and that was not the case at all. The relationship of the German Empire and Germany itself, I mean, even today, to Austria, and to a lesser degree to Croatia. That's, there's definitely like a deep, like, racial allegiance and as well as, you know, cultural interdependence and everything else there. But this idea that the German Empire was simply not going to let the Habsburg Empire disintegrate and this idea that, you know, Vienna was just this client regime of the German Empire that's totally facile.

But I can see why the Russians thought that. And if that was correct, if that was a correct strategic analysis, that totally changed everything that was happening. And that basically meant it was imperative to repair for general war against the German Empire because to simply prepare for a localized conflict that would have been disastrous. And if anything, arguably, that would have been, you know, assuming that the Russian view was correct, that would they they could have possibly been being duped into a strategic ruse and then annihilated um that's where their thinking was um and the uh russia is a conspiratorial society and i think they outsmart themselves because like every man and every agent and every every decision-making cadre

project something of themselves both onto his enemies and rivals and allies but also just like onto the strategic landscape itself even if you're self-aware you do this axiomatically you know so the Russians view everything as inherently conspiratorial you know and they they always fall back

they have a tendency to outsmart themselves they did it in the world war one they did it in the assault in afghanistan in 1979 um they Stalin did it um in uh you know trying to uh try to finesse and essentially lie to Hitler you know meanwhile devising um you know a plan to conquer Europe, you know, the icebreaker plan, as it's kind of known colloquially. But that's key to understanding

the First World War. And as well as the situation of the United Kingdom, which is something really nobody talks about, and the impact of the Ulster situation on the internal situation of the United Kingdom as well as on its decision to deploy as a combatant state to the continent.

The situation in Ireland was dispositive on that decision. And that's the only combatant state where the internal situation literally dictated what the decision to, you know, what the decision to. the decision to go to war abroad. And I don't know if this passes most people by or if it doesn't fit with the rest of the narrative, but we'll get into that

a little bit too. And finally, just because I can't think of a more appropriate place to insinuate it. To return just momentarily to the relationship of the German Empire to the Habsburg regime, for people who think that, well, this was just, you know, like a third Balkan war that was developing,

but Germany just wouldn't allow the Habsburg regime to fall. That's nonsense. And if, you know, what Germany was doing for a decade, for the onset of hostilities, was cultivating the Ottoman Empire. I mean, Wilhelm said a lot of kind of dumb things, and he just kind of, like, made statements, like, you know, he issued declarations of friendship or enmity. and, you know, just kind of whimsically. But he consistently was courting the Ottomans. During his visit to Damascus,

he literally said that, you know, like the Sultan is like a friend of Germany and the Kaiser is a friend of Dharal Islam and Islamic people. German firms were trying to create parallel infrastructure like throughout the Ottoman Empire. You know, like obviously the hedge against the United Kingdom. But also, obviously, if they're in their view, if the Ottoman Empire survived

it's like okay if the Ottomans get Bosnia and everything south and east like who cares if they're our allies or if it falls apart you know we can see we like you know being the Germans can stand to inherit a bunch of these territories

and as long as we can like finesse the populations there who are like racial and sectarian aliens you know like we'll you know we'll be a tremendously we'll be in a position of tremendous, you know, um, political power. And, uh, obviously if, you know, their, if obviously their notion was the, you know, kind of preserve the, like the gripping hand of, of Habsburg rule, that that would not

have been remotely what they were, you know, what they were pursuing. But we could probably do a whole, like, fucking series on that. But that's, that's just, that's another thing that jumps out of me and, and researching the um the decade before uh august 1914 that not a lot of people talk about now the historical date that's assigned as the onset of world war one is july 28th 1914 that's when emperor frant joseph that's when he signed his declaration of war against serbia um at the imperial villa at Bod Eshal

or Ishal The text The text followed basically the identical like template format That That's for a court It always used

It was nearly identical to The format of Austrians It used for declaring war on Prussia Back in 1866 The text literally read to my people it was my fervent

wish to consecrate the years which by grace of God still remain to me to the works of peace and protect our people from the heavy sacrifices and burdens of war. Providence in its wisdom is otherwise decreed. The intrigues when a malevolent opponent compel me in the defense of the honor of my

monarchy for the protection of its dignity and his position as a power, the security of its possessions to grasp the sword after long years of peace. um that sounds very overwrought and it it is that's what uh that's basically like with all like these these uh there's almost a contract of adhesion language like if people can believe that or not these are formal declarations of war under like the westphalian system and this was the last um um this this was the last uh general war that was waged within the westphalian paradigm

um world war two if you look at 1939 to 1941 or 40 or 939 9040 um i believe until dunkirk that was uh uh within at least within the contemplation of uh of uh of the german rike and and and of the french republic um that was a uh a wage according to westphalian custom and precedent but If, you know, the other combatant states, namely the UK and then the Soviet Union reject that paradigm outright, it can't be said to be, you know, the controlling modality of hostilities. What was key, though, in my opinion, and like I said, Christopher Clark, who's a historian, I esteem a lot. his take is he doesn't come out to say this but it's pretty clear from his historiography he identifies July 25th 1914 is when the die was cast three days

before Franz Joseph's Declaration of War this was when there's a meeting of the Russian Council of Ministers presided over by the Tsar himself attended by the chief of staff Yaniskevich and by the Grand Duke, Nikolai, who was significant because he was the commander of the St. Petersburg District of the other Russian army.

Okay. This meeting confirmed the council's decisions of the preceding days, which most significantly was they'd been sold by the foreign ministry on this idea that, The Habsburg Empire was acting in a pure proxy role of the German Empire. So any war preparations had to be tailored with an eye to wage a general war against the German Empire. And with an eye to, you know, with an eye to defeat its power potential. You know, it's forces in being as well as, you know, what could be mustered upon mobilization. Now, most importantly, what the council decided on July 25th,

they authorized its complex batch of batch of regulations known as the period preparatory to war. Now, these measures, it would seem at a glance that these measures were devised owing to the vastness of Russia's territory and its need to divide forces in a way that, um, maximize the ability to defend in depth, you know, on its flanks, as well as to, as well as to muster, you know, maximum firepower at the point of a, at the point of assault across the main line of resistance, but that's not the effect that, that's not the effect that this paradigm had, as we'll see in a minute. Obviously, the problem with this was that owing to the outsized comparatively, you know, power potential of Russia, its strategic reserve system and everything else, like any mobilization indicator that Russia ordered was going to be treated as a constructive declaration of war. It doesn't matter what it was. really the only way Russia could have ordered any any mobilization activity

that would not have been viewed as a general act of aggression against both the German Empire and Austria-Hungary is that forces were truly localized to strike into the Balkans against the anticipated path of assaulting Habsburg columns and that these efforts were attended every step of the way by a declaration of intent to Berlin

to avoid a general state of hostilities emergent with the German Empire. Even then, that would be no guarantee, obviously, of avoidance of escalation to a general of war with both Austria, Hungary, and the German Empire, but that's the only way feasibly that such an outcome could be avoided.

What focused the minds of the kind of entire war council that coalesced around the Tsar, Sergei Sassanov, he was the Russian foreign minister.

He had tremendously, in my opinion, internalized the logic of the Franco-Russian alliance, which of course was that Germany, not the Habsburg Empire, was always the principal adversary.

You know, and that anything Austria did was at the behest and whim of Berlin, and that any disposition of Austria, hardly towards Serbia, has to be understood as an effort to

to contain and roll back Russian influence in the Balkans but again that's that's that's very much at odds with reality you know but that was this was what the Russian this is what the Tsars

War cabinet this was their mindset um as for the as for the problem of um as the problem of Russia's general kind of like unrightiness for war

there's a strange dichotomy um both the France and the UK and the UK then the UK's ability to kind of forecast uh power potential outcomes was better than that of the French for a few reasons in my opinion um the French had a totally outsized view of of the capabilities of the Russian infantry. They just did, okay? I'm sure part of that was wishful thinking. Part of that was

French and Russian battle doctrine in the Great War wasn't radically different. An early kind of iteration, a deep battle kind of ruled the day. I think part of that was, you know, conceptually, specifically on strategic matters, people who mirror each other,

they tend to develop like an outsized belief in their own capabilities and the correctness of their own kind of tactical orientation. But the British had no such conceits, but at the same time,

they did you, they didn't account with the fact that like, okay, Russia had this vast reserve system. You know, that could eat that could pretty much like immediately be the um be transformed into forces in being but these men were barely trained you know and again like there hadn't been um like the russians have been in action in the crimea and they'd been in action and you know brush fire wars on the frontiers of the empire and the balkans but you know russian infantry hadn't been deployed at

scale in like opening in combat for decades you know so it's like the napoleonic era but um the uh the germans took uh took this very seriously as you have to you know um in terms of capabilities i mean um but i mean even if they even if they even if even if they didn't um even if even if berlin didn't the fact that um russia was by far you know like the largest military power on the continent. And they were quite clearly targeting Germany as their primary adversary. And they were treating any, they were treating any, they were treating any hostile action against Serbia by the Habsburg Empire, quite literally as, you know, a German assault on, on Russia's sphere of influence um

Bethman Holbeg um and any anybody in the military um command staff had to you know had to treat Russia as an existential threat or they were not

fulfilling their the duty of their office um now as I mentioned a minute ago the practical measures that um constituted this period preparatory to war

were somewhat baffling first and foremost there was a it calls for a partial mobilization this was specifically advocated by Sazanov but this partial mobilization it wasn't aimed at localizing the conflict

or signaling a desire to localize the conflict it was a general deployment just only partially you know so It had the effect of presenting a direct threat to the Habsburg Empire. It would signal to the German Empire a desire to wage, a desire and intent to wage war. You know, just as a German partial mobilization would have thrown the Russian war machine into full gear, as it were. But at the same time, it wasn't the scale and depth of which wasn't adequate to, to wage a general broad front assault against the relatively localized theater of Serbia,

against the relatively localized theater of the Balkans, coming to the defense of Serbia and assaulting Algeria, as well as penetrating deep into German lines and presumably assaulting with adequate forces. to break the main line of resistance. So it was kind of considered the worst of all possible options. Unless the idea, unless, as some people suggested, the notion of it was that it was a bluff,

but A, I don't believe that, and B, if you're going to bluff, like, you go all in with the ruse. You know, you don't partially mobilize. I mean, the only reason you do that is to presume, like theoretically leave room for negotiation before uh onset of hostilities but again you know any any mobilization is going to is going to indicate hostile intent and to claim you and to claim you want peace while mobilizing is just appears duplicitous or incoherent um this uh so the What's key is that this mobilization schedule was, it was, it was an all-or-nothing proposition.

You know, it made no distinction between adversaries vis-à-vis the Austria-Hungary and the German Empire. It's, uh, the variations in population density across mobilization zones meant that the Russian army just kind of drew generally on the entirety of the population. And it's localized draft boards or whatever or like reserve system. It fed centrally into the Russian army system. And then deployments were rendered as needed, you know, like as, as attrition set in. You know, so it can't be understood as, you know, the Russians obviously signaling to, again, like, reinforce locally or to strike a defensive posture. You know, there's no such thing as defensive mobilization anyway, but that's a different, it's kind of a different. it's kind of a different thing

but um the uh it also um it also um it also uh arguably and again I'm not enough of a I'm not enough

of a of like a war game or egghead and even if I was like I haven't like gamed the scenarios enough um to render like a judgment on this but arguably too that the Russian system wasn't even capable of a localized mobilization just going to the nature of Russian infrastructure the arrangement rail lines you know the complexity of logistics you know it's uh both reinforce the infantry as as it's attritioned you know and to get it you know food ammo um replace uh you know livestock as

needed and this was still like a fucking horse drawn army um i've seen it said by war college types who know what they're talking about that it wasn't even possible for the russians to affect you know again like an in scale down in theater immobilization um even if they want to do so um you know again it just confirming that this was a that this was an entirely binary enterprise in terms of how it would be interpreted by Berlin. So, in other words, again, as I stated at the onset of the discussion, this was a constructive declaration of war. That's hyperbole. That's literally what it was.

It was the, it was monumentous and horrific in consequences, not just because of the obvious fact that, it threw the German mobilization machine into motion by reciprocal necessity but it's also given a moment when

the German government had not had not even declared a state of impending war which was their counterpart to the Russian period preparatory to war but it it wasn't like a two-phase mobilization paradigm It was more a declaration of intent and a way of marshalling the executive around the Kaiser as warlord and, you know, and bringing together, you know, the war cabinet to function as it had to do.

In other words, Germany had not made the decision to go to war or not, okay? and it certainly hadn't decided to wage a general war against the Russian Empire. I don't even think that was in when Holbeg's contemplation. I think Holbeg believed that localized war was possible, but even that, I think he thought cooler heads would prevail, and it appeared for a time that the Serbs would abide the Hasberg Emperor's demands, at least with some faith-saving stipulations. there certainly there certainly was no sense in Berlin either from the general staff or from

the Kaiser or from the consler that you know so that they a general war with the Russian Empire was somewhat desirable um well let me would you say that Germany was what the fourth country into the war I'd uh no I'd say they were the second just owing to I mean, we'll get into that in a minute, okay. I mean, I think that, frankly, like, Russia going to war, the Russian decision to go to war meant that France was going to war as well. Okay, so, I mean, we can't really separate Russian intention from French intention, and that was the nature of their alliance.

And the French executive was a basket case, as we'll see. But by definition, Germany was reacting at every step to what Russia was signaling, or what they were interpreting Russian signals. signaling as correctly or incorrectly. So I, um, I, uh, but so categorically,

Germany was the second bell to the ball. People will argue and we'll get to that at the end of this conversation briefly, you know, the Battle of Lege. That's the whole myth of the quote, rape of Belgium comes from. Like, was Belgium a combatant state? It's like, well, I mean, the Holbeg, not just said,

openly, but he documented in his own journal that the transgressing Belgian sovereignty demanded some sort of recompensed, but the minute, it began clear the minute that the German army crossed the frontier, that Belgium wasn't a neutral state. They had a series of of complex fortifications. They'd armed and equipped military age males who were masquerading as civilians who put up ferocious resistance.

This went on for weeks. I mean, we're getting ahead of ourselves. But I, anytime we're talking about the European balance of power, at all times, okay, in power political terms. We're talking about, we're talking about Germany and Russia,

and we're talking about, you know, them responding to one another's signaling and deployment mobilization and or deployment paradigms, you know, depending on the epoch and everything else. but um Bethem and Holveg what I've said before I find highly sympathetic

and I think he and Franz Joseph were both very heroic and uh not there were not many heroes um I mean they never are in any epoch

but the the men in command roles in on the eve of the great war looked particularly bad um

Holvig and uh Franz Joseph looked particularly good, in my opinion. Hoveig went as far as he instructed the German ambassadors in London and Paris to, in no uncertain terms, warn anybody who would listen that the military measures that Russia was undertaking were considered to be an existential threat, in no uncertain terms. The German ambassador in St. Petersburg, he was instructed to say, in no uncertain terms, that unless discontinued

Germany would mobilize and upon mobilization this would mean war. So the voice from Berlin basically are telling anybody who will listen and mind you they haven't yet given their own

mobilization order saying we recognize what you're doing it's a war indicator we don't want to go to war if you don't stop it we'll mobilize too and war will become inevitable like this is and this is a civilian um making these declarations bethman holveg who speaks for the uh government of the german empire quite literally

this is like the supposed like militaristic german empire you know um when holbe was informed to reply um from the uh from the from the german ambassador in st petersburg he was informed by his British and French counterparts that they were working to, quote, restrain Russia. Well, Sazanov, the foreign minister, was, you know, was moderating his position, you know, under pressure, under diplomatic pressure from Paris and London,

which seems like complete bullshit. They kind of built-in duplicitousness, I believe, that it tends secret diplomacy is a very real thing. And in the case of London, again, you know, the United Kingdom of 1914 was not that of 1939. It was a lot more sane. There was a lot less prone to irrationality and just provocative hostility. I think the view from London may have been that may well have been that.

And we'll get into, I mean, London had its own grave problems at this time. I do not think they were truly engaged with the political. situation on the continent um in the case of paris in the case of the french foreign ministry that this was just like out now this was just like out and out ledger main it was it was out you know it was it was these things are being stated with an intent to mislead in my opinion okay whether you accept that there was some kind of deliberate disinformation campaign i mean that's that's neither here nor there it i there is no possible way that the french believed in good faith what was just uttered. The British Foreign Office, they briefly advocated a mediation effort with the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy coming to the table, which Mussolini, a generation later,

This is what he was trying to attempt with what was called the short-lived Four Powers Pact. It was proposed at the Four Powers Pact. So basically, I think until the 11th hour, the UK was hoping cooler heads would prevail. Why the UK intervened when they did and why they did, we'll get to that in a minute. but I developed the more charitable view of their decision and their decision makers in recent years but I think that you know again however foolish the foreign office had been

with respect to the Boer War and other things there had been a fair amount of successes since the Crimean War, vis-a-vis the foreign office and its ability to, you know, finesse a diplomatic solution in lieu of the onset of hostilities. You know, in 1909 and 1913, it was able to achieve, I mean, not by themselves, but, you know, they played an essential essential role in um mitigating what could have been crises tending towards general war um however i think they didn't fully comprehend the the severity and the rapidity of the trigger effect of russian mobilization on um the continent you know um sir george buchanan who's the british ambassador who's the british

to the Russian Empire. He had something of a counterpart in Jules Cambon. He was the French ambassador to the German Empire in Berlin. I think they fully, they seem to fully comprehend this, both in their own private writings as well as their correspondences, as well as their dispatches, you know, to their respective... home offices, quite literally. The Canada specifically had warned that

that a Russian mobilization would push Germany into a reciprocal mobilization, which for all practical purposes would be a declaration of war. And Cambon had come to the same conclusion. And both

but I mean, again, the Cambon was in Germany and I think traditionally there's people who stand out like George Kennan and start contrary that's this archetype but generally

you know the diplomat you deploy to a great power is a man who kind of like by nature he takes on the characteristics of his host and ideally he's a man who sympathizes with the people whom he's charged with

you know leasing with and Gambon like the Germans is pretty clear and it kind of and like he walked among them long and off to kind of taken on their their their cultural mind in basic ways um but again he was in Berlin okay I mean it um he wasn't really in a position to impact uh executive policy decisions And even if he were, you know, the French were, the French were irrationally committed, in my opinion, to the pact with Russia. In the case of Buchanan, again, he was in St. Petersburg, but the British had pressure. The British and the Russians despised each other in some basic way. They still do.

They always do. You know, the British didn't have some British aristocrat. He's not trying to tell the Tsar's work having their business. I mean, who the hell is he? you know this is just another englishman trying to you know trying to dictate to the world you know how they should conduct themselves and how they should do politics you know that's that's welcomed by exactly nobody that is now um however well-intentioned buchanan was and like i said i think he was

entirely well-intentioned rare as that might be for alimey but uh the hapsburg empire for its part was uh was locked any in a localized mobilization very clearly very deliberately and they had farless territory to defend than any of their combatants I mean save the UK but that was never on the table because the UK were fighting you know on the continent and they weren't at risk of an invasion but um you know the the Hasberg army was actually structured you know to mobilize locally And it was clear that they were preparing, they were mobilized, structured, and deployed to fight and defeat Serbia. There would later be some discomfort about this reality.

Both the Russians and the French, both of their foreign offices, respectively. they retroactively wrote these post-dated reports backdated they backed it by three days when the Austrian Order

of General Mobilization came down so to make Russian measures appear to be like a countermeasure when in reality there was no there was no Serbian or there was no Austro-Hungarian general mobilization until well after the Russian order came down which is interesting

I mean, it's unsurprising that people would lie in this way, but this is very craven, and it certainly suggests cognizance of, I'm not going to say guilt, because again, I don't deal in those terms, but it definitely, independently in one another, both Paris and Moscow did this, like, obviously, like, they realized the facts were cutting against their narrative of rationale for essentially suing for war. before um there was any general mobilization threat extant or ordered by any other combatant um the uh in the case of the in the case of uh the russians uh the russian ambassador to vienna um he'd uh he'd backdated a telegram um from the 31st to the uh to the 28th of july um stating um you know that uh he had he had evidence that you know a general mobilization order had been issued from from the uh you know from from franz joseph which is like which again it's like just obvious nonsense but i i i found that interesting um to say the least again like the cravingness of it like this isn't it kind of removes

these things from like fog of war sort of copes and what have you but again the the French documentary records apparently even more manipulated but I don't I don't read French apparently

it alleged that Berlin had undertaken secret mobilization for the preceding six days to the Russian order coming down. This is a complete confabulation. In reality, the Germans had remained in military terms, like, remarkably

cool-headed. And, I mean, the fact, again, Holveig, even when it became clear that, you know, the Russians were on, we're going to sue for war almost certainly. You know, he still left the option open. He gave them

an out with a safe, with a face saving. option um the leaders of the german uh general staff this is what historians like john keegan who otherwise is a pretty good historian but he's afflicted with uh that english uh the english have inability to objectively discuss germany at war so kegan talks about you know well at this juncture you know, the militarist German general

staff, you know, they took over and then the die was cast and and this horrible tragedy ensued of, you know, the killing fields of 1914 and 1918. Beliefs the German army, if they weren't in a

state of acute anxiety, they would not have been fulfilling their duty. Von Falkenheim he was the minister of war and he emphasized over and over and over the Kaiser

that any mobilization by Russia had the same consequences which was true and that like any head start the Russians had upset the you know the glass delicate

timing of the Von Schlefen Plan, which was, of course, the prevailing doctrine to fight and win a two-front war. So, I mean, this idea that they got a hypervigilance or the perceived hypervigilance to the general staff was evidence of a, you know, a German hair-trigger willingness to sue for war. I mean, that was their job. You know, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Cold War were exactly the same way. I mean, that's their job, literally. Again, the fact that Holveig was, you know, not the Kaiser, not, not Von Falkenheim, not Von Malkenheim, who was the chief of the general staff. like these these were not the men with the ultimate decision of government okay um it uh speaking of von mulch he was less uh he was less aggressive in advocating germany fully mobilized

you know immediately than uh falconine but he wanted at least a proclamation of you know intent to war preparation be issued you know by the Kaiser which would at least send a political signal to Moscow and would at least indicate an intent to you know escalate reciprocally in order to get in order to get his way He began insinuating himself into meetings between Hoveg Foggenheim and Terpitz, which again, some historians present his overreach. He began issuing statements on what it would require for Germany to fight and win in general war against both Russia and France. He began very kind of openly and publicly, you know, discussing.

what scenarios would warrant intervention on behalf of the Habsburg Empire in Serbia. His, he began communicating directly with his counterpart in Vienna, issuing statements like stand firm against Russian mobilization, you know, against Slavic iridentism, you know, Austria hungry must be preserved. You know, Germany will mobilize to defend you. Now, obviously, this was kind of overreach, but again, like I said, people like Kagan say, you know, oh, even even in hyper-militaristic Germany, like this is evidence

of, you know, like a burgeoning, you know, military dictatorship. It's like that military men say dumb shit all the time, okay? They always overreach. I mean, look at Douglas MacArthur, okay, like if you want, a case and point. Burke told, who was who was Van Moultz's counterpart in Vienna, he famously responded to one of these telegrams saying, you know, who the hell runs the government in Berlin,

Moult or Benthamen-Hollig. You know, obviously got to be annoyed by the uncertainty of these things. But, I mean, that's, you know, like I said, find me, find me, um, find me like a four-star in general in America who doesn't try and, you know, throw his weight around counter the president, you know, it's not, that's, that's paltry evidence to make the case for, you know, psychotic German militarism, you know, and the savage warlike

Hun, you know, being the proximate cause of war. Now, what was the, what was the situation I referred to, I referred to in the, you know, United Kingdom well throughout pretty much the entirety of the July crisis of 1914 the eyes of the key decision makers in London were on the nine counties of Ulster in the north of Ireland on May 21st 1914 the Irish home rule bill had been passed by the House of Commons and was being aggressively rejected by the House

of Lords. H.A.S. asked with the Liberal Party Prime Minister. He his coalition was dependent

upon Irish nationalist votes. He was threatening to utilize provisions of the Parliament Act, which in some circumstances allowed a sitting government. to circumvent the House of Lords and pass a bill by direct royal assent.

This prospect of a partial devolution of government functions to a Catholic-Irish Republic like United Irish Republic does this cause Tories to go berserk. And

for context, the Conservative Party in these days was literally called the Conservative and Unionist Party. Okay. it appeared that it appeared that there was probably going to be some kind of general civil war

sectarian civil war if some kind of compromise wasn't accomplished and on top of that again this reached into like the heart of like English political life okay and there's a disproportionate

number of like rabid loyalists in the officer corps like i'm not saying that punitively like my sympathy is with these people okay i mean that's my heritage but um a huge amount of uh the officer corps of the the british army specifically the infantry these guys hailed from protestant anglo-irish families you know who had like a direct stake in in in in unionism. It wasn't just, you know, like, it wasn't just, you know, ethno-sectarian loyalty. It wasn't as that, too. But, um, and, uh, what came to known as the Karah incident, a 20th March, 57 British officers based in County Kildare. Uh, they said that they'd resign their commissions rather than enforce the introduction

to home rule, um, against, uh, against unionist northern Ireland. um it went as high as uh the director of military operations henry wilson he was a staunch unionist and he started openly calling for insubordination against any government that uh that tried to try to enforce home rule and like the subject of this i mean you're looking at a situation where quite literally you would have had a british army not just in mutiny but fighting on the unionist side against you know a parliamentary and royal mandate you know a parliamentary and royal mandate I mean, this is insane. Now, this obviously wasn't lost on people that, you know, again, like we talked about, the other week, among other things, I mean, really for the proceeding,

really says the end of Disraeli's tenure, there been a kind of, like, listlessness to imperial policy in the U.S. UK. And, you know, among other things, you know, making an enemy of Germany resolve that in kind of like absolute ontological terms. But in the case of the home rule issue, in very specific terms, it's like, okay, like it kind of brought the army to heal. It gave him something to do. It took like the home rule issue totally off the table and definitely, you know, like it made sense.

Like the trajectory towards intervention on the continent was increasingly becoming a foregone conclusion, if that makes sense. It, like I'm not saying that was the sole proximate cause or anything, obviously. And ultimately, the, uh, initially,

the UK was reluctant to honor the London Treaty. It was essentially the French putting it to him like this. They said, like, look, you know, you're talking about German ships assaulting French ports, you know, in and across the English channel, and

you know, transversing British territorial waters it will. And, um, probably attacking and or appropriating neutral ports in Belgium. You know, and if London will tolerate that, the Royal Navy can't be said to be Lord of the Seas any longer. And that had a lot to do with it. But the prospect of a general civil war in Ireland with an officer corps, with a loyalist officer corps in mutiny,

That was a very real, very, very real possibility. That's basically what I got at long last for the political configuration of forces and motives that led to the Great War. At long last, in the next episode, we will cover the Western Front, the one subsequent to Eastern Front, and the final episode, we'll do the aftermath. and we'll do the aftermath slash Versailles slash, you know, the Wilson administration interviews, you know, in the American Expeditionary Forest Lands in Europe. But, yeah, that's about all I got from now. Awesome, awesome.

Remind everybody where they can find your work and we'll end it. Yeah. You don't mean like end it, right? You mean just like end this episode. I was talking shit. You can find me in my website. It's Thomas 777.com. It's number 7, HMAS 777.

You can find me on X at Real, capital, R-A-L, underscore number seven, H-O-M-A-S-777. You can find me on Substack. That's what the podcast is, too. The podcast, the new season is dropping in a day or two. It's literally being edited right now, I promise. It's Real Thomas 777. That's sub-sac.com. A lot of good stuff is in the can.

Trust me. And yeah, that's all I got for now. If you go to the comments on any of the videos, any of these videos that I do with Thomas, there's a link to the show notes page and everything Thomas just mentioned. I got links for it there. So thanks, Thomas. Appreciate it. Always.

Thank you, Pete. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekino. show. We are returning with Thomas 777, and we are picking up again on the World War 1 series. So, Thomas, where are we going today? I was going to continue to talk a little bit about causes and kind of the dominant schools of thought. I want to led to, you know, the advent of actual hostilities. Like, there's a few different thoughts on that. You know, and I'll first let me pick up and frame our discussion

you know in context um topically I think where we left off previously was quite literally the close of July 1914

you know and it's my position which I think is an arguable even people who are even people who are you know basically hostile to the German perspective like AGP Taylor he's a heterodox historian but he's

unpromising hostile to you know the German case as it were you know even he acknowledges that it was the Russian general mobilization order that was not obviously that was not the sole proximate cause

but it's the essential immediate cause of the onset of hostilities It was July 28th, 1914 That was when the Russian chief of staff Janiskevich He advised the Tsar that what was euphemously referred to as the period preparatory to war

must be superseded by formal mobilization announcements which initially was only a partial mobilization order but again that didn't matter the scope and scale of the Russian Imperial Army and the state of its infrastructural capabilities to you know prepare that army for combat

it was a it didn't matter if it was you know a quote of partial mobilization or you know a complete um or in order for full preparations. You know, the fact is that the capability was there and owing the conditions as they were, it was a constructive declaration of war. You know, the way they tried to finesse that,

in addition to announcing that this is only a partial mobilization, they signaled to Berlin that this was only directed against Austria. you know owingdub this alleged Austrian assault on Serbia from the Danube which was something of a gulf of talk and rationale everything else aside just as a side note um belgrade from the Danube at the time was an incredibly hardened target and its fortifications were essentially immune to all but the heaviest artillery so I mean, just that, this is obviously pretextual, aside in the fact that

the idea that Russia viewed the Hasbrog army as some great threat, I mean, that's absurd too. I mean, just going to the parodies involved. And finally, the whole issue in terms of

the German ability to defend in depth, to say nothing of the cultural and racial affinity for Austria you know even if that had been an honest dispatch

and if Moscow's only intent was to neutralize the Habsburg army you know and defend the integrity of Serbia territorially and politically that wouldn't matter you know Germany's ability to defend

its eastern frontier depended upon the Habsburg Empire remaining intact, you know, in terms of its territorial structure. You know, and that should have been obvious. Was that an alibi that the Russians were merely suggesting for cosmetic reasons? I mean, people have said that, but for what purpose, you know, to protect the historical record? That's not the way statesmen think in the moment, at least not when you're talking about the decision to issue orders that very possibly can lead to a general war. Sergei Sazanov, he was the Russian foreign minister.

He'd received word, he was the first Russian official to receive word of Austria's declaration of war on Serbia. he immediately conferred with the French ambassador Palliag that afternoon and Pallelag apparently

declared full solidarity with the Russian cause if the Russians were to go to war against the Austrians which was a foregone of conclusion by that point. Kind of conventional wisdom is like, oh, this is what caused World War I. It was the secret diplomacy and this reckless sort of willingness to abide these diplomatic

structures that the purpose of which had been to keep the peace, you know, in structural terms. and obviously once that peace was no longer possible these structures were redundant so that was kind of the refrain in the aftermath of the war was you know see this is why this is why conventional diplomacy is misguided and you know it was

it was this it was the irrationality of of um you know secret diplomacy that that led to hostilities I don't personally accept that whatever France did or didn't do I mean them and Germany would have been at

loggerheads the moment Berlin mobilized anyway and aside from that you know whether Russia stood alone or whether the Entente you know remained intact as intended it wouldn't have mattered

I think the personage is involved were just positive and I don't accept the great man theory of history at all I think that's a wiggish conceit but I do accept that when you're talking about

the command of forces at scale as really as only possible in later modernity and specifically in the 20th century where there was this unprecedented convergence

of industrial, military, and political power. Like the man in the role of warlord, actual potential, his tendencies amidst crisis

can be dispositive and often are and I can strut it up with examples subsequent to 1914 throughout the 20th century I mean this recurs again and again it was this weird

phase that you know prior to machine learning truly kind of sidelining human decision makers while at the same time traditional decision making had broken down by which there were certain safeguards of an institutional nature insinuated into power structures of scale by which you know an individual personage by virtue of his kind of discrete characteristics could impact the decision to go to war or to sue for peace you know um but also i mean i'm a hegelian at base so i there's a certain bounded rationality to

the structural explanations within the context of warfare but if we're talking about ultimate causes i think it's somewhat misguided as it were though bring it back to 1914 um janice kevich chief of staff he subsequently ordered that july 30th would be uh the first day of general mobilization

uh he called upon the czar secured the czar's signature um on the order for full as well as personal mobilization um you got all the relevant ministers signatures according to according to um this may be apocryphal uh supposedly the minister in the interior was this kind of orthodox and mystic he made the sign of the cross in the way that old believers do you know like behooved god to help the russian people and then you know provided his signature as well um And like I said, I believe this is when the die was cast. Strategically, it was also unnecessary. In addition to the quote-blown bombardment from the Danube by the Habsburg Navy,

this idea that if Russia didn't intervene immediately, that Serbia would somehow be threatened. Serbia is an incredibly difficult terrain to fight in. It's got an incredibly game population. You know, this caused the Vermach terrible problems from 1941 and 1945, among other things. This is why the prospect of a general war in the Balkans in 91 to 95 seemed so ominous, it wasn't just because of the potential.

for general escalation, you know, especially only to the initial response of the players involved, you know, Helmut Cole, Contra Yeltson, and Bush and Baker, and their desire to kind of salvage the post-terror strike of vision that had been shattered by the decisions of the aforementioned chiefs of state, but there's no possible way that within days or weeks the Hasbrook Army could

subdue Serbia. So, I mean, worst case scenario, a localized war, the Hasberg Army would be locked in a quagmire with Serbia regulars basically in perpetuity. which would call upon, you know, obviously the great powers to, you know, rely either on the Hague Convention or on, it's not going to ad hoc diplomacy regime in order to resolve hostilities.

You know, this was not a critical matter of strategic importance. you know again there was there was a question of masculine honor and like racial honor and obviously that someone takes seriously particularly as we discussed when you know in the case of royals having an actual executive authority

you know but the czar the czar and the Kaiser had amiable relations basically you know not only were they related but um you know this wasn't despite the kind of tragedy of geostrategic circumstance that puts the German Reich as it existed and Russia at loggerheads, there wasn't this kind of ongoing political culture of hostility as there was, you know, in London contra Berlin. There was no reason why, you know, the Kaiser had he not taken this kind of firm and absolute line.

on the issue of Serbia. It's not as if there would have been some kind of officers revolt or, you know, if you would have found himself sidelined. So that's, that's, that's, so that's important, you know, because I know that the rebuttal

that is now, um, particularly now, considering the enforcement state of things. In power political terms, I mean, you know, like Russia stands with Serbia, you know, and Slavic people stand together

and absolutely you know figured into the equation but again it was not it was not a critical juncture in military or political terms

to drive that point home Austria had approximately 48 combat ready divisions it estimated that at the very least about 28 of these would have to be deployed

to seduce Serbia obviously in the mind of war planners in Vienna who were very much very much took their cues from Berlin and the German High Command and von Moltke, the understanding was that

at least 20 divisions would have to remain to defend Austria-Hungary proper and in turn, you know, allowed Germany to defend in depth particularly because Germany at that point had not mobilized at all.

Okay? So again, even the full brunt of the Hasburg Army would not have been able to overrun Serbia within days or weeks but that wasn't even on the table

on the strategic realities you know and the Hasburg Army I mean they were game they had some good officers but there's a reason why

for example Hitler had no interest in serving in it And it wasn't, it wasn't just, you know, the eccentric Mr. Hitler and his love for, you know, the Votterlands. It's, um, they were not a crack army, you know, and they certainly, they certainly weren't some diversified force, you know, that had a proper, you know, mountain division or something that, you know, could wage, uh, war effectively against, Serbia regulars, you know, and Serbia was, the Serbian interior was mountainous terrain. At that time, it was full of impossible, impassable roads. You know, and this was, this was late autumn.

We're talking about that the campaign, at the very least, would have continued to. You're talking about a winter war against Chetniks in the mountains. You know, I mean, it's, come on, that's, that's a recipe for disaster. You know, certainly not. Something that's going to lend itself to a blitzkrieg outcome. And this proved to be exactly the case, frankly. It doesn't just academic. in 1915

before the true stalemate set in in the West or I mean it it um it uh the eastern front was a very different

situation regardless we'll get into that too but the um the full brunt of uh German Austrian and Bulgarian combined arms fell on Serbia from three different directions

and it took two months to conclude the campaign okay so you know this isn't academic the German Declaration of War came down on it come down on Saturday Russia had followed suit on Sunday August 3rd at 7 p.m. is when military censorship and the in the formal state of war was declared

throughout the Russian Empire. Russia and I command was basically optimistic the reason why Russia took such horrendous casualties in the East and that doesn't, the reasons why are

complicated. And as we'll get into next episode, what had been in convention, what was then conventional wisdom about about infantry assault gleaned basically from the Franco Prussian War and the Boer War obviously

the scale particularly the latter wasn't really applicable but such that lessons could be extrapolated those kinds of tactical doctrines are basically effective there was a highly mobile war in the East and there was huge casualties but for reasons different than on the Western Front

the Russian army didn't collapse, but it wasn't really competent for defending against massed artillery on the open step where you can't fortify the same way was possible in the West, largely for geographic reasons, largely for geographic reasons, but there's logistical problems too. but the basic confidence of the Russians it owed to, I'm going to butcher this, it owed to what they called the Bolshaya Voinae programas,

the great military program which had been launched around a year previous. It aimed to cut the army's mobilization time to 18 days shore up logistics to be able to rapidly reinforce

that field army like as they absorb attrition and the British the British Army's military at this he issued this report that suggested that um the Russians uh in a general war the Russians will be able to absorb attrition and reconstitute and equip their forces such that if the Germans moved on Paris, they'd be leaving Berlin undefended, and then ultimately the Russians, like

assuming that their lines held, you know, presuming, like, a von Schlefen type attack, the Russians absorb, like, the initial German assault. If they could absorb that, they could reconstitute the counterattack would attrition the German army to the point

that if the Germans moved on Paris simultaneously, Berlin would be left undefended, Russia could smash German lines and be in Berlin, or at least threatening it at the city's gates, literally, before the Germans reached Paris. That seems absurdly optimistic, considering all relevant variables and probable forces in being based on what was known. But this was kind of taken for granted. Like people, people took this seriously, including the German high command, you know, I know that it's conventional wisdom in academia as well as among war college types that, oh, the Germans weren't afraid of the Russians and that, and this is extrapolated, I think, from their desire to kind of

at all costs preclude people from accepting the reality of the situation. in 1941, you know, because their claim is that, oh, Russia was never a threat to anybody. You know, Stalin certainly had no designs on Western Europe. This is German militarism. Because otherwise, it's just not rational that people could reach the conclusions that they do in good faith. But the idea was, like, long story short, for our purposes on this issue, the idea was, in a in Paris, in Berlin, and in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, that the Russian army would perform exponentially better than it did. Okay. Um, the kind of one prominent pessimist was a Peter

de novo. Dernovo. He was the minister of the interior and he was the chief of the secret police. he had a very, very profound sense of foreboding not just on grounds the obvious potential for catastrophe as regardless of the military situation he realized being the top kind of policeman that the Tsar's mandate just generally was weaker than the court

recognized, particularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg because these people never visited the countryside. side. You know, and he stated in his diary that if the war went badly, quote, a social revolution in its most extreme form will be unavoidable. Now, this is remarkable, okay, I think, because he's the one figure in Russian officialdom, who was essentially saying, we better, we better win this war and win it fast, we're going to be looking at a red revolution. The improbability of lead in success, you know, was what shook the world is conventional wisdom and it don't get me wrong I think Lenin was probably

the most cable political soldier partisan who ever lived but at the same time it goes to show you the degree to which the degree was like Russia before like the Tsar's regime is uniquely ill-suited

like notwithstanding Russia's unique problems it was uniquely ill-suited to managing a territory the size of the Russian Empire. I don't really think such a state would have been manageable before before the mid-20th century, probably. You know, that's one of the reasons why Stalin

did what he did. You know, Stalin exterminated anybody who could force some kind of apoccal paradigm shift, such of the story that catapulted him and his comrade's the power. But that's, um, that's, um, a topic for another day. Romaine Roland, who was, um, he was this, uh, Swiss polymath.

And kind of this, um, favorite of the international literary set of the time. Kind of a nude Thompson type, except people don't like Thompson anymore because he basically wrote, um he basically like wrote a eulogy to hitler like if we got like no price for literature but um roland um he said that russia had essentially like lost its mind culturally since the death of tolstoy and there wasn't really critical voices not just in the court of the czar but

you know basically in in in kind of Russian um cultural life um he wrote on August 3rd that that essentially that like the collapse literally the collapse of civilization was afoot

and that Europe will never recover from you know the the coming war and um Spangler was another um bogger in that regard I think The natural German pessimism, you know, the idea of, I'm sure people dismiss that, including his basically sympathetic biographers as well, you know, you've got to consider the, you've got to consider like the German worldview, you know, and Germany was always, you know, one step away from crisis, so.

Um, you know, and presumably, you know, the chauvinistic German will always talk about, you know, the destruction of Germany and the destruction of Europe as synonymous, which they are, I might add. But, um, I, um, I think that Spangler had a more worldly, figuratively and literally perspective than that. But, but this wasn't, but this was, uh, in, whether you're talking about political, military or cultural life, this was, this was absolutely. This wasn't just a minority opinion. It was, it was basically like a minority of one, you know, in these respective endeavors. These sort of endeavors in which these men found themselves, I mean. You know, you're talking about literally a handful of people who saw the writing on the wall. You know, there was not, there was not any understanding that this is going to be a catastrophe. you know and again i realize as we talked about you know in europe contra america the 19th century was

not very much happened and the only you know the the crimean war and the frango prussian war were localized conflicts but there wasn't but i mean the war between the states in america there'd been a lot of europeans mercenaries and observers you know who'd been on the ground here um world um um you world media such that it existed at the time was focused on the war

between the states like there was there wasn't understanding that emergent combined arms you know had like laid people to waste by the tens of thousands

you know so it's it's peculiar that people can think this way but I mean they but they did um it's uh And I say that because, I mean,

lay people never understand military matters. I was talking my dad by then I don't want to go about, because I was pulling a bunch of stuff on kind of the craziness about that was bandied, you know, about the 1991 Gulf War, you know, crazy casualty predictions and just really misguided stuff. But, so, I mean, it's not,

there's not, it's not unprecedented or something for the commentariat to get it totally wrong on the evil war but it's almost always the opposite. They almost always say the sky is falling. You know, they pretty much never say, you know, this will resolve itself within weeks and, you know, there's not going to be meaningful attrition and civilian life won't be impacted.

You know, particularly you're talking about total mobilization of, you know, every major power at scale. I mean, it's just, it's crazy. But this isn't... Let me ask you something that you mentioned before. Yeah. do you think so many people in russia got it wrong that they didn't see it coming that they didn't see bolshevism coming there's a there's a basic backwardness to russia

you know it wasn't just like we talked about before i mean yeah the kaiser had real power in germany but it was holveg it was molchka it was um you know the top German industrialists, you know, who had the real power, you know, the, you know, King Edward and King George, and even later, you know, and even subsequently, um, the queen, you know, in the UK, like, had to have clout, had and have clout, but Moscow was the only combatant state where you literally had a You know, who wielded the same authority on war and peace matters and everything else, you know, as a European monarch would have, you know, 500 years previously. There's a basic incongruity there, you know, in terms of the management of power politics. And even if, you know, even if, you know, even so. something that was in the contemplation, even some kind of peasant revolt or something, which was not alien to the Russians. They couldn't conceptualize the emergence of like a Vanguard proletariat, animated basically by, you know, a German dialectical paradigm.

because I think it seemed too alien that's part of it um but um the war also it um you know Lenin in some ways was a great opportunist

I think as a situation totally deteriorated at the front you know and the Russians were looking at not just, the Russians were willing to get out of the war at all costs. I mean, that's the Treaty of Brestletovsk. But it's also

any kind of a catalyzing influence would have been adequate to the people who were literally starving you know, in the field.

I think that's why, but it's complicated. Russia doesn't make a lot of sense to Occidental eyes. Like, I don't, people constantly ask me, and I mean, I don't speak Russian, and I'm not some,

yeah, I'm not like a Russian expert, like, at all, but I write a lot about the Cold War and stuff. So, they asked me why, like, the Soviet Union just rapidly deteriorated and came apart. And I mean, people are like, okay, well, you know, like Andropos, as early as, you know, like, 1981, 82 was saying, like,

we're dealing with a systemic crisis. You know, people make the point, they're like, okay, Aldridge Ames, he sold out all the human intelligence assets that, you know, CIA and defense intelligence had, so the West was blind as well was going on Moscow, but it's not the whole story. You know, the, um, that's why I like a lot of, that's why there was a pretty vocal minority, not just the cranks. I mean, you remember, because, you know, you were an adult when it happened. Like, when the wall was coming down, people, like, there was some kind of, like, communist ruse. They're going to give up east of Germany, then they're going to reconstitute, you know, because there's no way the Soviet Union just coming apart suddenly, but it did. like what other states that haven't do I can't name one you know um it doesn't make a lot of sense

it um the way the Russians proceeded in 1914 didn't make a lot of sense you know like again it's um Putin today in some ways I think is a terrible whirlord in other ways

you know the Russians are uh the Russians have these um the Ethiopian Orthodox Church the Russians have been like pumping all kinds of money into it so now it's got big cloud in Africa and the Russians are all over the Central African Republic which is basically a field of diamond mines and um their proxies are winning there

you know it's not an accident that the Russians were very active in Yemen um because the orthodox I stand with um they uh they stand with um the Shia and the LO8 and the fibers and stuff. I mean, there's a highly sophisticated, very unusual kind of veld polity that's being pursued by Moscow today that on its face doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Could he be looking to flood the market with diamonds and take out the tribe's diamond? That's entirely possible. Yeah. but it's also diamonds diamonds are less volatile than gold, silver, and platinum something that's

so if you can, if you own the Central African Republic and you kick the French out, which they've done, you stand a profit. But like long term, yeah, like if if some kind of goyish Russian conglomerate

or, you know, some kind of tribe conglomerate, but that's basically adjacent Moscow, albeit for cynical reasons, you know, kind of like, because, like, the global diamond cartel, like, yeah, that'll, particularly as the Russians trying to get people off the dollar, they'll give them, like, bargaining power, you know, at scale. But the point is, um, I think I know something about power politics. And if you put me in the role of, you know, like Metternich or Kissinger, like James is Baker. I think I'd do better than a lot of men. Um, I would not at all pursue the course that like Putin and like Lavrov are, you know, I'm not even saying it's like foolish because in

some ways I think there's like a subtle, if not brilliance, like inspired creativity there. But it's not, it's not what I or I think you're most other. people Occidental people would would consider to be like appropriate priorities and and the correct course you know like and again I think I've got a longer view

than most Americans like I know I do because that's like people you know like I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about but um you know it's hard to say that's the big but I mean the 20th century is the story is

the story of is the story of communism you know like it really is that's why I'm always saying Hobbsbom as an important thinker whatever

like literally and figuratively ugly he was he was important in terms of that that that paradigm you know

I mean that but that's the kind of reason I mean I mean that's Hegel you know and that's um assuming you're a god-fearing individual i mean that's that's the hand of providence in history you know um and sometimes there isn't a why i mean that's the best answer i can proffer i really that's kind of a non-answer but um you know again like people say too when they talk about

the origins of the first world war like norman davies made the point that the discussion of it almost sounds like the way, like engineers did to talk about the Titanic or something. You know, like, well, why, why did this happen? Is it a structural problem? Was it, you know, was it, was it pilot error? Because, you know, there had to be some discreet reason because massive ocean liners cross the Atlantic every day and nothing happens. That's something in the wrong way to look at it. You know, in the First World War, it's always, oh, it was secret diplomacy. And, structurally, this is why something like the United Nations, the League of Nations, is essential, because otherwise states rely on self-help, you know, and that only comes in the form of cultivating military capabilities, and then mobilization at scale, and that makes war more probable, if not inevitable. But that's nonsense. I mean, like, look at the Cold War. You know, um,

You know, again, I believe in the kind of reason in the hand of providence, but unfortunately, the collection of personages, among other things, in critical roles in 1914, led the disaster. One of the reasons I defend Kennedy, I mean, I don't have reason to defend him in policy terms or anything. and one reason I especially defend McNamara in the situation room during the Cuba crisis basically like the one advisory voice telling Kennedy this doesn't matter in strategic terms don't listen to these people

was McNamara everybody else including strategic air command to the man of Curtis LeMay who was an incredibly intimidating personage was saying you've got it with salt now You've got it with salt now. You know, at all costs, we've got it with salt now. You know, it was the only McNamara who, I advise people to watch the Errol Morris documentary,

or biopic, rather, a McIntymer. I'm a big Earl Morris fan. But even if one is not, you know, you can see how emotional McNamara gets, you know, decades after the fact talking about Kennedy. He tells Morris to stop the camera for a minute because it's clear he's about to cry. You know, he was Kennedy's closest advisor, man, other than his brother, obviously. You know, if McNamara's not in that room in October 1962, a nuclear war happens, in my opinion. You know, like I'm not saying people need to, like, bow down and say McNamara is great.

You know, he prevented the deaths of 80 million people or whatever. But my point is that that's really the only reason why things went that way. It's not because there's some profound structural characteristic of nuclear weapons that make people behave rationally because oh, that's unthinkable. People do unthinkable

shit all the time. People are fucking monsters. You know, like, they don't care about attrition at scale at all. It doesn't mean anything. I mean, it does. You know, like, but in those capacities it doesn't. Nobody's saying, like, it's not like in the movies where people, But, like, I mean, you might have, like, you might have individual missileiers.

I think it's poignant in, like, war games where there's the guy in the Minuteman silo, and he's, like, you know, his colleague, you know, pulls a gun on him, the force him to turn his key, because, like, I'm not going to kill 80 million people. I mean, yeah, there's, I don't, I mean, that absolutely is, is realistic. But at command level, like, nobody's saying, like, oh, I can't kill 80 million Russians, but, like, fuck them, you know? I mean, that's, so that's. um you know if uh if if the czar's if the czar's chief of um if his chief of staff you know if the imperial army

chief of staff isn't who he is in 1914 and he says look this is this is going to lead to a quagmire we can't win or you know this is going to provoke a revolutionary situation and you know frankly your majesty your mandate already tenuous and presuming that man had the clout in the favor of the crown to speak that way then yeah I think it's going totally

to run away you know or I mean even if I know people claim that you know the murder of Ferdinand was like a pretext it wasn't a pretext Ferdinand was a respected guy called what a murder is a terrible thing

people didn't like the Serbs anyway like I'm not saying that'd be punitive like I mean it's just true you know you um there's a out we we don't know this because other than older folks

you know the last same political homicide was a thing was in the 60s like it outrages people you know particularly you know when you're talking about the personages of of monarchs and their heirs like people identify with them person

like if you um even in this day man like if you go around like it's sulling the queen like englishmen get mad you know like you're selling the version Madonna or like their mom or something you know like it's it's not a minor thing like it

even even today I mean there's like dudes who there's people who like probably kind of blow as we say stupid about Donald Trump I find that incredible and like I don't dislike Donald Trump but I mean like I'm incredible people want to defend his honor but i mean the fact is like it's not like this idea that um this idea that that um that

that austrians and and you know germanic adjacent people would be outraged by this so that why is why does that seem like a contrivance so like a pretext but but yeah that you know the um i like forgive the tangent be yeah my point is like it's not you're not gonna find some some structural proximate cause for the Great War and it's also too I mean the reason like also

invoking Habsbom again but also you know Hegel obviously and Nolte you've got a you've got to look at 1914 and 1989 as events in like a single

epoch and Nexus of Cuis You know, they're not like to streak conflicts that, you know, were emergent from some common operative factual patterns, but basically it occurred in, like, isolation relatively. They're part of the same conflict. You know, why and how it resolved the way it did is complicated. In very broad terms, it owes the properties of mind at scale, in my opinion. But, you know, again, you, if people want to pose the question, you know, why, why, why, why, why, why, why are the guns of August, you know, why were they loosed in 2014? Well, I mean, you, that's, you're posing a question like, why the 20th century happened, you know, um, that was just the opening solo.

I'd argue too And, you know, again, your point kind of oblique to Your question about the Bullswick Revolution The I mean, the conditions that made that possible emerged from the Great War

I mean, it's kind of like a chicken-of-the-egg thing You know, obviously like Left Higalians and and like Marxist-type historians Like, they'd always say like, oh, well you know, the capital of structure or an adventurous crisis mode, you know, it sues for war.

You know, for, because, you know, that is because that killed off the proletariat. You know, it takes the pressure off of, you know, the labor surplus and things. You know, but it also allows, you know, like a restructuring of access to captive markets for, you know, these regimes and states that enjoy diminishing

access to the sum total of global capital in being you know I mean that's that's that's nonsense as characterized by them but there is in fact

common causality in basic historical terms between revolutionary imperatives and you know the arrival of states of general war you know they're not They're not separate phenomenon, you know, at least not in my opinion.

You know, that's not, that's not some cop-out, like, oh, war is war or something at all. But, you know, they, it emerges from the same nexus of causation, at least in general terms. But, um, I'm rambling, so I'll bring it back here in a minute. Also, too, I mean, kind of, I think I mentioned in our last episode, on the Great War the question erased

the question emerged not ironically in Vienna it seemed to be Von Moltke you know who was chief of the general staff

who was not issuing guarantees but speaking for the Kaiser's government which led you know which led to

Haspergs, including Franz Josep himself, to pose a question, like who, who's making decisions in Berlin? You know, is it, is it,

is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is everybody been sidelined in favor of von Molska and is there a hoonza in place and all but name? You know, and this wasn't, people characterized, this in the most punitive terms

some of whom again AGP Taylor he's got a somewhat sympathetic albeit um less than

maybe something that's not the word like he he used the course of German policy in power political terms to basically be unremarkable in terms of that from the time Prussia was conquered from the indigenous elements there

to the time you know to September 3rd 1939 there was this basic continuity of policy and decisionism in Berlin he didn't view the National Social Revolution as changing that

at the same time he viewed the military as having outsized power you know I think that's the wrong way to understand it if you're talking about a crisis regime you know again I just invoke the example of

Kennedy's administration in October 962 the very fact that Curtis LeMay and strategic air command possibly could have decisively impacted the decision to wage nuclear war. When you're talking about a modern state and decisions at scale of a military nature, you're talking about people being sidelined who are outside of the military command structure,

just by definition. You know, I think the point all the time that Carter essentially returned in actual terms the power to wage nuclear war to the civilian executive, and it required the creation not just of you know a kind of moral and understanding to sustain that structure

but it required the marginaling of all kinds of technological command and control elements to create this apparatus where that could be seen through like when we're getting at it's not this like natural state of things okay um By definition, a chief executive in a modern state, a lot of his job is delegation,

and nor is that more profound or pronounced than on military matters, because it can't be any other way. You know, and I think people who don't contemplate, you know, the anthropological aspect of human decision-making. in highly scaled circumstances under conditions of technological modernity don't really realize that you know the reason Ivan Molska was running around

you know doing this like shuttle diplomacy with allies and potential adversaries alike is because it's going to come down to him in de facto terms whether or not the Reich went to war or not the Reich went to war or not.

You know, it didn't matter who was putting pen to paper, figuratively literally on a war declaration. So, I think that's important to keep in mind, okay? People, I don't,

was the German general staff predisposed a war? I mean, in geostrategic's terms, yeah, because they have to be. Germany's always outnumbered, and it's always beleaguered. You know, the, um, I was reading about the Battle of the Som, incident, the First Battle of the Psalm, or the Battle of Albert, the first phase was, the first, the British, called the First Phase, the Battle of Albert, at least they used to. you know the battle the song in one day um the uk took 20,000 dead

the Germans took about a third of that but um the song was one of the first combined arms assaults against German lines um which is interesting I think people have a this idea of of World War I with the Ententee powers is having this kind of like complex coordination. They didn't. And that was one of the reasons why there

were so many catastrophes. The central powers did a lot better with that. But the German General staff issued what amounted to a no retreat order to the

at the sum. And after the fact the commander's on the ground said we had no choice because if our lines had broken everything would have collapsed you know and we had no reserves to reconstitute like we had a way to stand and fight or die you know so I mean

extrapolate that to the situation on the Eastern Front after 1941 and it's the same thing you know it's not oh Hitler was a maniac you refuse to let people would draw You know, I mean, I'm sure some people are going to dismiss that as, like, epilogia for, you know, because I like the Third Reich and stuff, but it, um, you don't have luxuries, um, in terms of this kind of smorgasbord, menu verbally of, of how you proceed at war when, you know, you basically occupy

an indefensible an indefensible territory, which is what Germany is. The, um, Christopher Clark with a great book called Iron Kingdom about its history of Prussia. It's really fascinating.

I highly recommend it. But, you know, Europe itself is basically an indefensible peninsula. You know, like, the fact that it existed at all into the modern age is pretty remarkable. And the only way it did

was essentially by by cultivating a certain aptitude for warfare and adaptability they're in. You know, there's not margins for error. And it's somewhat

comical to me when there's like these kinds of like laymen or these, like, armchair historian guys or even, like, academics. They're, like, they're second-guessing, like, the German general staff who, you know, in their DNA is essentially, like, a thousand years

of knowledge on how to prevail in a Rossinic freaks that your civilization doesn't end. But it's, like, these fucking fools, like, no better somehow. We're, like, they've got some, like, moral calm with, you know, how these things are decided. But, um,

be as it may um you know it's also too there wasn't there wasn't ambiguity about how the Germans would respond to a German mobilization order and um Holwegg who again I've made the point I think he's other than Franz Joseph I think he's

about the most sympathetic kind of like political personage of of the epoch um yeah he he he's basically instructed the German ambassador in St. Petersburg to work Sazanov that Russian mobilization will be treated as a declaration of war.

You know, if this wasn't already cleared everybody, just based on precedent and practical reason, you know, I mean, this was literally issued as this is our policy statement. If you mobilize, we were going to go to war. July 29th, Wilhelm had personally appealed to the Tsar. in English, interestingly, which there's a few possible reasons for that. English is becoming something of a default diplomatic language at that point.

I view it more as a, you know, a it's just like a sign of simple respect. Basically, like, urging him to come to some kind of solution short of war okay you know in the um I raised this because

um Wilhelm was not an admirable man in history you know like I said there's a reason why there's a reason why Hitler felt about him the way that he did as well as many other people um but uh you know

this this this idea that you know he was either um I read it might have been Ian Kirsch I can't remember. Like, somebody claimed that, like, you know, one of these kinds of, like, Tori's story enticements claimed that, like, oh, you know, when, um, as like the Russian army

was mobilizing, you know, the Kaiser Vilton was, like, vacationing in his villa or something. There's like this, like, there's this concept of him either as this abject buffoon who was totally disengaged. Or as this kind of like war mongering brute. I mean, neither of those things is true. Like, yeah, it's unfortunate he was at the helm, but, you know, he was,

he was doing everything within his mandate, including, you know, calling upon his, you know, his kind of fellow, you know, his fellow, you know, his fellow, you know, aristocratic brethren, you know, to sue for peace at the hour decision. I mean, that's the whole, I mean, that's all reason why these, like, why these royals who were, like, related by blood were insinuated throughout the continent and beyond. I mean, that's, you know,

was for this kind of familial diplomacy like corny and and quaint as that sounds now but I mean he you know I don't I don't know what I don't know what the Germans should have done in terms of claiming the moral high ground here

such thing can even be discussed and the guy that is the power politics I mean they're afraid is always like oh well you know the the Entente powers were they were attacked I mean, again, war is not a schoolyard fight. It's not like who squeezed the trigger first. And you're not, there's not some moral imperative, like, wait to be attacked.

You know, if you're pointing a gun at my face, and I find a way to take the high ground and shoot you first, I'm not like a bad guy for, like, not waiting for you to shoot me. I mean, like, it's not, that sounds ridiculous, like, reducing things of such metaphors. But that's quite literally the way things are characterized... like in the english-speaking world like oh you know this is like a schoolyard fight and like you hit me first i mean it's it's it's ridiculous it's it's literally retarded like it's like it's like mentally stunned to think that way and we'll get into this next episode the ukays involvement in political terms it wasn't just positive but in battlefield terms

i believe it's what created a stalemate and the question of why emerged again and again, you know, it's, I mean, I think it was a, I think it was a culture, like it's decades long, kind of poisonous culture of kind of abject and basic irrational hostility to Germany as well as the fact that an empire that is being compromised just by fatigue and complexity and scale, you know, is always in need of kind of a coherent policy course, which by the 20th century really wasn't possible anymore. You know, it's like identifying a continental adversary in which to direct all of these energies towards, you know, like in the short term solved a lot of problems, but, you know, London's claim is always, oh, well, you know,

Germany violated Belgian neutrality. but, I mean, I and a whole vague made the point even for the evil hostilities that the case of Belgium, there would have to be some kind of like recompense for the Belgians. And when the Germans

did assault, interestingly, the Belgians seemed very well equipped to wage an asymmetrical war. They imposed quite a lot of attrition on the Kaiser's army. there were some horrible instances

of friendly fire on the German side owing to the way some of these battles resolved but I mean when you border France who for millennia is the traditional

enemy of the German states declaring yourself to be this non-aligned neutral and anyone who crosses your border with hostile intention is you know somehow committing an act of gross repeen I mean that seems

highly specious at best but you know aside on the kind of moral can't and you know even if it's in good faith this kind of

traditional anglophone belief in the integrity of structures tailored to regularize outcomes it doesn't it doesn't truly explain why the British willing to piss away

like tens of thousands of men for a few yards gain against the German army for, like, for what? I mean, that doesn't, you know, in the case of, I think it's of France and Russia, it was a foreground conclusion in a way that it wasn't for the UK, is my point. You know, it's, it doesn't

really make any sense. We should probably tackle the battle of the Somme, like, on an episode of two itself. Maybe we'll do that next time. But the, um, General Van Falkin He was the German war minister.

He thought that there's some kind of localized war would be possible. He was hoping that Burke told, who was perhaps a foreign minister would deal directly with the Russians, persuaded to accept the offensive against Serbia as a localized war. Von Moltke essentially he vetoed that he said look you know first of all

Moscow's not going to listen Moscow and St. Petersburg are going to abide what we want secondly you know he said this is an issue of capabilities Von Malk in some ways is very much like a forward-looking general

staff officer you know it doesn't you know it doesn't the decision point is you know when these capabilities are emergent and in situ we can't speculate about human intent

and that's again that's that's the way I mean that's the way everybody came to think about warfare including you know the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Cold War and everybody else yeah I think I'm gonna wrap it up now man if um

if that's um if that's agreeable I'll go that yeah yeah um we'll get into the battle this song and the american and like how that set the tone of um of combat and um and a whole and maybe we'll go a little longer and get into like the situation domestic situation in america and how wilson got his war mandate and how that you know ultimately was decisive and the outcome of hostilities yeah that that'd be great

all right please give your plugs yeah for sure man you can find me at substack and again like fresh content is coming my workflow got interrupted

and set back by about four weeks I apologize for that but the season two of the pod is coming as well as

other stuff I promise you can find my substack on my podcast at real Thomas 777.7.com you can find me on X at

Real Capital R-E-A-L-U-A-L underscore number 7-H-M-A-S-777-com. You can always find me my website. It's number 7-H-M-A-S-7-7-7-com. If you want to throw cash away, my cash app,

ID is number seven HMAS 7777 and yeah that's all I got man thanks to everybody for being patient about the fresh content again it's coming I'm uh we're like a two-man operation so I mean it still takes time um and uh this winter has been somewhat difficult on my health um but I'm on the men I appreciate it until the next time thank you yeah thank you man I want to welcome everyone back to the Piquaneda show. Returning, going to do a little bit more of this World War I series. How are you doing today, Thomas? I'm a little bit under the weather. So like I indicated before we went live, if it seems like I'm experiencing brain fog or something, it's not because I've got

early onset Alzheimer's or something. Just be aware of that. I want to talk about the American internal situation, not just the Wilson, administration and the intrigues therein which were substantial you know particularly involving the person at Colonel House

Wilson himself is really kind of unfairly maligned by everybody like people on our side I'm not going to speak for you people are like adjacent to like my belief structure they view him as the father of

you know utopian progressivism and globalism that I don't think That's true, okay? People on the left hate him because, you know, they view him as this big kind of racialist on grounds of, you know, the fact that he very much pandered in some sense to the, to nativist elements, you know, who were gaining a lot of clout in terms of their ability to mobilize, you know, and get people of the polls and things. you know, Wilson was the only, he was a university professor. You know, that was literally like his vocation, you know, and a man like that, unless he was very much insulated from people who saw fit to sort of manipulate his lack of experience and delegating authority in the way that such things are done in Washington, you know,

any man who did not have the advantage of such things was going to be misled in key capacities. And I think some of that is the case with Wilson. And finally, people forget, you know, Wilson's 14 points were actually, I mean, unrealistic as they may have been, they were premised on a commitment to not punishing Germany and not punishing the constituent elements of the Hathsbury Empire and not, you know, assigning war guilt. You know, Wilson was disgusted when it became clear that, you know, both Paris and London essentially wanted to pick the bones of a permanently prostrate Germany and, you know, divide up the world between each other because suddenly, you know, formerly Ottoman dominions and German holdings in Africa and Asia were up for grabs. So it was, you know, he, and Wilson, I think the war killed him. Wilson died shortly after. You know, he felt like he'd been made a fool of for any,

he took, unlike a lot of modern executives, he took responsibility for the American War dead, which were substantial, okay? I mean, it was horrible. And I don't want to turn this episode and next episode, which we're going to deal with America. I don't want to turn this into some hagiography of Wilson. Okay, I'm not saying Wilson was a good president.

But the situation is more complicated than Pete. will allow and but today i don't want to get some i don't want to get into the character of wilson today we'll do that next time and we may go for a third episode unless people are figuring out world war one because i want to deal with the battlefield situation and the american expeditionary force which is a fascinating topic and it's very important because that that was the game changer in battlefield terms of the bolt truck revolution but the key the key to understanding why America became involved in World War I, as I've indicated before in our discussion, it's one of the rare instances where high finance can be said to have had this

positive impact on the decision to go to war. I find it incredibly irritating. I call it the alibi of the simpleton when people, there's a, the fools, half-educated fools who invokes Medley Butler quotes and say wars about bankers and banking. That's the alibi, the simpleton. It's really, really annoying and really, really just misguided. However, J.P. Morgan and some other concerns, quite literally were bankrolling London's war effort. And based upon what they were being told from the onset of hostilities until about mid-1915, when it became clear that a real quagmire was emergent, like they were being told that this war would resolve with within months and allied victory was basically guaranteed and one of the ways the crown was able

to sell that narrative is because that's basically what that's basically what military authorities outside of germany interestingly we're saying okay this is something of a consensus that doesn't mean it's okay to gamble on the outcome of a war with uh with america's financial system but I mean the degree to which the degree to the decision to go to war was in part a bailout of Wall Street like that is true

that's the one instance of the 20th century that's true but the other part of that the other part of that equation is to do with the situation in the internal situation in America and these intrigues specifically between America and Mexico

which is why the Zayor Zimmerman Telegram was a big deal. For those that don't know, I'll explain what the Zimmerman Telegram is in a minute, but first I want to say it's cast by a lot of historians, both revisionists and court historians alike,

that the Zimmerman Telegram was somewhat pretextual as it causes belly, or that it was like or that it was like the communique issued by Wilhelm to Paul Kruger congratulating

him on, you know, on waging his guerrilla campaign against the British crown. Okay, it was a lot more significant than that. It wasn't a matter of pride or clout or of Washington, D.C., not wanting to abide insults from what they viewed

as a belligerent foreign power. America and Mexico, for all pride of purposes, were at war, okay, from definitely from 1910 until the early 1920s. Arguably from the time of the Spanish American, from the close of the Spanish American War until about 1930.

This idea that, this idea that Mexico was just kind of this like troubled backwards state, but it's a benign place. That's not true at all. And Pershing, obviously, who, I think Pershing is probably the greatest American military commander who ever lived. And he was a logistics. And the interstate highway system was something that he designed in Eisenhower, who's his protege, was able to implement in policy terms as well as, you know, corraling the engineers and, and a capital to make it happen. But, you know, Pershing, Pershing's most prestigious command before the Great War was the Poncho Via expedition, and that was considered a big deal.

It was viewed as essential to American national security to bring the border situation under control. You know, which is fascinating, or it should be, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. And that's something I pointed out to people, I mean, some years back now, Trump didn't articulate his position well, but when Trump was talking about the situation on the border, like, nothing's really changed. This idea like, oh, Trump's saying mean things about Mexicans or Spanish Americans or whatever or Latinos, whatever. That's not really the way to interpret it. Like, however you feel about Trump, whatever you feel about the situation to the South, it's an ongoing national security quagmire. Okay, and immigration is part of that, but it's structural and political as well.

and conceptually people seem to have a blind spot there. People who live in the Southwest certainly don't. But I think people who weren't proximate to the situation, odds as that might seem, considering that the world's being kind of one place because of the availability of up-to-the-minute situational awareness. Nevertheless, you know, it's not something people really think about. the situation with the Sinaloa cartel

and whatever is going to replace it and I think something is in the process of replacing it I mean that's a national security matter too it's not just because people getting addicted addicted to narcotics is bad it's you're talking about you're talking about a hostile non-state actor

you know based in Mexico that essentially can bring to bears the hard power of many states, you know, that is a law into itself and huge swathlet of territory adjacent to the kind of United States. Anybody talking about it, like, it's a law enforcement problem or just an immigration problem that's horribly misguided? But bring it back to where we need to be.

Wilson's Declaration of War, Wilson, when he asked Congress for a Declaration of War, against the German Empire. He addressed Congress on April 2nd, 1917, and he resoundingly was, he was, resounding yes, the partisan divide, gave him a war mandate. Now, this is interesting, okay,

because the Lusitania, which was almost two years previous, when Lusitania was saying, there were people, it was a substantial minority of people who were clamoring for a war declaration then you know

it and Will, I mean it wasn't just because Wilson campaigned on, literally on a platform of keeping America out of a European war but it wasn't either just that the Lusitania was what was in fact carrying arms

And, I mean, this was scandalous, not just because it placed people's lives in danger at scale, you know, without their knowledge of it, you know, and civilians at that, you know, including women and children. but it would have compromised kind of America's entire claim the moral credibility with respect to the combatant states, you know, not just it's, you know, kind of like nominal allies at that time in the, in the entance, but contrary the, you know, the Habsburg Empire, you know, Germany and the Ottomans. But what, you know, as we talked about before, too, I think we mentioned it in the context of Nixon's 1968 election. Wilson, in Wilson's first term, he did not have a particularly strong mandate. You know, he'd run against, he'd, um, it'd have been a four-way contest. You know, and that, like, Theodore Roosevelt, um, ran as an independent. There's a socialist candidate, his name alludes me, and again, forgive me for being kind of foggy.

And there was, um, the incumbent William were Taft. So there was always kind of, uh, Wilson and the commander-in-chief role was, not particularly strongly situated. So if he was just going to go, if he was, if he was just mining for some kind of clout, or if he was looking for a way to kind of insinuate himself as an article two, Warlord, he had plenty of opportunities to do it, okay? He didn't need to rely on the Zimmerman telegram as, as some kind of pretext or as some kind of, it's not going to look at it that way, okay?

this was genuinely impactful now the immediate catalyst or the proximate catalyst the German High Command had announced on February 1st 1917 it would resume unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic

and in the ports and enemy ports in the Mediterranean as well as territorial waters and contiguous zones the rationale for this being what I just said they said look like you know you're you're loading civilian vessels with arms you know and that that means that everything is a target and is that legitimate yeah I think so

but that was the that's what Wilson designated as the immediate catalyst but he'd broken off diplomatic relations with Berlin upon discovery of the Zimmerman

Telegram and I think that that's kind of like the key to this entire that's the key to this entire kind of nexus of causation the most diplomats initially believed the Zimmerman Telegram

was some kind of forgery by the proverbial war party in America but it wasn't And it became clear it wasn't because the Kaiser's representatives admitted every word of it was accurate. And that what it had been reported over the international newswire was a word-for-word translation. Now, the message itself, it was dispatched on January 17, 1917. It came in the form of a coded telegram that was dispatched personally.

by Arthur Zimmerman the Stats Secretar in the foreign office he was second only to the foreign minister okay the message was conveyed to the German ambassador

of Mexico Heinrich von Eckert Zimmerman sent the telegram in anticipation of the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany obviously So, I mean, that they can raise the question as to whether it was presumed that America would simply issue a war declaration in the wake of that. I mean, that's an interesting question on its own right. But there's indications that the German Imperial Navy seemed to believe it was a foregone conclusion, you know, that a declaration from the world's administration was imminent, a declaration of war.

But with the telegram instructed, it instructed Eckhart that if the United States appeared certain, you know, to enter the war, he was to approach the Mexican government with a proposal for military alliance and Germany would essentially fund the efforts. Now, mind you again, this was a situation. where America and Mexico were already in like a low intensity conflict you know um so this was not like a boat from the blue um suggestion

or something that you know was out would something that suggested like a change in the status of relations or something uh it it represented a willingness to drastically escalate an already like an extent condition of

hostilities but I think that I think that that's important um the language of the telegram as follows was quote we intend to begin on the first of february unrestricted submarine warfare we shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the united states of america neutral in the event of this not succeeding we make mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis make war together make peace together generous financial support and understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the president of the above, most secretly, as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States and America is certain.

And I add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence, and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Police call the President's attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers a prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace. Signed Zimmerman. Now, the Mexican border war, just to put it in context, it was the last true war fought on American soil. its predecessors obviously being the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the war between the states. The Indian Wars were an ongoing ethnic conflict, obviously, that, in my opinion, didn't resolve until 1920. But that was distinguishable from, you know, Westphalian War between state actors.

So, I mean, the fact that, I mean, regardless of the relative power of Mexican forces in being, or Mexican movable as Asian potential cost to the United States, like, regardless of that, it was tying America down in theater, and it was waging war on America, on American soil in part. I mean, this was a serious matter, you know, and particularly... From the beginning of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the U.S. Army was stationed in relative depth along the border and on several occasions engaged the Mexican army.

The height of this came in 1916 when Pancho Villa attacked the border town of Columbus, New Mexico and in response, was the Pancho Villa expedition under command of Pershing into northern Mexico

you know, the mission objective of which was to was to find and capture or kill Bancho Villa and only was not captured the expeditionary force did

locate him, it engaged the rebels into his command, and it killed a couple of his top officers. Via himself escaped. The American Army returned the United States in January 1917, among other reasons, because it became clear that they were going to have to deploy

to Europe, and like everything was changing. But Pancho Villa, at this point, had become like a national hero and like a lot of Mexicans were like looking to join a revolutionary cause against the gringo because they viewed as like this big victory they're like hey you know we we ran a raid into you know into New Mexico and we you know and we terrorized America in its own backyard you know and then we fought off the U.S. Army when it when it you know when it tried to chase down when I tried to chase down Pancho Villa you know so I mean they we can't be stopped you know on

our own turf and i mean this kind of this kind of nonsense but uh so i mean obviously the germans are thinking seriously you know if uh it does it does big the question did the kaiser and or holvig and or von molzka i mean whoever was actually reviewing the strategic situation in terms of the hard variables Did he or they think that Mexico had the forces in being, the gumption, the political will, the organizational kind of ability to truly recapture what had been lost in the 1846, 1848 war? I don't know if they did or not. But just the very fact that Mexico was in a position to mounts such an expedition, even if it was a disaster,

I mean, that would, America would have to prioritize that theater over any overseas deployment, you know, and forcing America into a two-front war in the Southwest, like, as they're taking mass casualties in Europe. I mean, that's, that would be a problem, you know. And even, really all Germany had to do was tie America down enough so that it was incapable of stopping what became the 19th. the spring offensive. Okay, we'll get into that next episode. But, you know, even after, even after the American withdrawal in 1917, conflict on the border continued.

You know, the U.S. Army continued to launch smaller operations in the Mexican territory. Like, what we'd think of now was like, almost like search and destroy missions that kind of like went on in Vietnam. You know, like chasing down. on gorillas, chasing on rebels who were raiding border territories, you know, things like that, trying to identify, you know, friendly, um, friendly non-combatants, you know, among whom

they'd been moving and had been, you know, storing, like, foodstuffs and weapons and ammunition for them. I mean, this was a dirty war, you know. Um, now, what was a game changer here? and was one of the things that I believe was strongly catalyzing in terms of America and Wilson specifically getting a really strong mandate. Because initially there was a, Wilson had a strong mandate to go wage World War I. And he got a standing ovation in Congress when he used to his speech. when only months before, like, basically, the country was totally opposed to intervention. And nobody can really explain why this is, but I think it comes down to what I'm about to describe

the battles of Amos-Nogales. The final conflict over Amos-Nogales was in August 1980, 1980, and led to a literal border wall between the two towns. It's one of those towns It's situated There's one on the Mexicans side of the border One of the American side of the border They both share a name There's literally like a wall

That was erected, you know, between them So I have this idea that like there's never been Like a border wall or whatever There's lots of border walls along the Mexican-American border Because American border is freaking huge Okay But there are these periodic There are these periodic

You know, rage on the Mexican side in the American territory and reports emerged from the U.S. Army not just from Colonel House in the White House, not from some newswire service, not from some British newspaper,

but from men in theater that these Mexicans are being led by German officers. And at that point people who otherwise were reasonable I think kind of took leave of reason and said we are under attack by Germany there's some dispute

as to who these guys were like were these guys just like European mercenaries yeah that's possible but I mean I don't I you know in context I don't really see who else they would have

been you know um and frankly the zirman telegram would have been kind of meaningless absent the presence of at least you know an advisory corps on the ground um representing the kaiser's army okay um um Possibly, you know, the emergence through late 1917 in the summer of 1918, the emergence of an actual hot border war between the United States Army and a revolutionary Mexican army, in part at least led by German officers. This was a game changer, okay, I think, in an ongoing capacity.

But this is also what came to be known. as the border wars pretty much like after you know the the poncho v expedition and basically everything all these border conflicts from the united states of mexico that ensued after 1910 it became in the time and in like you know really until like the 50s they were known as the border wars this was really the catalyst for for shutting down immigration okay i mean yeah a lot of it was uh like northern native part of was you know the coalition that um created kind of the 1920 clan of, you know, Protestant northerners, you know, who viewed the cities as, you know, being overwhelmed by Catholics who were creating these political machines and dispossessing

them. Yeah, that was a big, that was an ongoing thing, and that very much ossified by 1924, but nationwide, the border wars really were kind of what motivated people go to the poll and say, like, enough is enough, like, shut this down, like, this is a grave, like, national security threat. Like, these people are hostiles, these people being, you know, like, Mexicans, they're, you know, we're at war with these people periodically, like, why the hell are we, like, allowing them just kind of, you know, coming to go, as they please, as if, as if they were friendlies or you know

or just some kind of like contiguous polity or something you know that maintained good offices with us the the uh

and it's also the another aspect of the border wars it uh Mexico whether Mexico itself was providing particularly

small arms ammunition because artillery was basically exclusively manufactured in Europe because I mean it's a whole different matter like if you're you're like you're if your artillery pieces are going to fire or not you know not it's not the question of quality but also

like you know you can't just you can't just mock up an artillery shell it's like basically it's like basically compliant with with caliber and things you know what it but um smaller small arms small arms ammunitions um there's a huge amount uh flowing from vera cruz to germany and uh that was uh america the u s army occupied Vera Cruz

early on during one of the anti-rebel expeditions south of the border in 1914. So, I mean, the this is the kind of since the Zimmerman telegrams.

I think people think of it as like why the hell was Berlin talking to the Mexicans anyway, and this doesn't make any sense. And like on its face, it doesn't. But if you account for the fact that America was basically at war with Mexico, I mean, that that's it doesn't make sense and uh you know like i said this is relevant today in a way that a lot

of stuff we talk about isn't i mean it's all relevant in terms of meta history and you know psychologically how narratives are structured and things and as well as understanding you know kind of like where we're going like as a people like our people but just you know humans generally kind of like what their fortunes are in kind of the cycles of of historical development but in again kind of branch tax policy terms like what was going on literally 100 years ago on the border is still going on today

just with you know a solid different configuration of opposing forces and you know the added the added kind of horror of the narcotics trade and other things you know this is not

there's nothing new you know this is arguably it's it's kind of like the permanent you know a national security crisis in America is the Mexican border. You know, it's not, um, that's one of the reason is why it's still, like, bitch made in basic when it feels like, oh, that's racism and you don't like Mexicans. Like, I mean, that's like,

that's like, that's like, that's like, fucking, I don't even know what to say about that. I mean, like, maybe, even if like, every in America, like, hated Mexicans, like, which I certainly don't think is the case, but, like, even where that the case, that's not, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the crisis in the border. You know, I mean,

it, um, I mean, like, Nobody really likes each other, okay? Like, frankly across, you know, lines of race and culture, okay, with, I mean, at macro scale, I mean. But, but that's, yeah, that's, that's what, that's what I'm, that's kind of what I wanted to do. That's kind of what I wanted to cover today. And like, again, I, like I said, I'm sorry for making this kind of brief and, uh, I'm sorry for being kind of like foggy in the mind. Like this week's been kind of a,

this week's been kind of rough. So, um, no. Yeah. I think you're going to wrap it off if that's okay with you. And I'll promise, yeah, I promise, uh, I'll, uh, I'll bring more to bear like when we record again in a few days. Yeah, no problem at all, man.

Uh, just do some quick plugs and we'll get out of here. Yeah, yeah. Uh, people have been very generous in helping me out. I put out a call for help with some of my production expenses, as well as, like, human talent to help me with, like, editing and stuff. And, like, a whole bunch of people, like, there's, like, a deluge of people, like, helping with both. Like, that's, that's incredible.

I've got huge love for you people. That's fantastic, man. But that's not just a great relief to me, man, but it means, like, my workflow is actually coming together. I will be dropping fresh shit. I've been trying to do as much as I can with people. who just like invite me under their pod because i realize like i'm not dropping fresh shit on my own and it's not a good thing but i uh i i'm getting on top of it i season two of the pod

is going to launch my long form manuscripts are going to get done my video content is going to appear thank you for bearing with me i'm sure i sound like a fucking senile person or something that i'm always like saying this and then like it doesn't emerge but you can find my uh Todd and other good stuff at my substack. It's real Thomas 777.com. Find me on X, Real Capital, R-A-L underscore number seven, H-O-M-A-S-7777. Find me at my website number seven-h-M-A-S-777.com. And, yeah, that's about all I got for now.

all right i know the next one's going to be great we already talked we talked about it previous so yeah yeah get ready for that one and we'll get it out try to get it out next week all right yeah that'd be great man all right thanks thomas take care and out thank you buddy i want to welcome everyone back to the peeking yona show i got thomas before he escapes town and goes on the lamb to uh do another world war one episode how are you doing thomas i'm doing well something i want to touch on today before we get into the battlefield situation amidst the American intervention. You know, I made the point in the last episode when we were focusing on Wilson and his war

mandate or lack thereof preceding developments on the Mexican border. It's important to note that the American people and particularly white America at that time, close to half of people had, you know, German heritage and Holer and part um but there was a tremendous divide between um elite opinion and uh and the american street i mean even more than there is ordinarily in policy terms or whatever um one of the ways this was cultivated was the the UK um they were always masterful a kind of manipulating world opinion. I mean, that's one of the benefits of literally having infrastructure,

cutting-edge infrastructure as it then was, you know, on a third of this planet or more, as they did. You know, and in those days, the newswire, we still use that term because it was telegraph. Like, that's basically how, until Telex came about, that was basically the only way you transmitted data, you know, across the continental device. And in 1914, in August 1914, what the British did was they deployed a vessel called,

give me a minute, let me check my notes, so I don't, yeah, it was the morning of August 5th, 1914. There's something of a forgotten episode, which is crazy, especially because you can, considering how much media and the manipulation of data is so much everybody's mind these days. The ship called the Tilconia. It literally was outfitted with hooks, the corral, the undersea cables, that led to the German ports of Emden, which was really the only, that was the only source of outgoing information from the German Empire to the America. the Royal Navy systematically cut every one of these cables okay um from that point forward

any and all data coming out from the continent was going through the filter of British war sensors um from casualty roles you know to um to the outcome of uh of engagement on either front. Two, and most significantly, these reports about supposed German atrocities in Belgium. This was kind of the first instance of, like, a dedicated effort. I mean, in wartime, I mean, truth is the first casualty, right? I mean, that's an overdone cliche.

But this is the first really dedicated effort, you know, in a total sense, they're going to cast the opposing force as committing systematic atrocities and the claim was that well the Germans are in Belgium and they're committing mass rape of the women folk and they're pointing to death every military age male there was this famous story that made the rounds

they claimed oh this like starving Belgian boy you try to steal some German rations to eat and you know this this heartless Prussian mirth and it cut his hands off the Germans responded to this by saying they appealed to America at this point

American and German relations weren't yet at the toilet they're like we'll invite any of your media people to embed in the field with our army and that's exactly what they did and the report was that the Germans are constantly professional you know the Belgian seem like the Belgian civilian population

is not happy about them being there but they seem to be tolerating one another grudgingly you know, there's certainly, if for no other reason, then it would be a complete breakdown of discipline. There's certainly not mass rape of women and girls underway. And Clarencedero, he offered a reward. It was something like $10,000. He's like, I will pay $10,000, which is like a million dollars in today's money, to like anyone who can locate the supposed Belgian kid with no hands.

You know, and there weren't any takers. You know, so you had ridiculous as it might sound. And, I mean, there was, at that time, like, the East Coast establishment, like, really did, like, rule America. Even until the 60s, like, my dad tells me that, you know, like, when he, uh, when he went to the private sector and, like, these big private firm, like, private sector firms, you know, like, would send him around to, like, you know, because he was basically, like, a quants before that really became, like, a formal sort of profession. and like when people would ask where he was from he's like, he's like, I'm from Los Angeles, and then it'd be like, well, you're based on Chicago, we'd be like, yeah, well, there's nothing going on there.

Like, you know, it's like, look, son, like, find his other job in Manhattan or basically, like, you're, you're pissing into the wind, and that's, like, fucking poor folks shit. And, like, nobody talks that way anymore, or, like, thinks that way. But it was like this until the 70s, basically. But in those days,

like, the power, like, the power in America, like, the financial power, the cultural power, the political power, like, all clouds, came from the East Coast, okay? And all of these fools had this, like, misplaced reverence for, like,

for the British aristocracy. And they thought, like, Britain was just great. I mean, I'm basically, for all practical purposes, like, I'm fucking Anglo-Scottish myself. But that's a lot, you know, and I've got a lot of love for, like, orange ulster and stuff, but like, anybody who likes the British Royal family is a fucking jagoff.

I mean, it's like, like, let's be serious. nobody I mean like now at least around here like there's like blue-haired old ladies like breathlessly read about the fucking royals but like in those days like anybody who was like arguably like middle class or above like they

they acted like the English like walked on fucking water okay so they were like very eager to believe that like oh you know the British are are intervening because they have to you know I mean like even

I mean, even by the answer to not stillies, the Germans have been saying from Jump that, like, look, there's a secret diplomacy like London, going back to the days that Disraeli, you know, possibly even without his knowledge when he was serving as prime minister, they told the France that, like, they'd intervene

like the minute they declared war on the German Empire, okay? But this idea that, like, oh, we, you know, the, you know, the British expeditionary force, you know, they they've got to save Belgium because, you know, it's being put to slaughter by these, by these savages from the east.

Like, people really believe that garbage. You know, so that's, that's important to consider. And, like, Wilson, to his credit, you know, again, I don't think Will... I mean, it's easy to burn Wilson an effigy, and I made the point to one of the fellows on my timeline today where he's like, I like, I like,

I like, I like, I like, I like, I take exception. You're defending Wilson and saying, look, I'm not defending Wilson. I think he was, like, a bad chief executive. That goes without saying. But the guy was not some Clinton, or some globalist.

I mean, the guy re-segregated the district, number one. He was basically a white nationalist. Secondly, he went on a record as saying that, like, these people in Washington who were calling for the Kaiser to be executed were, like, literally insane. You know, he's like, what's wrong with you? You know, and I believe the war killed him because he, and the kind of naive is a common to an career academic.

He really thought that, like, he really thought Paris and London, were negotiating a good faith and they're like, oh, they just want some kind of workable conflict resolution mechanism, you know, that abides the sovereign rights of all involved. And when he realized that they were treating Germany like a prostrate corpse and they were the vultures, you know, picking out the choice, the choice cuts, as it were, you know, he realized that there was 110,000 American boys in the grave and, you know, a several billion in unsecured credit that was probably never going to be satisfied. You know, he'd been made a fool of and arguably helped tip the fortunes towards a kind

of permanent structural instability in Europe. So that's my point about Wilson. It's not that people should like him or think that he was. a good executive. It's that when people like Bill Clinton or like these fools like Pompeo or whoever involved like Wilsonianism

like they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Um you know like he like he'd be appalled by like their sense of um you know ethics and things or lack of their off. But as it may

America's intervention is what is what stopped the German offensives in their tracks. Germany was being bled white by the war. However, by 2017-1918 the number of men coming of age from military service in Germany

was the ratio was favoring the German Empire over their enemies after peace had been made on the Eastern Front. And that freed up between 50 and 55 divisions to assault westward.

So, say, the Allies had a problem would be a gross understatement. What is fascinating, and we'll get more into this, the Germans hadn't even started developing a workable tank until the enemy had already fielded theirs, and they never were able to field a model that was battlefield viable.

So, the final German offensive, Ludendorff's third offensive in 1918, this was infantry backed up by master artillery. They had no tanks. And the fact that we think of Germany as being like the master tank builders and they are, I'd argue that the Leopard 2 is the best tank on this planet today, okay? But the German army was a low-tech army. and by 1917 the war is becoming a mechanized war

hold on a minute let me see if I can shut off this goddamn alert thing when you're not on your own equipment stuff just starts going haywire if that keeps on pinging I'm sorry forgive me for being like a fucking old tard oldster tard but like I yeah but the uh the pre yeah

the proud collapse of Russia it released over 50 divisions of inventory and obviously it was in the mind of the German High Command was you know a mass offensive to finally break through to Paris if not knock out the British Army

to take Paris and Lundorf believed that that was an NSEG move and I think he might have been right. I mean it's hard to say but presumably to if, you know, if logistics were intact to sustain an assault on Paris, they could, they could push all the way to the coast. And, uh, that, that, that would have been, um, for all practical purposes, the, uh, the allies would have had to sue for peace, in my opinion.

I know there's people, like, like John Keegan argued otherwise, and there's guys, there's war in all their studies who claim, like, Paris would just be a prestige objective. It would not have been, especially in those days, in my opinion. But, um, the, uh, despite the German, despite the, uh, despite the, despite the German infantry being, uh, gutted by, um, attrition, again, they had, uh, they had numbers on their side without accounting for the American expeditionary force arriving. battle ready so they were raising the clock and what they lacked technologically, tactically the Germans were way ahead of the curve.

That kind of stuff pioneered by people like Rommel and by Lundorf you know what the Germans called stormtroopers colloquially um that was basically a Blitzkrieg tactic

but with highly mobile infantry you know like you break through You break through rapidly with smaller formations, absolutely loaded down with firepower. You force the enemy to fight on averse fronts, and then reinforcements overwhelm the flanks and slaughter them. That's basically Blitzkrieg without Panthers. And it was having a shock effect as intended on the British and French Army. And a point I made to be able, too, the French, the French, the French, the French generalism was superior to people like Haig, who was a fucking disaster, inferior to Pershing, in my opinion,

but the French were very game and they were very innovative, but they, they'd sacrifice men in a way that most Western societies would find unseemly. So that's one of the point I think it's past because there's other stupid things people like to say these days But during like the neocon era people would go The French are a bunch of pussies It's like man the French should the French should fucking drop 10,000 their own bodies To take like 30 yards

Like the reputation is the opposite That they're That they're incredibly callous about their own manpower To say nothing of Of the enemy and um you know it was just it was uniquely misplaced for people to say that because again if anything the trope should be the opposite but the um the german high command like the thing to keep in mind is that the germans at basically been in a holding pattern on the western front

their idea always was we've got to knock out russia that will give us a breathing room um you know that'll that'll basically alleviate all of our problems post war you know the inability to break through

in the West is not fine because it's bleeding us white but one of the reasons for the complete kind of lack of movement

after 1915 was because there was a there was a rush of first sensibility and as AJP Taylor pointed out, that's kind of always the

that's kind of always the German perspective. So this strategically, the entire not just conceptually, but practically, due to this you know, rush of if not fresh, like newly available

infantry at division level. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I was a game changer. Okay. But it was a great deficiency that the Germans had no tanks. The

infantry had been re-equipped with a large number of what we'd consider to light machine guns. And that did, like, both of their firepower. And again, that's one of the reasons why, like, stormtroop tactics worked. You know, was, and that's one of the things America developed, the

Tommy gun. Like, you know, the Tommy Gun became like, it began notorious as like a gangsters and a cop weapon but I mean it was supposed to it was supposed to be an infantry assault weapon at range for clearing trenches like the idea is that like you storm a trench and

you've got like a drum magazine you can open up with 45 ammo and you can just like you can turn everybody basically into spaghetti um like I realize I realize some machine like some machine guns of that sort are are obsolete but it's um but I mean the machine the Tommy Guns no joke man like like ripping full auto on somebody with 45 caliber man like I don't want to be in the receiving under that but uh but that's um and the Germans also were they they relied heavily on poison gas um there's not uh you'll find court a story to try and cast the the German Empire is like bad guys for using so much poison gas all parties use all combatants use poison gas um

the Germans use it to make up for other deficiencies. And at Bella Wood, one of the reasons, you know, like I think we mentioned before, or one of the other episodes, like the myth of Bella Wood, it's not just like the U.S. Marines like waving their dicks around or something. Like they, the Marines assaulted at Bella Wood in a way that the Germans weren't used to. Because generally, by that time, after almost four years of war, when the Germans started popping off, poison gas in mass quantities.

Like, they were used to the enemy, like, affecting a tactical retreat, you know, and then kind of like, no man's land, like, opening up. Like, the U.S. Marines, like, kept on assaulting. And that's where the Germans were, like, what the fucks with these people? You know, I mean, whether that was because, like, I mean, I think the Marines are uniquely

trained for that kind of stuff, frankly. I mean, they've been fighting the banana wars in earnest, you know, like, what became known as the banana wars in places like Nicaraguan stuff. You know, obviously, like, the scale and scope of that and the savagery wasn't the same but also i mean they there's something to like institutional fatigue in armed forces after like years of like warfare i think but uh the u.s marines actually did carry the day at bella wood and uh in the world war one era

the u.s army infantry and and the u.s marine corps were we're serious badasses that goes that can't be denied. But the the uh Hindenberg and Lundorf increasingly as the war

went on, you know, Hindenberg was the Supreme Commander for all private of purposes despite whatever, like the Kaiser's mandate supposedly entailed. Lundorf was his chief of staff

as the war went on the military increasingly got its way and it increasingly was able to set policy now of course during and after hostilities at Versailles the claim was like oh the Germans kept up with this

conflict and pushed these offensives at the 11th hour when they were defeated because it's the Prussian militarism of the sort that, you know, we've got to fight to stamp out for all time. Like, my rebuttal of that, you know, like we've talked about in our Cold War discussions, a strategic air command had really co-opted war-making authority from the civilian executive here in America. And that wasn't even during active hostilities. I realized nuclear weapons changed things.

But this idea that somehow, like, democracies in a total war, like, oh, they're able to kind of put the brakes on. the military from co-opting executive decisionism, you know, in a way those other people's aren't. That's complete bullshit. And the fact of the matter is, it wasn't quite like the second war where you had these lunatics like Churchill issuing crazy statements about not negotiating under any circumstances. But it wasn't clear what Paris and London were consider to be peace terms. You know, like, it's a hell of a lot easier to get into a war that is to get out of one. And had cooler heads, at least in the sense that America seems to like to consider such

things, and cooler has prevailed and had Holbeck somehow overwhelmed the, you know, the will of Hennonberg or had he died or something. I mean, it's not clear what that would entail. Would he just, like, order the German army in the field to stop fighting? Like, would he take a boat to London and be like, hey, let's stop all this? I mean, it doesn't, you know, by that point, like stopping fighting wasn't really an option. And also, even though the Germans had converted to a full war economy in the way we think of it, they basically were on the brink of starvation. and we're on the break of, you know, freezing in the coming winter just due to no coal and heating oil.

It got to the point where, you know, and Ludendorff said in no uncertain terms to the Reichstag, you know, look, like, if we don't capture some of these resources on the way to Paris and northern France, like, we're done. You know, we have no choice but to perpetuate this war now. you know and that's something that's something that's kind of like lost in the you know in America and even during the Cold War because like

much as in the Soviet Union deprived as people were like nobody's really starving you know like it traditionally if you wage war long enough it gives the point you have to keep going because then you know

you've got to capture what you no longer have because it's all gone, you know, and despite the kind of refrain of these fools, you know, like, oh, war is a racket and war is for business. War is actually terrible for business and nothing gets done, unless the objective is to build, you know, tanks and, and nuclear weapons and the World War I era, like, you know, surface dreadnots that, you know, can muster massive firepower. It's not like anybody's like innovating anything that is making, like, easier. It's not of things they actually need to get done like the business of life i mean is getting done like the army is getting everything your farmers are all you know getting their brains blown out um on the western

front um you know you've got women and old people in your factories um and those factories aren't making stuff people need they're making they're making shells and and and ammo you know i mean it's it becomes like a crisis unto itself you know um and i think that's something that people people for some reason don't seem to grasp, probably because they get inundated with bullshit like Howard Zinn at a high school or something. But the opposite of the German attack plan was speed, because it had to be. Lundorf had the necessary troops with the newly freed up divisions, and he had a realistic plan.

The plan was to a solid in a broad front across about 50 miles into assault and depth through use of the enormous weight of artillery firing the heaviest possible loads and the most concentrated bombardments at short, medium, and long range basically lay down like an absolutely crushing deluge of shells over five to six hours

backed up by in total this is over close to 6,000, fuel artillery pieces, backed up by 3,500 mortars of varying caliber, which, all told, had over a million rounds of ammunition assembled. The problem with this, obviously, is you can only do it once. And if this failed to break through, you know that you were fucked

and of course a lot of these shells the explosive shells were intermixed with all varieties of poison gas um phosphogein which is an exfixating agent you literally choke to death on your own like your lungs with fluid and you choke and die particularly cruel

is one thing the Germans took to doing I'm not saying this is like cruel in a bad way I'm saying it's just like nasty um they'd pop off tear gas shells. Tear gas shells could penetrate like the gas, like the active agent. They could penetrate gas masks.

So if you got a hit with it, you'd rip off your gas mask for relief. Well, as soon as you did that, they'd start dropping mustard gas and fosgene. So like, then you'd, like, choke on that shit. So this was, uh,

this artillery assault, this mass artillery assault was basically on prescended. Okay. Over time, like, at Eprin, at the SOM,

I mean, obviously there'd been like comparable volume of munitions deployed, but like not at this concentration,

at this short duration, over this, uh, over this concentrated an assault area. Um, um,

so the reasoning was sound um and the first of the uh the first of the uh the first of the of the of the of the of the spring of what became to be known as the spring offenses and the president for this was the last offensive against the russians um the in the baltic um german at uh german artillery had fired without preliminary registration or like range finding the calculations were tight enough that they could

assault without warning and this utterly devastated the Russians because all at once these rounds found their mark and just massacred them Brooke Miller was was Lundorf's artillery

wizard and this was basically this was basically like his innovation you know calculate as close as you can your range fire from beyond visual

range and when these shells start landing by the time by the time the enemy realizes he's got to withdraw or die like he's already dead you know and immediately begin assaulting like with your infantry and, like, you're, you know, you're basically advancing over, like, thousands of enemy dead.

And before, uh, before the mainline resistance, like, knows what's happening, like, you're already on top of them. And, I mean, you're going to eat a lot of attrition doing that, but you're, you're probably going to win, just by sheer shock. Um, this was, this was the idea. Um, and this is what, uh, this is what, uh, was sold. Hindenburg. And this is presumably what Hindenberg sold to the Kaiser, though it's not clear to what degree the Kaiser was clued in. Like at the operational level of things. I read different things of different people. And unlike World War II after World War I, men at general officer level were fairly tight-lipped. And then by the time, like, by the time the Second War, they were basically

all dead. You know, it's an interesting, an unfortunate kind of gap in the record, frankly. But the as

it happened, the morning of the morning of May 27th, this mass concentration of artillery was brought to the front the ammunition stock by that point was approaching close to 2 million shells which was close to double what had been anticipated would be available all of these were fired off in just over four hours against 16 allied divisions immediately out of the bombardment

15 divisions from German 6th Army assaulted they were backed up by 25 more they were assaulting uphill across the succession of ravines the idea was

smashed the main line of resistance reached the summit of the ridge, continued on the reverse slope, annihilate the retreating opt for, and then Halt, an open country was reached. It's a preliminary to renewing the attack in the front in the north

where the British Army was concentrated and presumably knocked the British Army out of the war. Ludendorf in the first two days was basically able to exploit this is a pretty good effect the next five days the Germans advanced

to Chateau-Terry I'm sure I'm butchering that pronunciation this put the German army within 56 miles of Paris so it basically worked The problem was, um, where do you go from there?

The British Army's not dead yet. And, um, you know, it's one or the other. Like, you either assault, you either assault with everything, you either assault with the full brunt of your offensive power and see if you can knock Britain out of the war, or you, or you drive straight for Paris. And, uh, Lundorf considered Paris to be too pretty an objective

to forego, as it were. What the Allies did, the Allies began committing the Reserve's peacemeal as slowly as they could without completely without the mainland resistance collapsing entirely. They were basically engaging

as few fresh divisions at a time as they could. And by the time the American 3rd and 2nd divisions arrived, including the Marine Corps Brigade, which was the spherpunct of American forces, they arrived on June 4th, and that's really what halted the offensive. That was the Battle of Bella Wood. as we, I mean, the Bella, Bella Wood was contested for a minute, but what we think of was the battle of Bella Wood is when these

American reinforcements arrived, um, again, the, uh, the lead element was Marine Corps infantry and, um, and, uh, and that, um, and the, and the, the, and the, the, the,

the race to Paris was no more. Um, And by that point, I mean, it was, there was no, there wasn't the, there was neither the manpower nor the, nor the will. You know, again, like the military, the Germanic command had captured as much clout as, um, a military command element can in time of total war. but they you know the the the the the the Germany was um was not going to was not going to tolerate um another sacrifice on that order even if we're even were it possible and it wasn't there simply was not the manpower um the counter if it was um the uh on june night there was an ever to renew

the offensive on the river Mots in an attempt to draw out the French reserves and annihilate them but also the wide and a salient that had developed westward approximately

between Paris and Flanders and the idea was to force the Allies to deploy um piecemeal, and then, you know, exploit those soft spots and salvage something in the original plan, but that, um, that was, uh, that was, that was a pipe dream. And on 14th June,

the American Expeditionary Force backed up by those very French reserves, um, you know, just like broke that attack, basically, basically like, uh, at its nascent stage. And, Something else of note, too, is I'm old sex. I'm sorry I keep coughing and sniffling and stuff. But, um, 1918 was the famous Spanish flu, which killed millions of people worldwide. You know, unlike COVID, it was an actual epidemic. And this devastated the German army. It laid low probably between 300,000 and half a million German troops who already are

already, who's immune, his immune systems were already depressed by, like, poor diet, breathing in poison gas, you know, like, living in, living literally, like, underground in the trenches. So, the Germans were fighting a total war. You know, their population in military-age males was rapidly dwindling,

and this deadly flu epidemic was, like, ripping through Europe and hitting Germany most hard, and nor are harder than at the front. So, I mean, there was that. Um, the, uh, and this was when, uh, it was on, uh, for clarity, it was the week of July 3rd that, uh, the Kaiser, the, the civilian government led by, you know, Holveig, the, uh, at the Journaline command all agreed that, um, for Germany to survive, it, it had to not to, you know, to column in its acquisition of territories in the east it also needed luxembourg it also needed the

french iron and coal fields coal fields and lorraine um and nothing short of that would could they end the war in the west like otherwise germany was done um so i mean it didn't it uh you know this made this this again like the longer the war went on like the stakes became like more desperate and that's something that people neglect because uh Wars of attrition like that aren't really possible anymore at scale. I mean, attrition wars do happen. I mean, Israel and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Shahad and Hezbollah. I mean, they're engaged in one now.

But, like, at scale of national mobilization, you know, like, wars of attrition, like, lasting years, I don't think they're possible anymore. But the – but – but – Lundor, for me, committed to a military outcome. Despite, you know, the Reichstag, basically, you know, a quorum had developed in the Reichstag, even among what had been the war party that, you know, there was not a military, there's no longer a military solution to the conflict and to the crisis emergent from that conflict. the military wouldn't hear of it um and frankly i understand that because they like millions of them had died by that point you know it's um there was there's 52 divisions remaining to mount

a final assault against the french um it uh the french had advance warning uh shaw's mangine or mangine uh who really It was kind of like the lion of the French, at least of their field marshals. He, uh, his, uh, the counterstroke that he mounted was, uh, really the death of the German army. Um, they'd, uh, they'd suffered enormous casualties, but again, I mean, like the French always eat attrition that we would consider to be unconscionable. and that's one of the things they paid for in the second war you know like there was a I mean France was a divided society on the evil war and I mean there was many different things that worked there

but even had it not been like there wasn't the French there weren't like military age men in France like to fight you know an attrition war against Germany if need be in 1940 there just wasn't France never recovered from the Great War Germany did

the UK was somewhere in between in my opinion but um that's uh that's basically what I got for today I want to get into

I want to get more into the internal situation of of the Americas and uh the degree to which Colonel House who was not a colonel at all it was a colonel like Colonel Tom Parker

but I like Colonel Tom Parker like Colonel House was not cool like that like he was an asshole but um he was this bizarre figure who kind of became like this minister without portfolio to Wilson

and he wrote science fiction stories like starring himself where like he was this guy like he was the smartest man who ever lived and he ended all wars and presided over like universal disarmament It became this, like, world dictator.

I mean, that's, like, bizarre even for Washington, D.C. You know, and, like, this guy was, um... This guy was advising Wilson on what was, like, sound policy in terms of, um, you know, like, real, real, like, war and peace decisionism. Like, it's, like, literally insane, but, um... Well, someone who takes a last name, Drew is probably... Has to have insane delusions of Drenger. Um, yeah, it's, um, but yeah, I realize, like I said, man, I'm just, I'm just getting over being ill, as you can probably hear, so like, forgive me in these last episodes have been kind of, um, brief comparatively. But, uh, we'll, um, we'll wrap up next, when I get back from Virginia, we'll go over like an hour and a half and I'll, I'll wrap up, uh, World War I. Um, or you do a live stream, man, or in addition, too, if, like, were people going to ask questions of this stuff I'm leaving.

out but um you know again give me because i've been low a live stream sounds good we can we can plan that at one out um yeah that's great do some plugs and uh get ready for your trip yeah for sure man um i am in effect dropping new content after new years

like i again i'm sorry for the delay man like but i figure like nobody's really doing fresh shit now because it's everybody's doing their holiday thing so like first week in January i'm gonna drop like fresh content like you know across like everything I do

but you can find me on Substack at Real Thomas 7777.com You can find me on X at Capital R-E-A-L underscore number 7 H-O-M-A-S-7-7-7. I got a telegram channel.

I don't know how long it'll last, but it's Thomas Graham number seven, H-O-M-A-S-Gram. It's T's dot m e slash peckerwood dispatch but i think if you search for thomas graham like you'll find it so i'm kind of excited about that telegram are assholes and i hate them but i like um i like what gets done like on the channel because obviously it's uncensored and like a lot of people

participate to keep it live but that's where i'm at with things man and uh god willing over christmas i'm gonna work on these manuscripts that have been eluding me and that's where i'm at with things in this life. All right, man. Until the next time, safe travels. Thank you. Okay. You ready? Let's just jump in with some questions. Yeah. All right. Said on one of your podcast today, Thomas said that most Americans who were

alive at the time of the Civil War viewed it as a continuation of the War of Three Kingdoms. Can you elaborate on that a bit? I've never heard that before. Are there any chances of a full U.S. Civil War series? Thanks. That's from potato mutt. $5.00 secret chat. Thank you. I didn't say most Americans who are alive viewed it that way. I said that in elite circles, people who contemplated these things in historical capacities, as well as the people who can be viewed as, who can kind of be viewed as in the epoch as sort of like the cultural scribes,

this is the way they characterize it. Okay, like the American founding mythos originally, and if you read Hamilton and Jay, it's significantly they talk about Anglo-Saxondom, you know, bringing back presumably these kinds of like Germanic liberties that had been taken away by this Latin overlord class, okay? That was very much kind of like the northern perspective.

I know it's popular now to say like, oh, Puritans are a bunch of reformers and the radicals and, you know, look at John Brown. And it was like wokeism that caused the war between the states. That's not the case at all. All right. but this idea of roundheads versus

cavaliers being transposed to the new world and these tensions ultimately causing the war between the states that is true okay and that's the way the people who put these things in historical context view it like the average guy who was like a pig farmer

he wasn't like watching the sunset and saying you know I'm a descendant of Oliver Cromwell and I don't like the cavaliers he wasn't saying that but you better believe people like Robert E. Lee and Winfield Scott viewed that way. You better believe

you better believe some of these rabid abolitionist types viewed that way. That's what I meant. What was the thing about the question? Is there a chance of a Civil War II? Is that the question? Yeah, Civil War series. No, is there a chance to Yeah, sorry. A Civil War series. Yeah, there's probably better guys to talk about the war between the States. I mean, I think

I know something. Okay. My main wheelhouse is the 20 century if there's enough if there's adequate demand for it yes i would be happy to do it i mean i basically take the cues from the subscribers and the viewers you know i mean there's my own i there's a reason why focus so much on the cold war and interesting conflicts they're in and war war war two and stuff it's not just because i find those kinds of things interesting and it bears on some of my own research and my own work product but i feel i'm more i'm I'm, this isn't EO talking when I say I am more competent than most men to speak on those things.

I literally have expertise in those regards. I'm not an expert on the world between the States. Okay, I'm like competent in it. But if you're looking for a war with the States expert, there are better guys than I to do it. But yes, I would be willing to do it if you want me to. Okay. All right. This is a question I had, but also one of the guys in my private chat, Marshall Forward,

had. He said, will you ever dedicate an episode of the World War I series to the Bolshevik uprising as well as the Russian Civil War? Would you also possibly talk about Roman von Ungern Steinberg's crusades were violate yeah. The Bolshevik,

Red Revolutions. The murder of communism, it's inextricably tethered to the conflict paradigm. that caused World War I, but it's its own discrete set of occurrences.

I don't like just, I don't like it when historians, revisionists, or otherwise, just included as this kind of footnote to World War I, because it's a different thing. And, yeah, the Great War and the fact that Russia

was actively losing it, and there was a mutiny in the field, yes, that was an essential catalyst, but it wasn't the sole proximate cause. And if you want to, and if you want to talk about communism, as a revolutionary imperative and as kind of the formative

kind of as the formative like paradigm of the 20th century yeah I think that's an important topic but I can spigiously left it out of our World War I discussion for the reasons I just explicated Sternberg I'd very much like to talk about

but I don't have the linguistic competence to do a whole series on Sternberg himself because there's precious little in English or even in German on the man. He's very mysterious. What he represents, though, he represents a tendency. He resonates like a proto-national socialist tendency, number one. Also, it's not an accident. He was a Baltic German because they were the vanguard against. communist in all kinds of ways like schubner richter was of the same stock as was

Alfred Rosenberg um but we can um that that kind of that the resurgence of mysticism i don't mean that in a punitive way that kind of a theology reasserting itself actively in european man's conceptual horizon these things that were thought to be long dormant representative of the old god figuratively and literally reasserting itself a sanguinary kind of Christianity that calls for blood and sacrifice and a warrior ethos you know a belief in a belief in you know a belief in duty to one's race only to epigenetic memory giving life meaning but also you know the understanding that you know men of race you know capital R

being the architects of civilization and, you know, the kind of culture bearing caste that's essential to, you know, preserving it and thus and thus literally

facilitating civilization. Like all these things, all these things were what created the resistance to communism on every front. And all these things were instrumental in

in the emergence of figures like first and foremost head off Hitler but also Mussolini Sternberg as we just mentioned Mosley Kadriano

you know these these pious warrior movements like that emerged in Spain all that stuff's tied together but it's like a top of it to itself it's not just a footnote of the bolster of revolution

And the Bolshev revolution is not just a footnote or like a side or like a secondary theory of the Great War. So yeah, if you want to talk about the short century of 1914, 1989 generally and the meaning of communism and why it had the power to animate and shape human affairs and the way it did and what and what and what and why the resistance to it was, you know, and why it was so grounded. this kind of atavistic spiritual impulse. We can talk about that, too. But it's a topic for its own series, I think. Okay. Yeah, I was going to just say that there is pretty much the war and how Russia was getting their, you know, getting their butt kick, basically.

I mean, that's what, that's one of the factors that allowed the revolution to happen. I mean, without, say Russia didn't get, say Russia wasn't involved in the war at all and they were just you know they were out of it completely they're just trading at the point i mean it's harder for that rebel it's harder for the bolshevik revolution to happen yeah as a necessary catalyst and i think too i think lenin i think part of his political genius i mean nobody's a true like auger but there are men who can discern patterns in the historical process as they're immersed quite literally within it and lennon was one of those guys and that's not to say that Lenin knew World War I was going to happen,

but it's pretty clearly you do something terrible was going to happen. You know, if for another reason, if for another reason the Tsarist regime was a total anachronism, and it wasn't just a case of, you know, oh, this is a corrupt regime that's kind of failing. And it wasn't, or just of case, you know, like the Ottoman Empire of, well, you know, the center cannot hold, you know,

because, you know, it's, you know, it's, um, this, this institution is a, in its entirety is, is a sure. raid. I mean, it was those things were true too, but there was something punctuatedly violent on the horizon of the Russian Empire, and that seemed apparent to anybody who was it all sort of politically sophisticated. And Lenin was an unusual guy, even within that sort of narrow coterie from a little like that, in my opinion. Okay. This message came from Claude. He's saying going, he's saying this is, uh, in reference to some of the stuff you're talking about pre-World War

one, the buildup. What's up with Bismarck's relative obscurity and lack of political interest prior to getting in bed with wealthy banking cartels? He said, you described him as one of the great diplomats of the time. He agrees, but you'd like to hear more discussion on that relationship. Did he not see that he was setting people up for failure? And he mentions Emil Ludwig wrote a biography on him prior to World War II, and he dedicated a lot of time discussing the Jewish influences on.

Bismar. Okay, I don't, I don't like this alibi of bankers. Like, that's something, that's dumb, dumb shit, okay? Like, what I can say about Bismarck is this, okay, for almost a century, Bismarck not only managed to keep the

wolves at bay and Germany's enemies, he has not only to disincentivize them attacking Germany, but he needs to disincentifies then allying with one another to conceivably undermine German interests. So, I mean, at some point, like, the proof is in success, okay? You know, it's the same, I just argument with somebody late last night about Nixon and Kitsenger

in the Cold War. Like, you know, oh, like, what was so great about Nixon? It's like, well, the fact World War III didn't happen for number one. I mean, sometimes the dog that didn't bark is what you point to as, is this positive evidence for, you know, a desirable outcome. you know i mean basically when we think about the modern state number one we were thinking about what bismar created he was literally the architect of these things okay like whether you think that's good or bad is he no here or there okay when he bismarer literally created the modern state in terms of praxis okay number two again um the point i was making as a rebuttal of this kind of anglo-phone myth of german militarism is there was you know well over half a century of

which is one of the reasons why the German officer corps was not particularly well situated to wage war 914 because the only men of her to shot fire and anger were elderly by that point you know and there's only a handful of them still alive

but if you're able to quite literally disincentivize again not just not just a direct assault on your territorial holdings but you're able to disincentivize you know, any sort of intention towards those tendencies, I think it's pretty clear you're a geostrategic

savant, okay? I mean, again, whether within the bound of rationality of those things, whether you think that's a way that's good or bad, that's, it doesn't matter. At some point, we're talking about the executive role in the post was failing order, you know, like results or all that matters. I don't mean in absolute terms, but I mean the judging. you know the greatness or or lack thereof of a chief executive that's why and like banking isn't some isn't isn't isn't isn't some tendency and there's some power into itself it's just not okay i mean yeah obviously the financialism can be manipulated all kinds of ways and if you've got people who harbor if you have people whose interest and values and intentions are inimical to the national

or racial interest yeah that's a disaster but like You know, like a national currency isn't somehow just exhumatically bad. Like, that doesn't make any sense. Got a 499 super chat here on YouTube. Rambot asks, why do you think so many significant Italians were quick to jump to war? Mussolini, Denuncio, Maranetti, Italy didn't get tons out of the war? why was so many Italians should have to go to war in, in, in, um, beginning with, uh, Ethiopia. I assume.

Um, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, run with that, go ahead. Okay, I mean, the, read about the four powers pact, which ultimately, after it was redacted, and, um, well, after much of the body of the intended treaty was redacted, arguably, its meaning was the opposite of, was originally intended, but the arbiter of the Four Powers Pact was Mussolini. This was around the time Churchill claimed that Mussolini is like the greatest statesman of his of his epoch. I think this was

19, I think this was 1934, 34, 35. But Mussolini was viewed as like potentially a great man. And Italy was viewed as this ascendant power. Like not globally, but absolutely like, you know, the arbiter of a power political occurrences and

Central Europe, as well as, you know, kind of the natural, the natural master of North Africa, contra France, which is viewed as being in decline. So anyone who believed in that, anyone who accepted that hype and was with the fascist program understood that there had to be something to direct action to back up that mystique and that purported mandate. So, you know, Italy flexing on Ethiopia or on Greece or deploying in the Mediterranean contra France, which was its intended adversary, not the UK, until that was really, really wasn't until the die was cast between.

Chamberlain and the furor that Mussolini became axiatically at odds of London, arguably even then, he was reluctant, but I mean, that's why, because and it's all too, like in the pre, in

the pre-atomic age, 20th century, like direct action was viewed as, it was almost kind of like the consideration, like the blood consideration that, like, sealed the intention. You know, very primitive about it but it was um i think one of the kind of i think it was one of the kind of like perennial holdovers that even like the even kind of like the mythologies of westphalia and against kind of like

the the rationalism that came to they came to pre-ominate power political affairsly superficially that was one of the that was kind of like one of the exceptions that stood out you know i mean so that's why it's like you're not a real if you can't deploy um if you if you couldn't deploy in depth of the 1920s and assert yourself in a colonial domain and like prove um you know that you had like a modern military capability that included armor by the way by that point that was part of it too that included like armor and like you know what we consider to be like brown to sell aircraft like you weren't shit that's why all right next question and this one was from claude as well um he said the assassination of the archduke is

This is just a tragic coincidence of history. He dodges a bona fide assassination attempt only for his driver to coincidentally stop right next to another assassin who spur of the moment shoots the guy. This wasn't even plan A failed. Let's move to on to plan B. This is a complete serendipitous event. It screams improbability to me. It's not improbable. You had a kill team locked and loaded within a small officer.

operational area waiting a spot of man around whom the events of the day were totally completely oriented you know i mean you ever been you ever been in a big city like when the mayor's like caravan goes by i mean is it it's it's rather like impossible not to notice it and in those days especially royals like the guy who was in a carriage with floorboards like standing up and waving to people you know and if you if um I mean it's basically how you was it's basically how you

I mean it's basically direct action 101 it's I mean it's like when when um when the kill team murdered Paul Costellano um the shooters who actually hit him

and Paul Bellotti right outside the steakhouse they were four deep you know and then something like 50 yards behind them you know it was like their back up two and two and then basically like on every possible escape route you know they were like you had men posted up the same way

I mean you don't you're going to kill Ferdinand I mean you basically deploy the same way you know I mean and it's some history's full of weird coincidences like that I mean that that's actually entirely straightforward and ferdinand despite the fact that he was basically conciliatory towards the nationalities you know he had like the chetniks absolutely hated him

and he had this reputation for being like very very hard-lined and like very intolerant of um the eastern slavs and of the serbs and things which was not really the case but in the hafburg empire one had to kind of like strike this balance between you know appearing to be a sort of like ecumenical figure of unity and being like standing on business for one's own tribe and one's own people much as i i've got romantic longings for hasbro vienna and think it's like cool quite literally like i realized there were like pathological things about it that's one of them but if you if you break down um if you look at a map at scale okay and if you play around with a 3D model especially which i have done of uh the kill zone

where ferdinand actually got a hit it's not unlike where the manner and layout of how kennedy got hit um jfk i mean at rfk this is this perception that like this was like this wide open space there's like this crazy shot like these people are basically on top of each other Okay, this was at intimate range. Okay, and having your backup shooter or shooters be sort of, you know, quietly but conspicuously, like, hanging around a cafe where they've got a direct, where they've got a basically direct line of sight to what's happening. But, you know, they're remote enough that to not, you know,

know, be made on site by any police or security element that it makes sense, even if, even if it doesn't sound like it should on paper, like trust me on that. All right. So this question here, this is a question I got earlier. I don't, if it doesn't sound logical to you, I have no follow up on it. Was Germany sending Lenin back into Russia necessary for the Eastern Front to close down? No, but it was, but it was essentially. an essential catalyst for the revolution to kick off in Moscow, in my opinion.

That's from Logan. He has another one. He says, was there any real opposition resistance from Russians toward the Russian government as far as getting into the war? I think so, yeah. But the political culture was such that if you didn't have, even if you were like a business man, even if you're like a muscovite or a petrograd businessman, you know, who had access

to the boyars or whatever or their equivalent, like there you still didn't really even clout with the czar. So, I mean, it was like you, there's a, there's a kind of futility to trying to mobilize public opinion, like even public opinion

within, you know, like a narrow cast that actually had cloud in other domains. I think that kind of futility just sort of like disabused people, the inclination to try and affect change that way, you know, and it was, like, we talked about when, um, on a serious Pete and I did, and one of the points that Norman Davies emphasizes, you know, the czar had real power. He wasn't the cipher and he wasn't a figurehead, and he wasn't, he wasn't, uh, he wasn't like the Kaiser either, where, you know,

in power political terms, like what we think of as like Article 2, command and control terms. You know, he had real cloud, but he was constantly budding heads with the chief of government. Like, it wasn't like that. Like, the czar truly was Caesar, you know, um, and, um, that's not to say Nicholas was a particularly strong personality, but, um, you know, the, uh, the power flowed from the office itself. So, I mean, that's, that's my take on it. I'm not like a ruse of, uh, a ruseophile at all. Like, uh, I mean, I like a Russian defined, but I don't know anything about the culture from within. I can't read the language, and it's certainly not, it's certainly not, I'm not like a

regional studies guy either, but in terms of what we can discern, there is a certain commonality in sociological terms to how modern military organizations work, as well is how they relate to nominally civilian authority structures. Okay, you can derive certain principles from that that are basically constant, you know, adjusting for things, you know, like cultural orientation and, and racial tendencies and things like that. So I think, I don't think it's totally off base for somebody like me to identify, right? Russia of 1914 as an outlier, you know, Contra, every other major power, it was, you know, within, who constituted the power paradigm.

That's my take on it. Over on Odyssey, Yeomanry asks, what impacted the 48 rebellions have on Germany and its relations with the United States? That's an interesting question. I think that it made very little sense in absolute terms for the consolidated German Reich to be at odds with the United States. There are basic commonalities there. And I made the point before that had the South won the war between the states, It's very probable that, like, a permanently divided United States, like, the Confederacy would have allied with the UK and France, and the Union would have allied with the German Empire. Germany was viewed generally by kind of, like, the chattering classes as, you know, like, the progressive European country, not progressive, like, you know, we're like LGBTQ and we all want our daughters to be a black guy.

Like, I mean, like, in terms of, you know, kind of like, a. advancing the human condition through certain kinds of intervention by public authorities. You know, it's like, oh, we got, we got pensions for, like, veterans and old folks. You know, we, we look after unwed mothers, you know, we, we've got like an education programs that people are basically literate, you know, from a young age. You know, we make sure everybody's fed, you know, like basic, like basic welfare state stuff. That was viewed not incorrectly as a German innovation. And I think, yeah, one of the reasons, even though, like,

Marxism never took off in America other than outside of, you know, certain radical quarters. I mean, like, actual Marxism, I don't mean, like, just the left. But there was a pretty committed subculture, really, until the end. And I think the origins of that were in people who post-1848 looked at Germany as, like, you know, kind of like the intellectual center of Europe and the place that, like, progressive people look to, you know, for correct ideas. So yeah, I think I think that's what it is.

Did the 1848 revolutions were they impactful just generally like in global terms figuratively and literally, not nearly as much as 1789 in my opinion. But yeah, I can't be discounted. What's your opinion of the book All Quiet on the Western Front?

I think it's kind of cry baby stuff you know um i read it kind of like uh it's obviously a lot more dignified and a lot more interesting than then then like like ron kovic's like cry baby book but it's still a cry baby book i mean like i i think it's i think people should read storm of steel instead um i mean i don't know like i was world war one uniquely fucked up but probably yeah i mean for the for the common Lanzer, you know, the combat infantry was like literally in hell, but that's, I mean, these things are in

these things are in God's hands and like everybody dies of something, you know, I mean, some men are swept up by, by, by, by, by great wars. Not great, like, Austin, I mean, like the Great War, like what, I mean, you can come at that philosophically and just kind of accept the human condition

and, you know, kind of look at the world, you know, the world's an ultra sacrifice essentially and life is about suffering and retaining like your humanity quite literally and your dignity and your piety amidst that suffering you know or you can or you can be some like constantly aggrieved person who's who views himself as as being victimized by the brutal various brutalities and injustices that they characterize modern life and i i don't think it's a particularly mainly look to opt for the ladder. And yeah, I mean, I'm sure people turn around and see, like, well, you didn't have to fight

and rule over one. No, but I've been through some shit. Okay. This, uh, we got another $5 super chat here on YouTube from Simeon and this might, what's the context of Kaiser Wilhelm saying, uh, second saying, I bitterly regret the favors.

I showed the prominent, redacted bankers. I mean, the Kaiser is very much in debt from jump. I mean, he was, no, Helm was, was just kind of a crummy guy. I mean, I was making the point of people is the reason why Hitler basically went without crossing the line into a domain that would have been unseemly. Hitler basically disrespected him and deprived him of what would ordinarily be kind of, you know, the state honors granted to a former king, let alone one who serves as a warlord during his tenure. Valhoma was, he was just, he was just kind of a crummy guy and a bully, and he was also a spendthrift.

But at the same time, he did inherit a great deal of public debt, okay, and he lamented that for good reason. And despite his reputation as, like, Valholm's wife, apparently, like, wouldn't even let Catholics, like, in the house. you know to what degree like that was um enforced i mean i'm sure it depended on the kind of personage involved and like what their pedigree or status was but you know these these these were not um these were not ecumenical people and um i for all of his false i mean bismar wasn't a traitor or anything and I think he um as much as he could within his own limitations I think he put the German people first I think he realized the implications very profoundly of uh the monarchy literally being in a hawk you know to um a cast of hostile financiers that for the kinds of

reasons hana or rent talked about were able to bring power to bear on people and punitive ways beyond merely the financial and depriving them of unsecured lines of credit, you know, to wage their wars and everything else. I think the context is exactly what it sounds like. He was just being sensible. But Tadam, who asked a question earlier, said, do you see the Armenian genocide and also the Irish Civil War, the Irish Free State Movement and everything as footnotes to World War I,

and not being able to happen unless World War I is happening. The Armenian genocide, yeah. The situation with the Irish and the United Kingdom was more self-contained. And it seems odd because if you're, I realize I'm like an old person now, but, you know, really from,

really from the 60s and 70s to today, and not just because I live in Chicago, where there's a lot of Irish people. Ireland kind of features in people's minds conceptually. That really was not the case, like in the first half of the 20th century. It wasn't even someone that Ireland was viewed as like a backwater.

I mean, that might have been part of it for people who had disdain for Irish people or whatever, but what happened in the UK was kind of seen as a sort of like self-contained thing. You know, like the UK discreet from the country, the UK and Ireland is discreet from the continent.

That's not as a matter of like geography. or then being physical islands. You know, like, conceptually, they really were considered kind of a part. In part, did that give Britain a free, did that give the British crown a free hand and being somewhat brutal towards, like, other white people in Ireland in a way that wouldn't have washed on the continent, maybe yet? But the case of Armenian Genocide, it was Max von Schuvenor Richter, who fell at

on November 9, 1983. You know, he'd actually locked arms with Hitler as they charged the police court on. And Richter was shot. And as he fell,

he dislocated Hitler's shoulder. Hitler said that Richter was the one man who wasn't replaceable who fell at the Bureau of pooch. You know, he's like, that man was like, he was like the, he was like the,

intellectual backbone of the party. You know, he's like he, we needed him. But Richter Richter was a Baltic German and he'd he'd fall at the Free Corps against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Empire.

And he deployed to the Ottoman Empire as a liaison after he served on both fronts, then he deployed him to Turkey. And he saw what was going on. And he reported back to the German consulate. He's like, you know, do you know what the young Turks are doing here? And the German Constance is like, look, like whatever happens, you know, like we, we got to get along with these people.

These people being the Turks, you know, and moving forward especially, we know the allies we can get. So don't, like basically stop it. Like stop publicizing this. You know, um, so Richter started anonymously. kind of alerting Catholic sureties and what have you to these

to these instances, okay, which apparently, and I'm sure there's Turks listening or whatever, like they'll correct me. It strikes me as kind of a Rwanda like situation, a combination of ad hoc categorical slaughter and more organized efforts

towards ethnic cleansing in areas of operation that were already affected by military engagements. I'm not here to like catch shade on anybody or something like that, but obviously

some very horrible things happened, as is the case in Rosson Creek. But it's significant that Richter, you know, who not only was a national socialist, but he was one of the earliest party ideologues. I mean, he's the guy who found this to be so against precedence and alarming and in need of, if not remedy, because that's kind of a naive way to characterize such things, in need of awareness of the reality of it, you know, and I suppose, it's

essentially modern character. You know, if from inception like these intentionalist historians claim that the NSDAP was essentially this

like genocidal criminal conspiracy, well, it seems a little bit strange that somebody like Richter would would characterize events like the Armenian genocide in such ways. the reason why he was able to, I mean, I realize the Ottomans were all practical purposes, like, finished by then, you know, not just as, not just as a political structure and culture, but as a combatant, as a parting of the Great War, but the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, absolutely facilitateded that, yeah, so otherwise, otherwise, like, it would have. it would have drawn massive attention, in my opinion.

So, yeah, I realize that was a long answer. The accusation that members of the tribe went to the Brits and said, give us to bow for a declaration, if you give us to bow for a declaration, we'll get the United States into World War I. That was implied, definitely. that was the understanding I mean otherwise what was the percentage

in those days you know I mean it wasn't despite the way people characterize things even in even in basically progressive corridors it's not like there's something like love for Zionism or something like love for Jewish

people you know and certainly I mean somebody like Churchill, I know people make a lot of the fact of like, oh, you know, Churchill was, was, was writing anti-Semitic editorials, you know, and it's like, okay, you got to take what a grain of salt anything Churchill said in any given time, you know, kind of depended on, on whose patronage you needed. But at the same time, that was basically, that was basically Tory opinion. Like,

I don't accept it was anti-Semitic, but it was like, why, why do we owe these people anything? you know um it was um and things were possible in the united states just weren't in the UK like even even to this day the UK system is peculiar contrary to the United States and the rest of Europe

I think I think the English and Scottish and Irish guys who contribute will acknowledge like not only is the monarchy still have clout like in subtle and unofficial ways but there's you can't

there's a peculiar way in which policy gets implemented and the way in which people are wooed and like the way guarantees are made it's not really like the United States but it's complicated because I think that even

I basically agree with David Irving you know like Irving said that a this, obviously, like, you know, Zionist lobbying was an essential proximate cause of the entire, like, kind of constellation of factors that, you know, brought the UK to general war with Germany, but it wasn't the sole proximate cause. and uh after um after um disraeli who was the last p m who really had a kind of sensible in in realist strategic terms position in germany like there's genuinely there's genuinely crazy things like bandy about you know and that had that had nothing to do with with those sectarian interests and and the ability of Zionist to co-op policy quarters.

Like, I emphasize that aspect because it's like a tab, it's, you know, it's considered like a taboo to discuss that. And people try and deliberately, like, redacted from the record. So it's important that it be insinuated back into the record. And then besides for that reason, but it wasn't, it wasn't like the driving engine. Like, in the case of Churchill personally, like, yeah, like that, that was who he was beholden to. And he was an essential aspect.

of how events ultimately develops. But again, like, it wasn't reducible to that single variable. Here's a question that we hear a lot. Going back to the Armenian Revolution just real quick, do you think the young, do the young Turks have a makeup of Sabatian conversos using the skin of one enemy to genocide another enemy? There may have been an aspect of the,

that, but again, I don't see any indication that was, you know, the sole determinative factor or motivating element. I mean, there's something about the modern state that requires ethnic cleansing at scale if one derives its mandate from, you know, exigencies of war. You know, either like amidst war conditions, extant war conditions or misconditions where you know such development into active hostilities is

always possible and you know again that's that's the source of you know the sovereign mandate of whoever is um able to capture it um so that's always there's going to be there's going to be no matter who we're talking about in terms of population, no matter what region of this planet, like no matter what, you know, kind of the kind of unique precedents are indicated in the indigenous political culture. We're talking about the first half of this century,

you know, like things suggestive of Rosson Creek or of, you know, like racial survival, the stuff's going to have an outsized significance. It's not because everybody was crazy or everybody was a racist in those days because they didn't have enough, you know, multicultural education. It's because the world's situation was strangely and violently unstable in a way that basically never, ever happens. It's not to say these things aren't important otherwise. Obviously, they are. I mean, anything of existential characters, by definition, capital I important, arguably more important than anything else.

They were talking about pure politics. but um this being literally at the forefront of you know political conceptual life i mean that that's not normal okay but it owes the world situation for the time so the conditions in limar are a lot of people talk about the treaty versa and how that set it up was was prussia liberalizing in the late 1800s to open the door to the kind of things, the kind of debauchery and the kind of degeneracy that help lead to that? I mean, I don't think so because it was way too much of a pietist kind of culture. And, you know, I don't accept the canard of German militarism.

But one thing they can't be denied is, you know, the reason why Frederick the second, Frederick the Great, rather. There was a couple of Frederick the Seconds, but we say Frederick the Second and the German guys made Frederick the Great. It wasn't as Hitler who revered him. You know, he was considered to be kind of like the model other than Bismarck. He was kind of considered like the model, you know, like modern German executive, okay?

And he held out the Prussian army as the model German institution. You know, because like militaries are so great, but because it was, you know, it, uh, quite literally, you know, like the Prussian socialism

was considered to be exemplified, you know, by the army, you know, obviously is distinguished from, you know, a proletarian socialism of the lower orders and things, but also, you know, the understanding that, um, pressure was not didn't develop organically in the sense

of it's just where people found themselves tens of thousands of years ago and then you know a or you know the like a culture developed therein

just because of its it's sort of natural um kind of like natural like rootedness that um overcame the people there you know like it was essentially a wasteland

with almost no arable soil. It was populated by hostile indigenous elements who weren't really brought into the kind of civilizational fold in some

cases until the later crusades. You know, so I mean, there was a pioneering sense of self among the Prussians. You know, like not unlike there was an old America. You know, and for similar reasons, you know,

was reared. So I don't see how within a culture like that you can never I mean there's other pathologies that emerge in cultures like that but this kind of like liberalizing debauchery

if we're talking about the deterioration of authority and public conduct and codes of honor and like the role of violence in guaranteeing and enforcing masculine honor. I don't really see how that kind of stuff can be emergent. And I think about Vimar and the whole point that people like the Shalham and like

the National Socialist had, and even the KPD had in some, albeit for like cynical reasons, like this stuff wasn't really natural. Like suddenly there's like pornography everywhere. Like suddenly you've got guys, um, suddenly you've got. guys um in uh in legislative chambers saying like you know we need to allow prostitution because it's just natural and like why pretend it's not i mean the stuff is very the there's like social revolutionary imperatives that were calculated the kind of dilute what there to for had been kind of taken for granted as you know essential components of

public morality um you know and obviously like this is very much duplicated in the in the Bundes Republic and particularly, and you know what became the allied occupation zone in Berlin. But, um, so no, I don't. But I also don't accept, I also don't accept this view that

progressivism as we think of it is just this inevitability. There's just like this con, if you're on the right, it's just this constant rearguard action, you know, to try and pluck holes in the proverbial dam of public morality, but it's a feudal thing. And I just, that's kind of like the Russell Kirk view. Like, I don't accept it. And that's one thing that's like fucked about conservatism on its own terms.

That's kind of outside the scope. Okay. Well, I think we're going to end it right there. So, um, ran out of questions. Is there, what else are you going on a plug? I mean, basically, um, I finally, one of the things that, I mean, I guess if there's a silver lining to my workflow, as I've wanted to proceed being interrupted, is that I've had opportunity to catch up on, These long-form manuscripts to long last.

You know, the third volume of my science fiction series, Steelstorm, that's basically ready to go. I've got to talk to my erstwhile publisher, Ursula and Long-Suffering publisher in Period Press, who are great guys, by the way. I don't just say that because they're nice not to publish my stuff. But I finally managed to complete that. And this political theory book, specifically on the Nuremberg system, you know, from 1949 to today

that's close to being completed and I'm excited about that not just because it feels like an accomplishment but I don't plan to go anywhere anytime soon but when when a pro is 50 or 60

you know thoughts of mortality do loom like a little larger and they did when it was 20 to 30 and I do fear like dying before some of these things are done. So be looking out for those in the spring.

I plan for them to drop, assuming there's not an issue with editing, and I don't need to shop for a printer, which sometimes I do go into politics, but, you know,

those are kind of the big things on my agenda. And I promise that the video content is coming. I've got a lot of it. It's just not edited. Like, I literally have, like,

lots of video, shooting more this weekend um and i i feel like i'd be doing everybody at this service i'd be doing a brand um the service if i just like release this stuff like with no wedding at all that that would i i wouldn't feel right about that but so yeah thanks for bearing with me and again i'm sorry for the for the delays that i'm sure to seem endless by this point that's no problem lady of shallot came in late and said listening on a windy beach in southeast australia to walk in the puppy. Really hope everyone had a great Christmas. No, it's great. She's a dear, she's a dear friend of ours.

Yeah. I guess we got one last question, and Tommy Riley says, what are your thoughts on Wyndham Lewis development after World War I? I mean, I specifically, I don't know what to, I'm still not an expert on Wyndham Lewis. I've read very little of his stuff. I don't, I don't, I don't have anything to add. I mean, you probably know more than I do about the man in the time. topic. Yeah, I mean, I read his book, the book he wrote on Hitler, and it was just at the time,

it was basically a biography and, um, talking about what he was doing. Yeah, I've never read his stuff. I mean, I've read like extirous, but I've never, yeah, I, I, I, I'm not qualified to see. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you. Always Thomas. And thank everybody for tuning in. We both appreciate it.