History 102 with WhatifAltHists Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett

Welcome to History 102, we're YouTube creator What If Fault HIST, Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett. Dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in. Hi everybody, welcome to a new episode of History 102, starring myself Rudyard Lynch in our contiguous co-host Austin Padgett and today's episode is on the Prussian Empire. Very exciting. Prussians. Very scary. Patience they love clocks by merch get yourself a map so you never forget the psychological motivation of every region of the world Every single time I've seen Prussia referenced online in the last few years is to call it something only a nerd would care about We'd be like oh my god you think about Prussia. You're such a nerd and I think that This is a this demonstrates how unfair we've been to European history where where Prussia was a great power, and if you want to use this word, they're a fairly inspirational historical story where they started out as this Marsh people on the frontiers of Germany versus the East, and by the time they reached their full form, the Prussian state controlled an area that stretched from North Africa to the top of Norway and from the Atlantic out to nearly Kazakhstan. And by that point Prussia had mutated into the form that we now understand it, that being Germany. And Prussia was the place that unified Germany after 600 years of radical disunity where Germany was 500 little princelings and counties and city states. And we shouldn't take that for granted, because I believe there are many worlds where Germany wouldn't have unified. And it took a unique genius and a handful of geniuses to unify Germany. And you can look at places like the Netherlands or Belgium or Switzerland or Litzenstein or Austria, where these are places that centuries ago would have been considered ethnically German. But the reason that the Dutch or the Swiss or the Austrians have become different identities is because they never unified. And Prussia is an example of how leadership can determine the course of history. Because as I've researched this topic, I've come to realize that Prussia is only or was only the successful empire it was, because it had a series of very capable leaders. And if you removed that leadership class, you would not have the unification of Germany and the Prussian Empire. And I read Carlisle's book on Frederick the Great to research this topic. And Carlisle and I have practically the exact opposite politics. I'm Lib right. or we have the, if you remove the left from the equilibrium, we have the opposite politics where he's very authorite and I'm very libraite. But as he was writing about Frederick the Great, I was thinking, if you studied, this is one of the better test cases for absolutism and authoritarianism, and the, because if you look at Frederick the Great's life, and this is true of a lot of Prussian leadership, the sole reason that Prussia developed the Great Empire and did was because of the Hohenzollern dynasty and then later Bismarck and the rest of the population did what they said and another element of this is and we're going to explore this later on because I want to earlier get to the Middle Ages and the formation of the Prussian state but when you look at Nietzsche's philosophy you can see this as the attempt to reconcile how the Prussian state existed in opposition to Christian morality were an entire generation of early Prussian thinkers. A lot of the anti-Christian thought was developed by the Prussians and if you look at Prussian history you think authoritarian society where the leaders drag things along, surfs beneath them and they win through constant military aggressiveness and hyper-discipline and you think how would and they were hyper-intelligent too, how would you explain this mental trajectory in an overwhelmingly Christian society and you would end up with a trajectory that would lead to Nietzsche and then the Nazis. Right. So I'm curious to get to the bottom of this because Bismarck is often referred to as a great figure. He was really intelligent, right? He had great accomplishments regardless of how you feel about him, like Napoleon. You speak positively about his actions to unify Germany and then but then there's also like Bismarck's points get directly used to support the EU and I don't like the EU so where's the philosophical overlap there also with the anti-christian thought and is there a reason why maybe unifying in his context made sense or was it like short term because it ended up in a system collapse of Germany versus maybe the German diaspora people would be bigger even if they were called Belgians there's a lot of stuff to untangle there. You should not judge the rest of history by this era because we are a very strange aberration. It's the equivalent of I think most people have a really weird period of their life where they made decisions that didn't make sense for the rest of their life and they look back on like what was I on at that time and that's where we are now and so every previous generation of European leadership until maybe even like the 1980s or the 90s would view our current ruling ideology and society as an abomination. If you showed us to Bismarck, Bismarck would say, what the fuck is that thing? Kill it now. Where if you went through all of the things Bismarck believed, he would just say, he would agree with Nietzsche that we're in the the age of the last men. And Bismarck was an aristocratic monarchist, and he gave concessions to working classes and the socialists in order to stabilize his power against the parliament and the classical liberals. And he did a lot of things that I don't agree with, but he also did a lot of things I think are genuinely admirable. And when you go back to Bismarck's time of the mid 19th century, they didn't know what we know now. They did not think that socialism would become the dominant ideology. And you can see this as well, where when the Germans sent Lenin to Russia, they did not think Lenin would be one of the great men of the 20th century, and they'd conquer the Soviet Union, or he'd build the Soviet Union almost single-handedly. And the 20th century and the 21st century would appear completely alien to most people in the mid 19th century, except for a handful of genius visionaries. Because the world until the end of the 19th century had been fairly continuous since the ancient world, where similar agricultural systems, nobility, same religions, they read the Greco-Roman authors. And there's also an element of if you look at a board game and you see, because people don't control where they're born or the context they're in and if I was born in Bismarck's position where I am a I think Bismarck was ethnic I think he was half Prussian half West German if I was born as a nobleman is part of the Prussian Empire I would have done what Bismarck would have done because I would have been willing to make compromises and I would have steamed this as the way to unify Germany. And I would have preferred the unification of Germany because I would have wanted my group to succeed. But then after that, you see a spooling out. And it's similar to how a lot of people on the right today blame Reagan for the current issues we're in. And what I say is that, because they dislike that Reagan imported immigrants and he liberalized the economy, which allowed income inequality. And what I say is that If you would deem the Carter, and I didn't, I was born in 2001, but the Carter administration before Reagan was so sclerotic and bureaucratic and effeminate that Reagan opening things up was a positive shift. But what didn't happen was there wasn't leadership afterwards to look at the excesses of the neoliberalism that Reagan and Clinton put in. And so the trajectories just kept going and that's similar to Bismarck where a choice that made sense at the time can often metastasize down the road and you have to hold the generations later which did not adjust for when this old system stopped making sense more than the person earlier on who made the decision when it made sense in that context. Right and there's tons of examples of that in real life where someone's maybe like I gassed up the boat and set it up for you but I can't make it and then the next part is up to you like yeah the boat might take you over a waterfall but you got to get out of the jungle anyway so um uh and then you kind of mentioned that it's it was a big it was a disruption of the entire social system so it's kind of like a period of chaos it's kind of like europe was thrown into a fallout kind of simulator and someone was going to gonna reestablish some sort of like force-based control and a different paradigm. So it was kind of like what was happening. at the time. And maybe you could say he was at least he was good at running an empire versus like the postmodern stewardship of an empire that we saw from like 1950 to Trump. Postmodernism wasn't even an abstract concept in the 19th century because keep in mind that even the leftists were 19th century leftists were more so. We like how the ancient Spartans and the Roman socialist state worked where 19th century leftists were largely looking backwards and they thought if during classical civilization you had these big governments then we can have them now but the socialists they were not post-modernists they were hyper modernists they believe the socialists believed their moral code more than anyone else at the time but the post-modernist turn is really a recent thing and I see this sort of, I see this argument with, I'm going to make a video on the main channel about if socialism should be blamed on Christianity and I've seen this argument in a lot of right-wing circles where people say Christianity made the left and my argument to this is you have to look at a parent in a child where parents import influence upon their children. But if you look at a family with the same parenting, children can have wildly different outcomes, and past a certain threshold, you have to hold the child responsible for themselves, not the parent. And when you look at Christianity, when the West was actually Christian, it conquered the world, it had the technological and the scientific revolutions, and when the West stopped following Christianity and stopped reading the Bible, we saw the rise of leftism. And the leftists explicitly said that they hated Christianity and they didn't follow the code. And so past a certain threshold, you have to have a cut off of responsibility of this emergent phenomena has arrived that operates in its own interests. And modern people are really bad at thinking through emergent phenomena, which is an emergent phenomena is when there's not a clear demarcation for when something happens, but it's clearly changed. Where if you look at America of the 1950s versus America today, we've evolved into a different country, but you can't pick a single year that we did. It was a gradual evolution. And that's really a shame. It's not like Pokemon. Yeah. Because emergent phenomena are the vast majority of culture in humanity and how we act as people where if you see a friend in your personal life and it's often useful to extend there are issues with this but it's often useful to extend things you see in your personal life onto the national level where nations have their own psychologies and whims and their own friends and their own pettiness and because nations are scaled up people where you can see a person change over years but you can't put a dot on when or how it exactly happened. Right. And a good example of kind of responding to the context of your time and then passing the responsibility off to the next generation is the nuance between Trump saving us, quote unquote, versus actually giving us a chance. Like, Trump put a foot in a door for us. But if we check out of politics and kind of let the rhinos maybe take it over in a worse direction or kind of revert back to their previous behavior, then yeah, Trump will not have saved us, but that he did what he could at his time. And then in the future, we have to do what we can with that. I think the tragic element of human history is something that's very valuable and human that we've left out. Where the Greek genre of tragedy is you have a great man, they do a variety of great things, But then either the context changes or they grow, they get old or they get hubris. And then each Greek tragic hero, they go too far and then they decay. And the Greeks were trying to explain how humans work. And this is what happens to every great empire. They all go through the tragic arc. And if you're a great man, there's a question past a certain threshold of do I keep going with the potential of increasing my score? but I know that I will eventually hit the tragic arc or do I slow down and stabilize my position and then sort of agree to go old rather than becoming a villain in the tragic arc. And I don't think Trump is a villain, but I am grateful for because we are going to talk about pressure after this. I'm not going to continue this tangent much longer, but I've been thinking a a lot about how we have the secular cycle and we have mouse utopia. And these two are sort of neck to neck. And if we hadn't had a handful of great men like Trump and Elon, we would have just continued the trajectory that Europe is on, where we just keep going towards mouse utopia. Because real mouse utopia is when the government forces the population to go along with it. And then the government stops there from being a natural, counterfeiting force to mouse utopia. What a secular cycle looks like is a civil war between the right and the left. And in America, the reason that we could get to a threshold where we could have a civil war between the right and the left is due to figures like Trump and Elon, where they punched through the managerial void that allowed there to be even the mental space to consider that any of this is happening. Because we forget in 2015 how total the mental control of the Western world was. You needed to have people shoot through the illusion so that people could see that it was made out of paper and there was something behind it. And if that had never happened, we would have just kept stumbling towards the behavioral sink in basically extinction due to the birthrate collapse. And with a lot of these great men, I can accept their failings knowing it's part of a tragic arc, because what are you comparing people to? at the historic great men, they're great men because they exceeded everyone else of their era. And so when you look at that, you're like, cool, you're already like, your scorecard has already been maxed out enough that you were in this great man category. And so whatever flaws you have, feed into this, but they have to be part of this story of being human because no one is perfect. Right. And it's funny because you can get that classic trend where Trump does something we're in kind of a new paradigm and people aren't appreciative because they don't really they aren't able to see how bad it would have been if we went on our previous trajectory for another 10 years but we have a real-world example right across the ocean where we can actually look at an alternate reality of our positive negative futures and like you said avoiding if you're afraid of mass utopia then we need to avoid socialism because if you avoid socialism then you don't get mouse utopia because people are able to adapt around it. It's when we get if we if we erode our foundations and get caught in this like bureaucratic sink that's where we're screwed which is why I get sometimes skeptical of some of the like worship of classical civilization in contracts with postmodernism because it forgets the thing that made the West so successful which is this dispersed bottom up decision-making which isn't as as kind of president and classical civilization, especially late classical. That's a very good point. Yeah, that's a very good point. And part of the reason why I hesitated with, because Prussia in many ways helped pioneer European and Western socialism, but socialism was so different inside the Prussian context that it's hard to mentally categorize it against anything that came after. And what I mean by that is that Prussia was a surf society And when they industrialized, it was like Japan where, and that's part of the reason why they were allies and worked together in World War II, is that in both Prussia and in Japan, industrialization occurred because the nobility agreed to work together, get investment capital, build the factories, and then transfer the rural social structure into the cities. But what happened in both Japan and Prussia is you ended up with these parochial surf-like relationships between employers and factory workers, where in Japan as an example, you have the culture of you're basically not allowed to quit your job and there's all of these implicit deals where you're supposed to sow deference to your boss, you're supposed to work extra hours, you use familial titles. And part of that is that Japan could make that jump in the other Asian societies couldn't because Japan had the higher social trust from their nobility and villages working together in this process in a way you didn't see in China or India for a while. And in Prussia, with the move from countryside to the cities, the nobility had a comprehension. They had to perform the services that they did back in the villages in the cities because in exchange for fighting for the regime and In sacrificing their lives for the Lord, the Lord had to provide these duties to them. And that naturally translated into the socialist state almost immediately. But Prussian socialism was actually very right wing and reactionary, where the reason that Bismarck is established a lot of these socialist institutions and Bismarck helped expand the voting franchise in Prussia is that he knew that the serfs that he would bring in or I don't know if this Germany had universal suffrage before universal male suffrage before World War I and they expanded it more rapidly than a lot of other countries. But the reason was that the parliament didn't actually have that much power. And so he was, I was going to say Kissinger, Bismarck was giving these concessions to the parliament and the socialists because his thinking was we can count on the serfs and the working classes to support our interests because they're part of this traditional patronage system. And the parliament doesn't even have that much power anyway. And so when the Weimar hit after World War One, which was the death knell of the Prussian Empire, the reason that socialists and the degenerates and the Marxists held power in Germany was because the British and the French demanded that Prussia become a liberal democracy and that gave these moderate leftists a lot of power. Well, the hard right had shot the Marxists during the social destabilizations after World War One. And what happened was that this old rural German population still held these socially conservative values, and they were horrified by the degeneracy, and the German deep state and elite were also socially conservative. So they all enabled the rise of the Nazis because the Nazis allowed them to have a centralized socialist militaristic regime in the same way that the Prussians had set up earlier. Right, and it's kind of funny how in the western or English or American tradition we talk about oh, no But if we pay a standing army and have a central tax collection system Around that then eventually other things are gonna like add on to it over a period of hundred years or maybe 200 years And we might find herself in a different situation and the Prussians are like setting it up like a pop-up tent like big military Socialists focused immediately kind of create a big bureaucracy kind of similar to how China went from You know 12% a gdp public spending to 30% gdp public spending or 40 and 20 years where it took us 120 years in the in the late cycle Voltaire who was a long time long-term friend and correspondent of frederick the great called prussia a country, a military with a country attached. And that was something that they had done for a while. And as an example, Prussian society gave veterans huge military benefits in order to increase social trust. And if you went to the military, the government was legally obligated to give you a job afterwards, where they would give the former military men and postmaster general jobs or just little, these pity government jobs. And so you saw this emerging system of welfare, military, state planning, go back to the 18th century. And it's interesting to read about how Frederick the Great was doing state planning, state planning of the economy at the same time as the American Revolution. there. He was building, he was, it was like France, which also had government control of even farmers, wherein in the Los Angeles regime, France in the 18th century, the centralized authorities in Paris could order farmers what crops they would grow. And Prussia was like that, but even more, where Frederick the Great would go around Prussia and say, I don't like how you're farming. You need to change that. He would say, we need to level this swamp, and he would spend government money to that reclaim a swamp for farmland or for building certain things. And James C. Scott in his book, Seeing Like a State, talks about, and this is one of his examples for the failings of modernity, is that the Prussian state started doing mass forest construction in order to harvest wood for their own purposes, because a lot of Europe had been deforested by this point. And the Prussians did this by building lines of trees with no other foliage and using that. And that was quite productive for the first generation, but then after that, the forest started seeing mass ecological collapse, which made it unusable because they weren't able to reclaim, to build a sustainable ecosystem with growing in this forest style. And so after this, they started looking at what organic forests did trying to replicate it so that they could build a more sustainable forest that they could harvest for wood. That's fascinating. That's just like the Soviet Union's environmental, big environmental degradation through kind of large projects, right? That aren't connected to organic infrastructure, which plays into sustainable system. It's also interesting that the Prussian school system emerged because the Prussian military needed easy conscripts. Where the Prussian population were serfs and they had a super competent officer corps, the most competent in Europe. And the way they got around that was by training the men to follow the orders of their officers unquestionably. And the modern school system that we use in America is called the Prussian school system because they developed this, I believe in the early 19th century as a reaction to the Napoleonic Wars, to train men to be interchangeable cogs. And another thing is that Prussia had fairly high literacy compared to European countries, even if the population were serfs, because Prussia was Protestant. And so there was the element of actually educating people. And educated serfs. That's an interesting mix between like Russia and England. As I was starting this video, I was thinking to myself, itself. It's really weird that the Prussians fought so hard considering their serfs. And this is also true for the Russians. Russia was a predominantly serf society. But the Russians have a sort of, I don't know, barbarian fanaticism that the rest of Europe doesn't. And at the same time, Prussia is also a more closed society where the average Russian serf had no other knowledge of any other culture. And that was true, but it was a lot less true because Prussia is on the European subcontinent and Russia is not. Russia is out farther away from the coasts. Prussia is a predominantly coastal country, which meant it had access to the rest of the world. And I was thinking this through where why did the Prussians fight so hard? And I think it's because the Prussian nobility established all of these reciprocal relationships between them and the serfs, where the serfs felt they were being taken care of, and it's comparable to Scandinavia, which was a Lutheran country like Prussia, where Prussia had a Calvinist ruling family who were the ones pushing things along and a majority Lutheran population. And that tracks because the Calvinists have been disproportionate in so many of the innovations over Western history, vastly more so than other Protestant sects, and the Protestants more so than other Christians. And in Scandinavia, part of the reason they have these big welfare states that work better than the other welfare states is that their kings had made these reciprocal relationships with the peasants back in the Lausian regime, that they would take care of the peasants in exchange for submission. And that's also why these societies have the Yontes law impulse of radical egalitarianism and conformity. Right. The way the Swedish trust their government is different than anything else, even up to the point where they went against, like, is their very left wing, right? And they went against, like, the global left-wing orthodoxy on COVID because they trusted their government health officials over everything else, which no other left-wing country did. They all clammed onto this kind of international reaction. So it is, it's definitely a very interesting kind of unique dynamic. And it seems similar also to the Napoleonic system where the military gave them a path towards social advancement. So you'd be kind of surprised what level of, you know, military hardship or hardship in general, people are willing to tolerate for a chance at social advancement, which they probably didn't have before that. That was part of the culture. That was part of the shifts inside Prussia due to being defeated by Napoleon, where Prussia, for about a generation after Frederick the Great, degenerated and they became bureaucratic and kind of lame. And then Napoleon crushed them at the battle of Jaina and maybe Auerbach, where he occupied Berlin and then at the Treaty of Tilset, he humiliated them taking half their land. And this forced the Prussian elites to go through this huge reform phase where they got rid of serfdom, they opened the military up to merit, and they changed their social and legal and tax structure to modernize. And this is what gave the Prussians the extra oomph to defeat Napoleon and then later unify Germany. Right. Again, it's kind of like Japan. where it's a short-term rapid buildup in response to new levels of threats from surrounding areas, either through technology or a transition to full army warfare or whatever it is. Exactly. Let's start chronologically, where Prussia was the creation of the German colonization of Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages, and the internal colonizations inside Europe have largely, during the Middle Ages, have largely been forgotten, but they were often substantial, where there was a huge migration of Germans east due to Germany developing faster than Eastern Europe over the course of the Middle Ages. And so Germans became a predominant merchant class in Transylvania, in modern Romania, in Hungary, Ukraine, Poland, Czechia. And this was also in the Baltic region, combined with German political conquests. And you can see this with the Germans pushing through Brandenburg, Silesia, Pomerania and Prussia, which they all populated with ethnic Germans. And then the Baltic or modern Latvia in Estonia, they never ethnically replaced, but they had a German nobility put on top of it. And the two empires that were German speaking, that were unified and legitimate European players over the early modern period were Prussia and Austria, and both of them were frontier regions that conquered east and stabilized authority there. But they weren't able to conquer Germany itself, which was a patchwork of hundreds of tiny little statelets. Some of them smaller, where if you look at the Rhineland or North Germany, it's like someone took a vase and just shattered it, and it's all these shards of glass. And then you had larger ones like Bavaria or Saxony, which were big enough that they were actual, where the king of France would have an emissary to Bavaria or Saxony, and he wouldn't even consider speaking to Unhalt or like Cologne or Friedland or all of these tiny places which I could just make up and you wouldn't know if they were countries in Warhammer or places in Warhammer or places in the real map. And Prussia and Austria both expanded against the frontier, where Austria or Osterreich, or Ostermark or East March, or March was a medieval term for front, and they expanded against the Hungarians and the Turks and the Slavs, while up in the northeastern frontier it was expansion against the Baltic peoples in the Slavs. And Prussia itself was the fusion of two distinct ethnic German regions along the Baltic shore that had been independent different parts. And one of which was Brandenburg and Pomerania, while the other one was Prussia. And these were disconnected by the area around Gdansk or formerly called Donzig in the north of Poland where they all had their own trajectories and for much of Prussian history Prussia was two different land blobs that were disconnected from one another where they either had to get treaties from Poland to unify them or they had to do so by water and this was a long-standing issue over German history where the core of the new Prussian state was Brandenburg, or the area around modern Berlin. This region had been colonized by ethnic Germans in the 12th century as part of the Wendisch Crusade, where the Wends were the local Slavic population, where the Slavs lived around Berlin. The Germans had earlier populated Eastern Europe and the Slavs had a huge demographic push during the Dark Age period, and they reached the Elba River out by Denmark and then the Germans went through another process of colonizing east where they took the lands between the Elba and then the Oder or the Vistula and a huge area about a third to the west in the north of modern Poland was ethnically German from the medieval period until World War II where this area experienced mass genocide by the Russians And it's really remarkable how big that genocide in population displacement with World War II was, where old Prussia, or the area out by Königsberg and Lithuania, that was ethnically German. And now it's ethnically Russian Russian, not Belarusian or Ukrainian. And I could be wrong, but I think Putin's from, it went from Königsberg to Kalinograd. And that area juts out where it juts out for the Germans as the furthest east they've populated by a big margin and remained a demographic majority. And it's the furthest outcropping of the Russians now. So that signifies to me that it's a hinge region. But Brandenburg, that was populated by Germans during the High Middle Ages. And there's been this whole school of history of saying, oh, the Prussians aren't really Germans, they're just converted Slavs. And there is an element of validity where the modern genetics is that the area around Brandenburg was about a third ethnically Slavic. So as majority German, but there was a big Slavic component. I don't have good genetics data on old Prussia because it's not a genetic pool anymore. But I would guess it's comparable. But old Prussia was really ethnically diverse. If you look at an ethnic map of Prussia, and another element is that old Prussia had huge swamp lands that divided it up. And there was the Masorian swamp lands that blocked them off from Lithuania further east, which gave them a sort of buffer where Eastern Europe has this like the Pripyat Marshes in Ukraine with these huge swamp lands that act as if they were mountains or deserts that can block armies and stuff like that. In a bunch of times, the Prussians have been able to use the Missourian marches as cover to wipe out much larger Eastern armies. But Prussia had German populations. They had Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Jews, and many others all mixed together. But I would guess that the Prussians were majority German, but we don't have good data on that. And there is an element from Western authors saying, oh the German founding population that unified them aren't real white people. And it's because if you say they're Slavs, then you're saying they're not like Germans. Yeah, exactly. But there was a significant German demographic migration east. And this occurred through two different large population movements, or two different sort of political social forces. One being the the Hanseatic League, which was a union of North German merchant states, I believe, based around Straussund, which was in Pomerania. And Pomerania is next to Brandenburg, where Straussund is across the odor from Pomerania. Pomerania is in modern Poland, and it was ethnically German, and it was known for having the tallest Germans. And so the depression to talk about, oh, our soldiers from Pomerania are so tall. And Straussund on the German side was a core area of the Hanseatic League, and that was a Swedish colony from the Thirty Years' War until the start of the 18th century because it was where the Swedes entered. But the Hanseatic League, they were a merchant, I think they were a republic, a union of Republic, North German merchant city states that stretched from the Netherlands out to Eastern Europe. And part of the growth of the Prussian state in the early modern period was crushing these old merchant towns where there were one or several in old Prussia. Old Prussia is the term I'm using for the area of Prussia that juts out by Lithuania and Poland out by Königsberg that's distinct from Prussia, the broader country that also includes Brandenburg and Pomerania, etc. And there were several merchant republic states spread across this entire region. And the way the Middle Ages worked was you had these independent governing jurisdictions that had various rights distinct from the centralized government. So the Prussian state over the course of the 17th century had to go about crushing these and co-opting these to create a unified country. That sounds kind of sad because the Hanseatic League sounds pretty based. It was. But I was wondering, like, you know how the north was more fractured and the very was more of a thing, but, like, the north is fractured and so the French would not send a guy to this little town or this little town. But I was wondering, like, there would have had to be somebody they could have talked to that sort of represented or sort of like was the power broker would that be the handsiotic league like if they wanted to talk to the fraction north territories that was really who they met with the handsiotic league was powerful enough that they could go up against countries where the handsiotic league and Denmark fought one another and then they beat the Danes where there was a period where the German German settlers and nobility they just moved into central Denmark and populated it and so it used to be that Denmark stretched down to the Elba River where Hamburg was the border between Denmark and Germany and then the part I mean Bismarck also beat the Danes in the 1870s but they're what which moved border north so that Prussia could have the Kiel Canal between the North Sea and the Baltic, which is where Denmark's tiny area on the peninsula is, because to build the canal from the North Sea to the Baltic, you have to have the neck of Denmark. You can't put it around Hamburg, because Hamburg's not on the peninsula. But the Hanseatic Germans did beat and humiliate the Danes, and the Danes had to pull their act back together to get the Kalmar Union, where they were able to unify all of Scandinavia in the 15th century, before the Swedes launched a rebellion in the 1450s that gained independence and the Danes kept Norway. But the Hanseatic League beat Denmark. They went up against England. And England beat them. And I don't think England's defeated them because the English were markedly better. Although the English by the 14th century moved from economic reliance on the Hanseatic Union to having their own economic power where by the end of the 14th century English merchants sailed in controlled trade from Morocco and Portugal out to Prussia where there was a huge English connection to Prussia where one of the kings of England fought in the Prussian crusade against the pagans and English merchants also controlled that route after the Hansa got weaker And Emmanuel Kant, who was the greatest Prussian philosopher, he was of Scottish ancestry to this trade route. And there was a significant Scottish diaspora in Eastern Europe in the 17th century in Poland and Prussia and those places. So there was that connection. But the Hanseatic League also got corrupt and decadent, where at the beginning, they were one of the top roads of social mobility. And by the time of the Black Death, they had ossified into a hereditary caste, into a set series of cities where you couldn't really join the Hansa, where the pre-established cities would dominate the new trade routes, where they weren't a collaborative system. And systems like this are decadent and fragile, so it allowed the English to puncture them and make the Hansa weak. And by the point the French emerged, by the point that the French emerged, the French had to fight the English, And that kept them stuck in the nation of France, and by the point the French ultimately beat the English in the Hundred Years War, the Hansa had lost its dominance to often English merchants. And also, to answer your question with all of these disparate statelets in North Germany, you would speak to the Holy Roman Emperor if you wanted to talk to them, because the Holy Roman Emperor was the tentative lord of all of Germany and most of the neighboring countries. The Holy Roman Emperor was a Habsburg based out of Austria, and his predominant territories after the 17th century were in Eastern Europe outside of the geographic designation of the Holy Roman Empire. So the Holy Roman Emperor's predominant territories were not inside the Holy Roman Empire, and he couldn't actually exert authority over most of the empire. So the Holy Roman Emperor had to launch multiple military campaigns to conquer the North because they refused to listen to his orders, where Charles V waged a war to conquer North Germany that failed. And then in the 17th century, the Habsburgs fought all their way to Denmark before getting beaten by the Swedes. And a huge part of the rise of Protestantism was these North German statelets we're trying to say if we convert to Protestantism and the Duke of Saxony was the guy who pushed Protestantism predominantly is we can invalidate that the Holy Roman Emperor has spiritual authority over us that can trounce our distinct independence because when we have these national churches we can negate that the Pope gave the Holy Roman Emperor this title. And so with these North German states they were in a weird place where they did after the Reformation they didn't listen to the emperor but there was no broader authority that they would sort of deal with which just created confusion and weird stuff like the prince of Hessa would just have mercenaries and that was what Hessa, Hessa's economy was based off so that's why the Hessians fought in the American revolution. It's why a lot of the German authors of this time period would talk about random degenerate noblemen runs this tiny statelet and he just parties and sleeps around and I'm just stuck here. That's funny because the last area that was kind of still under the part of the unofficial central figure of the fractured German states, i.e. Prussia, the area that was latest under the Holy Roman Empire ended up being the one that was used to like, unify the rest of Germany. So like, even though it was not powerful and it was weakened, it was still the only kind of organizing principle. I can see why this was such an elitist society, because just explaining the political, the basic politics of one subregion of Europe requires a high enough IQ to parcel these the different religions these are the different noble lines these are the different ethnicities involved and today you just have nation-state countries the action I mean the real confusions today are ideological and cultural but no one looks at them we've artificially simplified and they made things complicated but to answer your point Prussia declared itself an independent kingdom at the start of 18th century. And it was the only German state to do so. And what happened there was that Frederick the Great's grandfather had been loyal to the Austrians in a messing up the chronology here, but you guys won't die. And Frederick the Great's grandfather was, and this is the start of the 18th century, he had been loyal to the Austrians who were the Holy Roman Empire, because he was hoping that in the process they would give him geographic territories that would allow him to expand. And so at the start of the 18th century when you had the two titanic conflicts of the war of Spanish succession where the French were trying to conquer Europe and then the great northern war when the Swedes were trying to conquer Europe and the Swedes conquered Poland Lithuania they nearly conquered Russia there was a point in the early 18th century when And Sweden nearly had the huge chunk of Eastern Europe, and they were under their boy genius king Charles XII, who was a teenager when he was doing this. Prussia was technically on the side of Poland and Russia in Denmark, fighting against the Swedes, but the king of Prussia basically made a hand way of agreement with the Swedes that I will serve my liege lord, Austria, to fight against the French. And so Prussia sacrificed to fight against the French. Prussia told Sweden, I can recognize you as my suzerain, and I can recognize your dominance in abstract, but my real lord is the Austrians or the Holy Roman Empire. So the Prussians fought with the Austrians. The Austrians did not give the Prussians the concessions they agreed to if they fought that war. And so the next two generations, and after that too, of Prussian leadership turned vehemently against Austria, allying with France or England when they could because they knew the Austrians weren't going to back them. And I believe this would have had to have... I can't tell if this was Frederick the Great's father, Frederick I or his grandfather, who made Prussia a monarchy. And this was something that the European orders could sort of just pass off because no one took Prussia seriously at all It's like, oh, I guess Korea is a monarchy now I guess Thailand made itself a I guess Thailand's still a monarchy Where it wasn't really central to Austria if Prussia was a monarchy or not because I think they were still part of the Holy Roman Empire even though they were a monarchy and so when Prussia was a monarchy that opened up a lot of of doors of we can be the true leadership of the North German Protestant peoples who did not have a country that represented their interests. What was Prussia before it was a monarchy? Prussia was the duchy of Brandenburg and then the military order of Prussia. Well, I need to explain how because we talked about how Brandenburg formed where, but the way Prussia worked was Prussia was part of the Teutonic Knights, which was a German religious military order that conquered Prussia and then Estonia and Latvia from the local pagan peoples in the 13th century. And they were a colonial force where the Prussian nobility that unified Germany for centuries afterwards. They were called Junkers, which is spelled Junker in English, which is really not a pleasant name in our language, and Junker is German for Jungher or Young Lord because the way these formed was that these German noblemen who were often second sons or they weren't even noblemen, they were just adventurers, they would go out to Prussia, fight against the pagans, and then make themselves noblemen so they are young lords and that their title of nobility is recent. And they were a barbarian frontier of German civilization, where the Prussians were seen as ethnically German, but they were distinct, where in the same way that it's weird that Canadians are a distinct nationality from Americans, but we treat the North and the South or California and Texas as the same country, Germany as the same dynamics, where North and South German were not intelligible in this time period. And the German that won out was High German, or the South German dialect, because that's what the Bible was printed in with Gutenberg, while the dialect that the Prussians speak no longer survives, where Germany went through a huge dialect compression. And then the cultural difference in East and West Germany was staggering. And that was something that authors commented on. It's going to keep popping up over the course of this video. And the Prussians were an extra overton window away from people in Brandenburg. And so when Germany got unified in the 19th century, a lot of people in Bavaria or the Rhineland did not see the Prussians as the same ethnicity as them, even though they technically were in a language basis, in an ethnic basis, and a big reason for the German total state was the attempt to compress these very real regional differences inside Germany, but Prussia formed in the Teutonic Knights. And the Teutonic Knights were a religious order that started out in Jerusalem as maintaining the hospital around the mountain of where Christ died. And when the Mamluks drove the Crusaders out of Israel, they migrated to Transylvania to fight the nomadic barbarians of Ukraine called the Cumans on behalf of the king of Hungary. And then they migrated up to Prussia and they took over Latvia from the Danish brothers of the sword who were another monastic order with the most dope name of all time. And the Prussians established or sorry, the Teutonic Knights established, they had a colonial nobility or the Yonkers manage stuff beneath the Celebit religious order because you can't have a ruling class of Celebit people and they were able to maintain power until the Protestant Reformation where because they were Catholic they had to lose their title and they maintained these beautiful red brick castles with the local population as serfs. And what happened was that the territories up by Latvia in Estonia, they got consumed by the Swedes who came down from Finland conquering Estonia. And then Latvia got conquered by Lithuania and part of the broader Poland-Lithuania project. And there were periods where Poland-Lithuania, which surrounded old Prussia on all sides, periods practically controlled and owned Prussia, where there were periods in the 16th century when it was basically part of Poland, but for the entire period the local German nobility maintained power, where Prussia was a unique designation, and so in Poland Lithuania grew weaker, old Prussia could gain functional independence, and then in the Baltic the German nobility maintained power. And so through Poland Lithuania and then the conquest by Tsarist Russia, the Baltic German nobility maintained authority and even became one of the most powerful factions in the Tsarist Russian government because they were more competent than the ethnic Russians. And what happened over the 70th century is that due to mutual marriage, old Prussia and Brandenburg got fused. It's amazing how much of a northern Europe is just like spilling across Eastern Europe and down to the Mediterranean. Like you said, the Prussians were in North Africa. Like why do Visigoths and northern northern Europeans always end up in North Africa? Why are you like you'd almost don't think of them going south because they never go through Italy or Greece. But they're like spilling around the edges. Why are we in Texas? We followed the coast, manifest destiny, David Crockett. The Norseman naturally searches for the heat because it is what he lacks. And the Somalian naturally searches for the cold because it's where there's the best welfare benefits. Facts. Speaking of Minnesota and Canada, like that's a really good example. We have this conversation about American identity, but you could break down what are the the differences and similarities between Minnesota and Canada versus the South. Like Minnesota and Canada are a lot more similar culturally. They even speak the same. There's more liberals versus they might disagree on hockey, where Minnesota might agree with the South on hockey, like should the US or Canada win? Other than that, like they're way more similar to Canada. Canada is predominantly English and Scottish and the prairie of Canada is Ukrainian and Romanian and German and Minnesota is German and Scandinavian. It's interesting that the Scots-Irish and Appalachia don't have more in common with the Scots-Irish and Canada. And they kind of do with Alberta, right? As people are talking about the Alberta unity that's growing as a mental. That's true, but Alberta is also an exception. If you look Look at Ontario, they've become very... Ontario's sad and I used to live there because a lot of the rural culture in Ontario is very Midwestern. I think if you remove Toronto, Ontario would be a right voting state that would be a place like Ohio or Michigan or whatever. But having Toronto and the Laurentian elite, and I go into that voice because it's become a meme among Canadian pundits to talk about the Laurentian elite destroying Canada, which is the shared elite from Toronto to Quebec City through Ottawa and Montreal that shares the liberal interests. But you look at the biggest Scottish concentrations in huge Scottish populate, not huge, because it's Canada, Scots predominate in Nova Scotia or New Scotland and Ontario, but that's been fused in with the Laurentian elite. So they lost a lot of the individualistic, freedom-loving Celtic traits you'd see in America. Sad, just like real Scotland. And then Alberta is where, I don't know, what are they, Scots-Irish and English mix, and they have still more of the Appalachian character. Yeah, there's Alberta is Canada's Texas. And it's been done in the oil fields. And it's due to geography. Isolated and Prussia. So Prussia was one of the places or Brandenburg was one of the places that got most screwed over by the Thirty Years War, where they lost three quarters of their population in the Thirty Years War, and I just want to hammer home how insane that is. Losing three quarters of your population, that's one of the worst things you can experience in history, because half is really, really bad, and it really put a fire under them that they had to improve and had to get better lest this didn't happen again and many authors have said that the 20th century German barbarism and totalitarianism is a remembrance of the 30 years war which killed a third of Germany's total population and the reason they lost so many people was that the Austrians were fighting upwards and they were trying to crack all of north Germany to unify the Empire. And then the Swedes were fighting downwards, and the Thirty Years War lasted 30 years, so it was going back and forth. And so Prussia and Brandenburg became this center of just constant warfare between the Swedes and the Austrians. And the Thirty Years War was brutal because this was before professional militaries, so the armies would just burn towns and take supplies and then take local girls as sex slaves. And this was a horrible conflict where under Tilly, and I always think of Tilly as, because there was a rap producer in the 2010s named Colin Tilly, and my mind fuses him with the Austrian 70th century commander Tilly, where Tilly was the commander that was ultimately beaten by Gustavus Adolphus at the battle. I was going to say Leuthern, which was Frederick the Great, but Lutzen, at the Battle of Lutzen, but Tilly burns down Magdeburg, which was the big city around Brandenburg, because either his men were getting paid or they didn't sign a treaty at a certain time, and that was killing hundreds of thousands of people. And so that was a huge psychic scar on this area of the world. I apologize for the background noise, by the way. But it's pretty gangster or hip hoppy. He'd made like this sort of cringe hip-hop stuff with Justin Bieber, it wasn't gay. to. But I think homosexuals are similar. And it's also just, I literally, I had a one hour conversation with your wife about this, so this exact topic. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. And so Frederick the Great, he eventually rose to power after his father. And it's very much a Philip of Macedon Alexander relationship where Philip of Macedon established a foundation of the Macedonian military and state structure, which Alexander the Great could then use to conquer the entire Middle East. And so also kind of gay conquering Alexander. Maybe it's the parents. Maybe it's not genetic. Maybe it's a military dictator father's. He was by where he had several wives and he also had he engaged in pedorasty, which was a Greek custom of the time. He was just down. I mean, there are many significant homosexual important historic figures. If you look at the course of human history, homosexuals have accomplished more for the human race than what their percentage of the population is. I mean, just look at the Trump admin. There's a lot of time for filming normal gays. I'm not denying that people have done gay stuff. I'm just saying there's a little more complicated than the modern progressive left likes to portray it. I'm a dinosaur. For just the great entire life we spent in war, whereas I was reading his biography, it's just really marked that he had basically no period where he was at peace. And that was a lot of how 18th century politics was, it was just Europe's warring states period, which we should make a podcast about soon. And so Frederick, his predominant goal was the seizure of Silesia, where he was very set on making Prussia a greater country than it was. And Prussia only unified due to leaders like Frederick the Great. And Silesia was important to him because it was part of the Austrian Empire. And I heard that Silesia's importance to Prussia was 20 times so on a population basis than to Austria. Because Austria was a large empire that spread into Hungary and Transylvania and Serbia. And so Silesia was this German speaking area that jutted out to Poland that was part of the Austrian Empire and they were Catholic. But the thing is that there was no mountain range from Prussia to Silesia, but from Bohemia the other Austrian possession to Silesia was a mountain range. So it was naturally within Prussia's geographic orbit. And so if Prussia could conquer Silesia, it would increase its population by over a hundred percent, while Austria would just be losing a province. So practically the entirety of Frederick the Great's life was him trying to hold on to Silesia after he briefly conquered it. And like Macedonia, really similar actually. What do you mean by that? Oh, was it? Are you talking about the father, Frederick, who was solidifying in the territory and then his son kind of did more? So his son conquered Silesia, his dad to the institution building. Okay, okay. Got it. He conquered that and just held on to that. Yeah. And when you look at Frederick II's life, he just conquered Silesia, which on a map basis. And as a teenager, I saw human history solely through maps. And as I've grown older, I've realized how limiting that is. It's not that impressive, but you have to remember what Frederick the Great accomplished was he made Prussia a serious country on the European stage that could rival the Great Powers, where Frederick the Great fought a series of wars against practically every single neighboring country that would allow them to see that Prussia was not an eccentric joke of a country, where he was consistently able to beat the Austrians, the Russians, and the French, who attacked him on all sides, and I think these were also countries that added together had something like more than 20 times Prussia's population. Where it was just really remarkable, and Frederick the Great opened up a position that Prussia could be conceived as a serious country, and then at the end of his reign and he also expanded to Poland. And so by the time he gets to the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia was seen as in a similar bracket to Austria and the new French Republican nation had to prove itself to Prussia, which was part of the European concert of nations rather than vice versa. Right, and people kind of like still think of them as Poland because Poland took them over a little bit for a bit. And they're like, are you sure you're not Poland? sure a real country. And then they ended up conquering Poland and totally reversing and kind of cementing themselves as not Polish. Yeah. So I'm going to go through these. The first Silesian war was when Frederick invaded Silesia, and he solidified his position, defeating the Austrians at the Battle of Molewitz. And then he invaded Bohemia multiple times because Frederick the Great had greater aspirations than what he attained, where he was able to conquer Saxony, which had a population equivalent to Silesia multiple times. And Saxony was one of the great German states where they had a toy soldier military. The other German states besides Austria, they would have these toy soldier militaries that were well drilled, they were well armed, but they lacked the determination the Prussians did, where the the Prussian military through all of these engagements consistently showed itself to be hard, to be rugged, and to be very disciplined, where the Prussians drilled their men more than anyone else. And so they would hold up under pressure and they were more durable, where a lot of these battles were sort of stalemates, where 18th century warfare had this natural sort of end of we're gonna stare at each other and fire off rounds until one side gets tired and then we back off. And what Frederick the Great really did that was brilliant was he pioneered most of the tactics that would become mainstream during the Napoleonic Wars, a generation earlier during the 18th century. And Frederick the Great was one of Napoleon's great heroes where he, when Napoleon conquered Prussia, he actually went on a sort of pilgrimage Frederick the Great's palace so to do homage to him where he said he's one of the greatest men where Frederick the Great was much more aggressive with his militaries. He invented the strategy of taking a long because 18th century warfare had these long lines of musketeers that line up against each other and fire volleys until one side gives up. And what Frederick the Great was he compressed his militaries into a line. The line marches forward against rather than these blocky positions and due to that you have a much smaller area where you can strike your opponent so they can move faster at taking less damage and then they can slam right into their opponent or once they get to the opponent they can move out to lines. And Frederick the Great also also engineered using light artillery and this was big in the Napoleonic Wars because the earlier cannons or artillery were very heavy behemoths and monsters where when in the 18th century with the lighter cavalry you could attach them to horses and then move them around the battlefield rapidly and use them almost like machine guns and this was something that Frederick the Great pioneered that Napoleon later mastered and the Prussians Also had the Bay Ruth Dragoons and Dragoons are a type of soldier where their horsemen they can either charge an attack and cavalry warfare Was quite effective through the Napoleonic Wars or stuff that we would see like knights with spears and swords they could still win battles and be decisive through the age of guns because you took the pike out of warfare and So Prussia also had quite good cavalry and the dragoons could get off their horses take their guns and fire." Right. And they could sneak around and get slow moving cannons and stuff like that. And by single file line, do you mean vertically or horizontally? Because I've seen like they march both ways sometimes. They're vertical. Depending. Prussia. So Prussia did vertical attacks and then the pre-established military said horizontal armies. Right. And then the French Napoleon did vertical marching. Yes. And the English were like horizontal. Yes. Because Napoleon studied Frederick the Great's tactical victories and he implemented them while the rest of Europe was still operating under the 18th century playbook. Why didn't they just copy him? And what would it have looked like if two straight lines walked into each other instead of one being flat? Like would they even see each other in the back? Because the reason the French Revolution occurred was that the European governments were corrupt and decadent, where because People saw these innovations that occurred over the 18th century, but the government didn't implement them and so the sort of the issues that caused the French Revolution in France were present across Europe. It's just that they happen to occur in France where you could have seen a French Revolution in Austria or Germany or Italy. And so once the French Revolution occurred and Napoleon's are conquering Europe It was this oh shit moment from European elites that they had to implement these enlightenment Rational systems to survive and they couldn't just oppress the poor to maintain power Right, and it's kind of funny because I mean, you know Wellington ended up winning anyways with flat lines versus Straight lines, so there's other factors there. Maybe it's not the the hugest thing, but like it's what Frederick did was similar to Napoleon, but turning humans into machines instead of like using cannons really effectively like you you have cannons right and then you figure out that if you use them in a certain way you can kind of make progress and then you can apply that formula and greatly expand it and and go very far and he did Frederick did kind of the same thing with humans where he kind of mechanize them into not retreating, right? Because it's like the sharp quote, I know you can fire three rounds a minute, but can you stand? And that's that's the real question. The Prussians were very good for being durable and for being hard, where both Frederick the Great and Napoleon would often win battles. And Frederick the Great won his greatest victories like Rossback and Leuthon through his ability to move very quickly. And this isn't something they thought got from the Romans, where the Roman advantage was they would have men and they'd train them so they could walk like 30 miles in a day. They could set up fortifications, they could maneuver very, very fluidly. And so at his great victories like Rustback or Leuthon, Frederick the Great would march his army markedly faster than his opponents, attack them on the flank where they weren't prepared, and then compress or crush the flank. And a lot of the greatest victories in military history, like Napoleon's Austerlitz or the battle of Adrianople, where the Roman field army got wiped out, or the Hannibal's great victories like Cannae or like Trezumene, were won because if you attack on the flank, you can get an asymmetric compression of your opponent's army. And there was their mobility that enabled them, or flexibility, mobility, whatever combination. Another thing that Carlisle said, and also Edward Shepard Creasy, who was a British military historian of the 1850s said, is that this was the first era of history when Eastern Europe entered the course of world history, where if you want to use Hegel's idea of world history as like a game that you're using to progress, Eastern Europe was in its state formation and it's figuring out its own issues through the medieval and early modern period, and the 18th century was the first time that Eastern Europe was a place that could fight against Western Europe or determine the course of world history. They became part of the balance of power of the European landscape. Exactly. And the Russians... This is a pretty big change. It is. And the Russians... It puts Germany in the middle. It does. And the Russians showing up was the first step of this, where Frederick the Great had to fight the Russians, and the Russians were the first big force that destabilized the Westphalian balance of power that emerged after the Thirty Years' War. And one of the things Carlisle said is, when you look at Frederick the Great's Prussia, you have to imagine these are basically barbarian peoples like the Vikings, who are across the Baltic Sea in Scandinavia and ethnically similar, who are under a Spartan-like warrior state where people at the time often compared Prussia to Sparta with the warrior nobility, the surf class, the hyper militaristic culture and all that stuff. It's a little more on the Russia focus, but I kind of blame the Swedes for showing Russia fire a little bit because they were able to use that. They didn't get big as Swedish Russia, but the Swedish Russia's legacy was a big reason why they were ever able to challenge Central and Western Europe. Both Russia and Prussia, which are similarly said words, they're not of comparable origin, at least I don't think. They only developed because they'd highly capable leaders who could drag the population in an autocratic manner. In Russia, they modernized because they fought the Swedes when Peter the Great was the Tsar. And Peter the Great was their most competent leader. And so he could look at the Swedish threat and tell the Russians if we don't modernize now, we're gonna get conquered. But you're right that the later governors of Russia were likely not competent enough to pull off what Peter the Great did and he needed the external Swedish threat to do it. Right, and not only that, but the Swedish were there hundreds of years before setting up the original Russian kingdom. So it's it's it's kind of a poetic back and forth. It's like a reminder. We have to return to our roots to stop this foreign invasion by these people who settled us a while ago. Europe is complicated. Europe is convoluted. If you were to see European history as just scaled up clan wars, that would not be unfair because when the English and the French fight each other, it's like the national arc of history. But these are largely oversized tribes that hate each other for long-standing ethnic reasons. Right. And they kind of forgot their lesson, right? Because they got invaded by Sweden, you know, a thousand years ago or whatever in the medieval period. They realized they needed to be more like Sweden to, like, defend themselves. And then they slowly forgot until Sweden invaded again. And then they remembered. It's like, do I have to invade you for you to remember? member like the right way to do things but Alexander Dugin says that Russia is an innately durationist country that must pull from its asiatic roots against Western decadence that's kind of what I say because I call them oriental best bots and a more direct you know I still have faith and that was an arc in the Great's Wars where he fought the Russians later on and the Russians had these huge militaries and Prussia was most threatened when it was attacked by the Russians. And so you hear about the Russians having these huge armies of untrained peasants that they would send in human waves against the Prussians who had this iron drill. And it's two Eastern European societies that have a border that are very different places. And you can see the start of the animus and the rivalry between Germany and Russia starting with Frederick the Great. And it's funny, you have the first Silesian war and the second Silesian war, but the first Silesian war ended in 1742 and the second one started in 1744. And both were occurring at the time of the War of Austrian Succession, where it's a war of Austrian Succession is the term that we use for the Silesian Wars in the English-speaking world because a A woman Empress came onto the throne of Austria, that being Maria Theresa, and Carlyle makes various sexist remarks against her in his book, but under Prussian law a woman could not inherit and under Austrian law she could. So Frederick the Great took this to a justification he could see Silesia, and Maria Theresa took this as a huge grudge that she needed to get back against Prussia, and Maria Theresa was seen as one of the better Austrian leaders or emperorses it was under a golden age for Austria and so the second legion war was the attempt for the Austrians to reconquer Silesia and this was Frederick III went through a big winning streak in the middle of his career where he defeated a much larger Austrian army at the battle of Hohenfriedburg and I also want to say the ruling dynasty of Prussia were the Hohenzollerns from Swabia. Not to be confused with the Hohen Staufens, who were the ruling family of the Holy Roman Empire in the High Middle Ages, they were also Swabians, and then the Habsburgs were from neighboring Switzerland. So for some reason this triangle of territory of Swabia and Switzerland has produced the great German and dynasties, but do not confuse the Hohenzollerns and the Hohenstaufens, but the Hohenzollerns were the big reason that the Germans, that Prussia became a great state. Hohen what? Hohenzollern. Ah, Hohenzollern. Yeah, I love that area, it's my favorite area of Germany, the northern Italy, southern Germany area. It's where our ancestors are from and where a plurality of German Americans are. And he won the Battle of Hohenfriedburg through doing a morning strike where Frederick the Great's victories tended to come from his aggression and he would attack early and in places his enemies didn't expect, because this was the way to short-circuit the advantages of sort of the stagnation of the L'Océan regime militaries. Blitzkrieg anyone yeah, I mean they it's the same ruling nobility the Yonkers Nothing is original. It's funny. It's like they think the Nazis came up with it. The Bible is a quote about that. There's nothing new under the sun. And Frederick the Great also invaded Bohemia multiple times. It would have been really impressive if he could take Saxony and Bohemia. And he made it done to Prague, which is pretty far. It's impressive when you're a little Prussia and you fight your wars by just invading the neighboring countries that are much larger than you And to reach Prussia, to reach halfway through Bohemia involves, first of all, conquering Silesia and Saxony first, where for most of his reign, Frederick the Great controlled Saxony, but he had to give it up due to losses in the Seven Years War. I was just stuck on a side thought about how the Bible would have a quote that says there's nothing new under the sun because the Bible literally says everything. It's like every point it's like it's like look at Charlie's tweets Charlie has a tweet about everything the Bible has point about everything conservative back to Austria conservative thought be like all of human all of the human condition is contained within the Bible and Charlie Kirk so at the battle of sewer the Aristotle talk a little I guess at the battle of sewer whoa man what about the book of nature of studying the world through comprehending nature but so Frederick beat the Austrians again at the battle of Sur where the Austrian launched an attack on him over the forest, over the hills, where Frederick the Great consistently used terrain to his advantage. At both Rossback and Lothan, he was able to hide him slamming into the enemy flanks. They're using hills to block it, and the Prussian military were trained to use geography to their advantage. And at other battles like Zorndorf, where, sorry it's just a stupid name, on the Oder River, another bad name. Zorndorf on the Oder River. Frederick the Great tried to drag his cannons over a swamp and it took eight hours longer than he expected. And so he was attacking the Russians in the morning after his men hadn't slept, pushing the Russians against the river so that they'd have to fight their hardest. And then his men got slaughtered, but we're not there yet. And so there was a brief period of peace at the end of the War of Austria in succession, and then before the Seven Years War. And if you look at Frederick the Great's life, there's very rarely peace. It's mostly war, and the periods of peace are largely preparations for the next war. But it's interesting to read his life, because Frederick the Great was a sensitive young man where he would write poetry and we have letters of him talking to his friends and he was best friends with the French ambassador and this is L'Enciel Régime Politics where the ambassador of France used for Prussia he preferred the Prussians as he was actively helping Frederick the Great against Prussia because they were besties and so we have letters of Frederick the Great sharing his depression and his anxiety with the French ambassador. Right. He was just a gamer or we have letters. Yeah. His his sensitive young man, his sister was married to the prince of the Netherlands. So we also have him writing letters of we are totally going to lose and I'm about to die. The only thing that keeps me going is my ability to read philosophy and write poetry in my free time. That's wild. I was wondering about that. Like when I watched these meetings of like the Iranian leadership shown up to talk to somebody, I'm like, how can like, what are their faces going to look like? Are they going to be anxious, scared? Like some of them have a straight face, like depressed? It's just like a, it's a big situation to be in. But I guess you get used to it. And is this like before his army died in a swamp that he was predicting this? Was he kind of right? He had multiple periods that felt very dour. And one of the things you learn when you read about the lives of great men is a lot of their lives are depressing or boring or failures. Frederick the Great won all of these great victories, considering one of the greatest met leaders in European history. If you were to look at his autobiography or his biography, most of it was him just wasting time or in lengthy campaigns without battles or other different things. That's the case of practically every single great man or historic figure. Another thing you find, and this is true of all of them as well, is how many of them have setbacks. Where Frederick the Great, if you read his story, from a glance, it appears like he has a bunch of great victories. But his actual life is lots of stuff like Zorndorf, where he's going to lose a bunch of battles soon. And it's like he's going to lose. And I'm focusing on Frederick the Great, because I've found this with every single historic figure I've read, that we can look back on their life and see them as very impressive. But these were human individuals which had lives that had countless failures and complications, and they think they're going to lose. And what separates the great men from the rest is they keep going, and after five failures in a row they're still in the saddle. And what non-great men do is they give up. And that's why great men are so historically rare. And to answer your earlier question, in this society, Frederick the Great was expected to wear the mask of command for the peasants and the soldiers, but among the nobility, due to the shared social norms of self-control and honor, there was a lot of emotional expression. So Frederick the Great could open up about his feelings with his close colleagues, with his top nobility, with his family, and that was part of the aristocratic culture of the lost your regime. It's a fun dynamic because it reminds me of the classic lesson where bravery isn't the absence of fear it's having fear and overcoming it and obviously you look at a hero like oh wow you're so brave you have it all figured out you know and then they get off of the battle and they're like yeah I can't believe I'm alive I totally thought I was good. There is a story from esoteric Jewish mysticism of a man who walks up to Moses and he said Moses your face is absolutely terrifying, seemed like a bad guy. How come you're the founder of Judaism? And Moses said the reason I attained this greatness was by overcoming my own negative false traits. Only with them did I have the strength to do this. By leaning into like channeling your aggression into something positive or yeah. Yeah. The full will of your own psychology manifested. it. Prussia was really not in a good place for the Seven Years War, where Russia, Austria, and France all agreed to crush Prussia for being the upstart European power. And Britain was their ally, where Britain kept funding them money and support. Although Britain didn't really fight, Britain had a possession in Hanover in the Anglo-Saxon homeland south of Hamburg, but they weren't sending a huge amount of military support because the Seven Years War was actually started by George Washington fighting the French over Pittsburgh, and then it rippled over to Europe. And so the British were invested in seizing India and North America where they paid the Prussians to fight against their rivals. Well, they didn't militarily fight in the European continent, but the predominant thing the Seven Years War did was the Anomorabolos, where the British took French, Canada, and the Midwest, bringing it into the Anglosphere, and then the British also defeated the French in India and seized Bengal, which gave the British India. But inside Europe the Seven Years War was predominantly Prussia fighting for survival. And we can really see Frederick the great skill as a leader because he was able to win all of these staggering victories where multiple times Frederick could defeat armies vastly larger than him that he had no real reason to, but in earlier on he had a lot of victories and by the end of the war he had nearly lost and he had overplayed his hand and And then he survived due to basically a chance of history, where initially he invaded Bohemia because his MO was largely to launch attack operations to catch his enemies off guard before they could act. And at the battles of Lobositz, which was inconclusive, and a lot of these battles were inconclusive, again we look at some like Frederick the Great and we don't think a lot of these battles were very undramatic and then he tried to seize Prague and then failed. He seized control of Saxony once again and over time the Austrians were able to push the Prussians out of Bohemia and the Prussians held Saxony until surprisingly late in this war and from this point on Prussia was largely fighting a defensive campaign of survival over their home turf. And the Russian's attack from the east, where the Russian's occupied old Prussia, where interestingly enough, Emmanuel Kant, Prussia's great philosopher of the time. And we have to talk about Voltaire's relationship, which was straight, by the way, I have to clarify that, with Voltaire, because they were close friends. And Kant actually did quite well under the Russian occupation of Prussia because the Russians were using these Baltic German officers to occupy Prussia, which they treated quite well. And so we have stories of Kant flirting with a lot of the Russian noble women in wowing the Russian nobility at the house parties with his intelligence. Interesting. Yeah, that's not I don't know if that's a compliment for Voltaire that you have to clarify. He's not gay because he's a French poet. No, because talking to Frederick the second is a homosexual That's why I cried if he was talking to like, I don't know Think of a tough figure like whoever the king of the Netherlands were or something you wouldn't make that assumption But if he's talking to Voltaire, you're like what? There was Voltaire was like a sexual degenerate that was not uncommon for French men of his type where he lived with his girlfriend and he was a nobleman and he used her house as a library as his laboratory I don't think he really got married and Voltaire was sort of a wit of the time where he would write these scathing remarks about various people and things and he and Frederick the Great had an on-again off-again relationship because for example he lived in Prussia for a bit and part of the reason was that Voltaire was so scathing he had to periodically flee France. And Frederick the Great was a big fan of his work because Frederick the Great was an enlightened despot who brought the Enlightenment to Prussia and him alongside Maria Teresa and Catherine the Great were all enlightened despots. And when Frederick the Great arrived, he wrote a scathing remark on basically guy who ran the Prussian polytechnical university because he was a science autist where he said Voltaire would write this poetry mocking him saying he's the type of guy who thinks to understand someone's internal monologue you should take a scalpel to look at their brain right which maybe is kind of like a fair partial critique and it sounds like Voltaire got stuck on permanent critic mode yeah and Frederick the Great burst into laughter saying this is hilarious but you cannot attack Prussia's institutions like this. I am reliant on Prussia's institutions to maintain authority over the serfs. And Voltaire also engaged in illegal options trading where he was basically doing insider trading inside Prussia and various illegal financial moves like sort of the 18th century equivalent of NFT scams. And he had multiple times where he'd publicly mock Frederick the Great. And it's weird to compare people who, Frederick the Great is a king, and Voltaire is a philosopher, but he was the philosophic equivalent of a rock star, which could exist in 18th century Europe, but not today. So you're looking at two different types of asymmetric power, where there were lengthy periods when Frederick the Great and Voltaire had a falling out where they refused to speak to each other, but they kept on getting back together and saying they admired each other. And we have loads of their correspondences of basically Voltaire saying, I admire that you're a man of action. And Frederick saying, I admire that you're a philosopher. But then there was another period where they were talking to each other, where Voltaire was just trying to sort of extract attention from Frederick the Great. And then he was writing back to his French buddies, oh, Frederick the Great sucks. That's kind of interesting because they were kind of pure avatars of their mode, but also with the ability to recognize that the other was necessary, even if in their role they couldn't act that way at all. Like Frederick had to be pure statesman. Voltaire was a pure philosopher, but they recognized the nuances instead of kind of, I mean, it's funny how you have to make your case, right? But then there's also these other realities. So it's hard to make your case as like a pure avatar of something while acknowledging other realities, which is maybe some problems people have in permanent critic mode. One of the things the left tries to spread is that everyone before the 1960s was repressed and stuck up. And if you read it 18th century Europe, there's no chance you can believe that these people were constantly, in fact, they should have been way more stuck up in Puritan, where they were constantly having relational drama and like people had lots of extramarital sexual relationships at the time. It was it was a known thing for kings to have concerts, concerts or people had girlfriends or homosexual relationships, etc. And one of the things that teenage Bismarck wrote when he was 18 is he would say that if a nobleman visited a town, they would just visit another know woman's time that is go into the local town and then pick the prettiest surf girls and sleep with them and that was just an accepted part of 19th century culture and so when you look at the Victorians and you think of this society where a woman showing her ankles was taboo partly that's a British thing but also you had a wider overton window than people think right especially in continental Europe maybe yeah which we know what the French are up to already yes and so So as the other militaries pushed up against Prussia, you saw the Prussians defend their position in several incredible battles. We've mentioned Rosbach, which was in Saxony, and Leuthon, which was in Silesia before. And both of them involved Frederick moving quickly, going on a flank, and then slamming into the enemy military force. I played Rostbach so many times in Empire Total War, which is a video game, and Rostbach was against the French and the Austrians, and that knocked France out of the war, because France was fighting really far away from their supply chains, and you also had the Holy Roman Empire's military, which was quite pathetic, where the Holy Roman Empire had military force in the same way the UN did. It's just sort of a thrown together. And France couldn't sustain fighting so far away from their home country in Eastern Germany, as well as fighting as their losses in the New World in India. So after Frederick the Great wiped them out at Rossbach, the French pulled out of the war, but then he still had to face the Austrians and the Russians where Leuthon was him against the Austrians where outnumbered and the Austrians may have had twice as many men as him. He was able to use terrain to sort of do the same maneuver again and wipe out a much larger Austrian army reconquering Breslau from the Austrians and after Zorndorf things get quite dark, where the Russians kept going in from the east, where they finally made it to the Oder River, which is the current border between Germany and Poland, but was then in the middle of the Prussian state, because Germany kept going into modern Poland, and Poland Lithuania had become a Russian puppet state by this point, where the Russians could just march armies across it, and no one took Poland seriously, which is strange because if you look at the map, Poland was a huge geographic area that if it had a more functioning social structure, could have been able to totally dominate the region, where the existence of Prussia as a power was predicated upon Poland practically being a failed state. And as I said before, Zordendorf was an attempt to drag the artillery over a swamp to attack the Russians. And then it was too disorganized. And so he lost a huge military. And then Hawk Kirk was when the Austrians surprised Frederick the Great's camp at night, killing a lot of them. And Colonel's Dorf was a disastrous Prussian defeat where half of Frederick's army got wiped out because it was a combined Austrian Russian force. And at this point, Frederick the Great considered suicide because his position was that dark because he just assumed they were going to lose. And he was able to get some victories again at Leignitz, but then you kept on seeing this position where the Russians and the Austrians were pushing up against Frederick. And so Frederick had to defend his position and it reached a point at the winter where Frederick tried to do winter attacks a few different times as a way to get around his greater movement advantage versus the other militaries. And during the winter, it appeared as if the Austrians and the Russians would crush Prussia. But what occurred was that Catherine the Great, who, this is one of the funny things Carlisle says, that Catherine the Great hated Frederick the Great because Frederick the Great called her a slut, which was true. She would have multiple male lovers after her husband died, which is how she got married the king of Russia, Zara of Russia. He died. He was a retarded child. I forget if she assassinated him. And then she would take multiple male lovers and so Frederick called her a slut which was accurate. So she hated him She died this successor was a huge Frederick the Great fan boy who said yo, we can't kill this guy I'm actually going to support him war has stopped Frederick the Great was saved and During World War two when Hitler was surrounded on all sides He looked back on this and he hoped that in the same way that some random black swan event saved Prussia that because God had ordained Hitler that Something similar what happens the germination got destroyed in his hope was that Harry Truman would be the new czar That Harry Truman would stop the war after FDR's death so that Germany could survive That's funny. Maybe they poisoned FDR But that's it's also funny because it sounds like that Queen got um, FDS, right? Because Frederick called her a slut. And then the next guy, I obviously didn't have FDS so he could see, you know, it was working with him. Carlisle literally says that he writes the 19th century equivalent of this was a woman moment. He did that. He says that for both Catherine the Great and Maria Teresa, where he's like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a woman scorned. Maria Teresa was a fairly good governor. Catherine the Great was not, although Catherine the Great saw Russia's expansion. And so Prussia survived, and that was like the nicest thing you could say. The Seven Years' War was a conflict where Prussia should not have survived. And after that, Frederick the Great went about trying to fix Prussia's economy, doing economic reforms, all those things. And the next great political event was the the dismemberment of Poland, Lithuania. Because Poland went through this revolutionary phase where they ended serfdom, they started industrializing, they made a modern military and tax code, and this terrified every neighboring country because Poland was not allowed to be... they even made an American-style constitution and became a democracy. And Poland was not allowed to do this because if Poland is a functioning country and industrializing, literally built fact we're building factories in Poland this is how on top of things they were it's so sad no one lets Poland do what they want to do I was even now they have to struggle against the pressure of the EU to be different like they always want to be different everyone wants to stop I was reading Adam Zamoyski's history of Poland and I literally shed tears over this because I was reading about Poland's innovations in the late 18th century they just got ruthlessly crushed right they just want to try you know, society keeps crushing their creativity like a public school kid. A Prussian public school kid. Yeah, crush the historical creative creative arc. And I'm just imagining Poland as an anime series. For older people, when I say anime arc, what I mean is that modern Western cinema has been so starved of heroic storytelling that the only way the youth can process the idea of this is a child. He was utterly destroyed that he studied the blade until he could take revenge upon his opponents going through a lengthy multi-continent story arc When we say anime arc, that's what we mean Right. It's like how rap music is the only expression of like Masculinity and music like that's what you have to go to we're forced to go to like Japanese cartoons for good storytelling None of this is our fault. Okay, we're just looking for outlets. You could listen to country murder ballads rather than rap Yeah, there's better choices, you know, and so there's better animes than others but and you could just watch Sharp the 1980s series with Sean Bean. You could read the books. I'm a dinosaur. So it's interesting to read Carlisle talk about this because it was clear that and it's also interesting to read Carlisle who was writing in the 1820s because he talks about the lib opinion of the 1820s like holy crap these are the same people because he talked to their cynicism and their alienation and the Libs being like it was such a tragedy you divided up Poland, Lithuania. But then the colonization was as in because liberals of 200 years ago often there were anti-colonial liberals, but they're also pro-colonial liberals. And Carlisle was saying the dismemberment of Poland, Lithuania was the natural arc of history. And because Poland was just decadent in the need to divide it up. I don't agree, as I stated before. Darwinism is a pretty harsh response to Poland's very unfortunate struggles. It must die. You have been deemed unworthy by God in nature. Carlisle also has another segment where he said, Austria taking Bavaria was not part of God's plan, but dividing up Poland as part of God's plan. I'm like, how are you determining this? Well, because it happened, I guess, that's how you know. So Prussia got a huge chunk of Poland. And there was a period before the Napoleonic Wars, when Prussia was a majority Catholic country due to Silesia, and they even took Warsaw at a period because Frederick the Great, I don't think Frederick the Great did all of Poland's dismemberment. I think his successor did another part too. It was but it was multi tiered where they took Warsaw or the capital. They took the area by Don's egg and then the Napoleonic Wars showed up and the Prussian state after Frederick the Great, and this Highlights the point that there was the Holenzollerns who are pushing things They had grown decadent and so for the first through the three coalition wars prussia was at war With the french and I think they sent out a military detachment in the 1790s into belgium them, but they weren't super militarily involved until past the Third Coalition, when the French had broken past the Rhineland into Central and East Europe, where Napoleon went through a lengthy process of trying to conquer the region, and he wiped out the Prussians at the battle of Jaina and Auerstadt, where they were allied with the Austrians, and he seized Berlin, humiliated the Prussians at Tilset, and Prussia was one of Napoleon's greatest rivals over this war. And you could see that Napoleon did not have the men to occupy Eastern-Central Europe, because there weren't enough Frenchmen to conquer all of Europe, And Napoleon could recruit West Germans and Italians and Poles to fight for him, but they couldn't fill the gaps, because Napoleon had to reconquer Prussia like three or four times because he could defeat them in battle, but he couldn't militarily occupy them, and he could humiliate and divide up the region, but he couldn't maintain his authority over where he, for example, broke off the core region of Poland or in Warsaw and Krakow as the Duchy of Warsaw. And this was a Polish-governed state which he created as a sort of island of French influence surrounded by the Austrians, the Russians, and the Prussians. the Prussians. And the thing that caused Napoleon to invade Russia was that he refused to surrender the Duchy of Warsaw to the Russians, which were the terms they asked for in order to not go over to the British. And interestingly enough, one of Napoleon's favorite mistress was ethnically Polish. And I don't want to say that that was the reason because the Poles, hundreds of thousands of them died for Napoleon. They were his big base in the east. But the Prussians used the war to do all the innovations we spoke about before. So in the time between Jaina and Waterloo, 1806-1815, Prussia went through a total social and military revolution so that they were getting utterly trounced by Napoleon until they could defeat him. And there were Prussian militaries in Paris where this was actually an inspirational moment of German nationalism because the Germans were imitating nationalism from the French Revolution and the French were using these nationalist ideologies to compress all of these smaller German states like making the confederacy of the Rhine which was a unified German state of all of central and of central Germany between the Rhine and the Prussian territories. But then they were also using German nationalism to against the Russians. And so thinkers like Goethe or I think Herter or others of this era Kant wanted to make a European Union style pacifist secular European Union of European States. He was very much ahead of his time in that regard. And Kant also pushed the idea that democracies wouldn't fight one another, which is not true. And interestingly, Prussia and Austria were excited to invade Russia with Napoleon because their hope was to help consume Russia. And so hundreds of thousands of Austrians and Prussians fought in the invasion of Russia, but they all got slaughtered with the rest of the French army. And so the second that Napoleon lost in Russia. Prussia and Austria turned on him, even though Napoleon had married an Austrian princess. And... Or a Polish. So Napoleon had multiple side checks. He had an Austrian princess who he divorced to get rid of Josephine, and then he had a Polish mistress and several other mistress. Oh, Prussia and Austria, right. We're talking Prussia and Austria and keeping them in line. And didn't Napoleon care about Poland like we do, too? He sold them out so he could get Prussia and Austria on their side like his heart was literally in Poland He associated it with like the hopes of the Corsicans It was actually personal to him, but he killed that part of his soul to lose in Russia As Napoleon once said I was born in the battlefield a million deaths is nothing to me Right. I wonder if also he ever had this moment. Maybe it's in his writings where He he he assumed that if you could win all the battles then you would win the war And he didn't anticipate the difficulty of actually like occupying a country after winning that war He especially has a cannon guys like if I win the battle I win. I wonder if that was a thing Caesarean leaders tend to fall into the hubris trap where Napoleon dead Caesar dead Hitler dead and And the reason is that if you're a Caesarean figure, it's largely because you take daring risks and they're consistently rewarded and you don't, because people continue what has worked for them. And so- Right, you can't stop. You can't stop and you don't know the button. I have conquered more than I probably should. I should stop and consolidate this because you have to think to yourself, I can conquer this. Can I occupy this for five years And then can my descendant to her weaker than me occupy this too? And those are very different things. It's harder to cold an empire than it is to conquer it. I feel like he was more like a dog chasing a car because he was a really good runner. Yes, and Napoleon was technically good at everything. He was an incredible, he was in some ways a better statesman than a better commander, but he lacked sort of intangible factors factors where, and that sounds like a woo-woo thing to say, but he didn't know how to judge when he had gone too far. He would alienate his allies like the Spanish. He didn't know how to manage these long-term diplomatic relationships. He failed in his various romantic relationships that publicly humiliated him multiple times. He was constantly trying to suck up to the old European royalty, although his strengths came from that he was a self-made man and he was respected by a lot of Europeans for that. And so Napoleon's failures tend to be from intangible factors while he was technically good at basically every material task. Right. And it's hard to think of what a task it is to be a Caesarean type leader and how unique that is because we can make comparisons to Trump. Like, oh, is Trump have too much ego? Is he going too far? Is he going to be able to to reign it in. I think basically in Trump's situation, like I'm not worried about going too far because it's like do as much as you can where Napoleon had like a different level of leeway. Yes. And I have a certain attitude of like your good bro where if you can accomplish a certain amount of stuff, I will tolerate a lot of mistakes from you because you've like past the threshold of like your good bro of like you have gone past this threshold. So everything you do past this point has been excused because you already hit this threshold. I think about it that way too. I also think that like on the other dimension, he needs to be ambitious about legacy and I think he is a bit in terms of like the shaping of the world and fighting the globalist and all that stuff. Like he's got some big picture, but like I forget where I was. This is why it's important to see great men in a tragic light. And Frederick the Great avoided tragedy largely through good luck. He largely should have been crushed in the winter of Brandenburg. But good luck saved him. He would have been seen as a tragic figure like Charles the Twelfth, who nearly conquered Eastern Europe and then lost. But he got saved due to good luck. And it's about what you do with your luck too, right? Yes. Like not getting shot. But all great men have this tragic element to them. And all great men have one or like one intractable flaw, Augustus who was really good at avoiding the political issues of great men, where Augustus got power when he was my age and he was very cunning and indirect, he was great at PR, he was great at managing coalitions. He was totally cucked to his psychotic wife. And so at the time he died, he was only eating figs from his own market, lest his wife from his own garden, lest his wife poison him, and he was hiding inside his own little sort of man cave and you look at a figure like that who avoided the political trap he got it for his romantic relationship and manifests somewhere yeah exactly or Charlemagne would do stuff like he forbade any of his daughters from marrying anyone because he loved them so much he couldn't afford to let a man take them right which probably did not help this genetic line um it's like hoarding fish on survivor so not eating them and then starving getting pulled out this was before my time um survivors the wrong show too so that would be extra confusing so once you get to you have the battle of Leipzig which was the battle of the many nations and it was fought in Saxony which was always the territory that the Prussians tried to seize but was elusive and they seized it again in the the Napoleonic Wars, they had to give it up again. And Leipzig was an insane battle of, I think over half a million men fought there. And for a frame of reference, the biggest armies of the long-standing regime were like 80,000 men. So the jump from 40,000, because 80,000 men was a big army. The jump from 40,000 men to half a million men is staggering. That's more than you can fit in one control group. Yes. And so you were the battle of Leipzig of these huge rockets and the Prussians proved themselves to be a good military and so after Napoleon lost at Leipzig they were pushed west where the Prussians were on the edge of Paris and then Napoleon's men backstabbed him and put the Bourbon monarchy back in France. Napoleon was put in Elba, this tiny island he was king of. He stayed there for a few months, went back to France, installed themselves as emperor, the Prussian army under Blücher, they beat Napoleon with Wellington in Belgium at the Battle of Waterloo, and then in the peace that came afterwards, you have Prussia got a lot of territory from the Napoleonic Wars. They got the Rhineland in western Germany because you had all of these tiny German statelets that had gotten compressed during the Napoleonic Wars, that you realistically could not give back power. Where Germany's map was still a mess, but it was a compression of these are 500 German states, to these are like 30 German states. And Prussia took the Rhineland, which was a huge shift for Prussia, because it highlighted the difference in West and East Germany, because the Prussian model was based upon this East German, East European surf structure. And the Rhineland was next to France. It had trade connections to the Netherlands and England. And German authors of this era in the 20th century would often talk about how the West Germans had more in common with the English or the Dutch or the Americans than the East Germans. And so there was this disjoint because the West Germans craved having a parliament because they were part of the Western democratic tradition and they believed in freedom a lot and so you had this underlying tension where Prussia did modernize but it was still a brutal authoritarian state and their Rhineland possessions didn't geographically touch their East European possessions and by the way they got the area that connected East Prussia to Pomerania around Danzig which was ethnically German they got that And then Warsaw in central Poland became Russian possessions where Eastern Europe had a Best outside the Balkans Eastern Europe maintained practically no border changes from the Napoleonic Wars until World War one for a century and so with the conservative victory and the maintenance of aristocratic authority that that became entrenched with the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, you saw this underlying tension that West Germany was not happy with governance by the Prussians. And so with the buildup from 1815 to 1848 or the era of revolutions, you saw this underlying tension where Western Germany saw its population booster in 1850 And this was exported to America or the Industrial Revolution in Prussia and East Germany. So it's population booster on World War one that was exported into the world wars. And so there was a 70 year demographic difference and people were in mass poverty due to overpopulation in 1848 and... There had been a a social transition with the industrial revolution because Western Germany was industrializing at the time while Eastern Germany was after unification and this caused the revolutions of 1848 which occurred across Europe in They believe they started in France and then they spread across Germany Austria Italy and even to Russia and And 1848 was considered the event that didn't happen because it was widely thought that France would go through these liberal revolutions that would usher in a new age. And then the military stayed loyal to the governments and then just shot the revolutionaries. It is kind of funny because France started this like revolution across Europe and then they won and then they didn't do it. it and everybody was like what I thought you were gonna like where's the below that we were waiting for like the whole point of this and it's like actually you know we just had more fun conquering I think we're gonna keep doing that we don't need to do this whole new society thing let's put back a king or get Napoleon's ancestor and make him lead. People would talk about the silent majority during the 20th century and it was this idea in conservative politics that if you actually pulled the average American, they held fairly socially conservative views through the 1990s, and we had a liberal agnostic elite which controlled the government and the media and the educational system, and they governed the American policy while the general American public was much more socially conservative. And so if you look at things like the 1960s, the Vietnam War, most Americans did not hold the left wing views that we view those time periods with. And I don't think the standard majority exists today. I think the 21st century has seen a radical atomization and breakdown of social values in America. So if you pulled the average American today, it would just be depressing. And so the 19th century was similar because we look back on these eras and we think, oh, the liberals were going to win. But if you pulled various European countries, even in France, which was the heart of the revolution. And early anthropology was partly developed to this. Most French people, especially the lower classes, had very socially conservative views at the time of the French Revolution. It's just the managerial class seized power. In Europe was like that in general, where we see the liberals were the ones pushing the culture like the philosophy or the art or the political movements. But most of Europe was still overwhelmingly rural. And a huge thing about 19th century Europe is you look at the philosophy and the science which are the things we focus on. But the power was still held by this rural martial aristocracy which looked back centuries. And so a big shift, our next video is going to be on the Belapoke era before World War I, where you look at the Belapoke era, the reason that early 20th century Europe had these hyper-reactionary culture that led to the World War I was because the nobility weren't really involved in these broader urban cultural shifts. And neither were the peasantry. So you look at these cultural innovations that tricked themselves into being more popular than they were because they held the means of production and they interfaced with the European public and they thought, holy shit, you people are still this reactionary? And then yes, they were. So you'd see these liberal uprisings, wait Europe's not ready for this, crushed and also fundamentally the French Revolution did reach its victory after World War I peacefully and that's when Europe declined. So there was a general comprehension among the elites that these are utopian ideas that if we actually implement them Europe will fail and people don't put together that the reactionary victory after the Napoleonic Wars was what let Europe have its 19th century global dominance. And if the French Revolution had worked, that Europe would have slipped into the bureaucratic stagnation that it did in the 20th century in the 19th. And you never would have seen the colonization of Africa. The industrial revolution would have been limited to Britain in a handful of neighboring countries. And Europe would have gone into a quiet bureaucratic stagnation, which was comparable to why France experienced population decline starting after the Napoleonic Wars because they bureaucratized harder while the rest of Europe did only in the end of the 19th century through World War One. I think it's really important that that happened because it gave Europe at least a historical experience of a more free society in a time that was technologically or culturally comparable to modernity in a way that you can like more easily take those lessons into the future. Similar to how like the jacks, interjections securing like the late 1800s in America as a kind of golden age gave us a historical example of something to point to. Whereas like, hey, actually, we grew fast here with only 3% taxes versus like if you're talking about the 1600s or before that it's a little bit harder to relate it to the way modern society works. It can be more explanatory in a different way but it's nice to have like a tangible example of like what civilization can be because it gives us some roadmap to get back to it. That's why our next video is going to be on the Bella Polk era because I'd like to show a different 20th century because people think of the 20th century with leftism or these ugly concrete buildings but pre-World War I Europe was an industrialized 20th century society but it was radically different. Yeah it's kind of like a fantasy land in a lot of ways it's like a historical peak it's a it's a beautiful setting like I'd love to immerse myself in it and And it's like one of the eras that I'm nostalgic about, even though you shouldn't be overly nostalgic of past eras. It's just like a great peak of humanity. You think of all the German towns or the inventions and that's the base of their manufacturing ability. And then that's another thing that like what the Russians did, but not only did they kill out of the German Eastern diaspora, they literally took all their technology and all their metal and turned it into scrap metal. reading about that recently, which is just another huge setback. So not only is it important for the reasons we mentioned, but it's like, you can't understand the tragedy of the world wars until you appreciate the beauty of the Bella Puck. Indeed. But that's next episode. And with 1848, it's one of those events where the revolutionaries lost and then the ruling government to avoid another revolution gave them all of the concessions they asked for anyway. Where, the 1848 rebels, when I said that if the French Revolution won it would have caused European Union style bureaucratized stagnation. But the revolutionaries of 1848, they were classical liberal nationalists in a huge amount migrated to America. This was the singular spur, largest spur of German migration to America because they preferred America as this nationalist classical liberal free country and their goal German nationalism and classical liberalism were fused where their ideal is Germany should unify as a set country and it should do so through a classical liberal democracy like America. Interesting they kind of like that because that's where we're getting right now in the U.S. where, okay, we got to do some sort of national, combined nationalism and libertarianism. And that was kind of the way they were going while dealing with different pressures than we were in the U.S. Yes. Where we didn't have to be as explicitly nationalist. Yes. And Bismarck co-opted a lot of this sentiment, which was why it worked. Because what happened afterwards is when they militarily crushed it, Prussia established a parliament to appeal to these West German influences called the Reichstag which had differing levels of which didn't have a lot of power which is why Germany got universal suffrage before a lot of the rest of Europe because the king in the military held a lot of the real power and Bismarck who became the minister of Germany in the mid to late 19th century he saw this nationalist sentiment he said okay we're going to appeal to this rising German nationalism through saying Prussia will unify Germany and he also appealed to the lower classes and technological advance where Bismarck is an example where he was a reactionary German nobleman and he appealed to progressivist sentiment to further the reactionary goals and he was really brilliant at playing the concert of diplomacy where only a genius like him could have done this because it requires a tremendous amount of skill and he pulled along multiple kings of Germany where the king of Germany was often not on board with Bismarck's plans but then Bismarck would burst into tears in front of him and emotionally blackmail him until he agreed. I was gonna make a joke about how like not everybody can do this complex social asset unless you're a woman and then you're saying his example was crying. Bismarck was also one of the great seductors of his era where he was constantly sleeping with different women. that stuff. And he was a sensitive young man as well, a lot of sensitive young men. The society cultivated them on purpose at the time. And... It's almost like they're going to inherit the earth or something, I don't know. Almost. Bismarck beat the Danes first, where he needed a variety of external threats to get the Germans on his side, where Denmark was an external opponent. They had this small area called Schleiswig-Holstein at the bottom of the Jutland Peninsula. And he started a war with them, he crushed them. Germany industrialized earlier so they had an asymmetric advantage. They built the Kiel Canal from the North Sea to the Baltic, put the German navy in Kiel. He then fought the Austrians and interestingly people assumed Austria would win this war because they had a better military. People thought they did, but Prussia did a series of new reforms. And a big reason Prussia had the military advantage it did was they were the one of the first militaries in Europe to start using vaccines. And a much higher rate of soldiers died from taking vaccines, sorry, died from illnesses that vaccines stopped from actual battle. And I read this history book that looked at the coming Franco-Prussian war where a huge element of that was the Prussian military used vaccines. They also used reloading rifles which the French didn't. And they had their supplies down better. And so the Prussian military was just on top of stuff, so the French lost a lot more people to disease and to just military incompetence. But then the Prussians beat the Austrians very quickly in a matter of weeks. And the Napoleonic wars ended the Holy Roman Empire, but then the German Union was the replacement with Austria at the head. What beating Austria did was transfer leadership of the German Union from Austria to Prussia. So Prussia ran the political designation. So then Bismarck taunted Napoleon III, who had just finished his failed venture in Mexico, to attack South Germany, thus using his treaty to unify all of Germany against France, wiped out the French at the Battle of Sedan, which was another upset that showed that the German military was better than the French, who were thought to have the best military on earth, wiped out France, and then Paris fell to a communist society, which the Prussians conquered. And that ended the French monarchy. became a republic. The king demanded that Germany take Alsace-Lorraine, a German-speaking area in modern France. Bismarck said no because he didn't want to stain France's honor, which was the correct decision. And so the French resented that until World War I. They cared a lot more about what they were taking Alsace than their African empire that was thousands of times the size. And in the process, he unified Germany through using a constitutional clause that if Germany was attacked, you could federate it together. Right. And then you create your attack and the plan is activated. It's funny that Prussia made France a republic because we just talked about how France conquered everybody to turn them into a republic and then it was like, eh, never mind. And then, yeah. French was politically schizophrenic. They could not maintain a consistent political throughline. They would change their governments every five years. And- The only constant is that they're the best. They're like, we're not really sure what we're doing, but we know we're the best, that's all we know. That is ironically true, where the French could punch above their weight in practically every field, but they could not maintain a consistent government. It really shows that the French people were capable, but they just screwed up on the government. The Bismarck was kicked out of power because Kaiser Wilhelm II who got Germany into World War One didn't like him, where Bismarck was kicked out because and he was quite old at this point so he wasn't going to make it much longer, because he told Kaiser Wilhelm that they had to stay allies with Russia because to maintain the balance of power, and Russia had to be on the same side, while Austria and France were allies, Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to make Austria Germany's ally because they were both ethnic Germans. And Kaiser Wilhelm wanted a more aggressive foreign policy where Bismarck had delayed World War I by decades through maintaining the balance of power, where Bismarck said We're not going to have a major war if we have three countries in Europe out of the five great powers that are on the same side because the other two won't team up against them and So when Austria Germany and Russia were working together at a certain point France and Britain had no reason to fight a war what Kaiser Wilhelm did is he made a series of bad errors where? Germany and Britain were on good terms they such there is Anko Saxon brothers and Kaiser Wilhelm wanted a Navy to compete with Britain because partly he just loved boats. People would say at the time that Kaiser Wilhelm was retarded. This was probably not true, but there's a story of a doctor's note of someone assessing childhood Kaiser Wilhelm, not knowing he was king and saying he was retarded. My dad's teacher in fourth grade, fifth grade, or no, kindergarten thought he was retarded. My teachers wanted to hold me back in kindergarten first and second grade because they said I was a below average learner. Yep. Which is turns out they're not teaching the right things. Get back to the Prussians. And so Billy too. Billy too wanted an African colony. He was I think the nephew of Queen Victoria. And this alienated the British who allied with the French because they were terrified that if the Germans had a big enough military they would attack Britain. And he alienated the Russians because he wanted to conquer Eastern Europe. And so Kaiser Wilhelm made a series of errors that set up the coalitions that led to World War I. Well, Bismarck had maintained said coalitions longer, because World War I occurred a century after the Napoleonic Wars. And when a peace lasts that long, something was done right. Right. And so leading up to World War One, you have a strange political institution where Prussia was the biggest kingdom in Germany, but Germany had a series of sub kingdoms. And in World War One, you had, for example, I think the Duke of Bavaria, he had his own private military that he fought with the Germans. And Germany was a mix of this old feudal society which had industrialized predominantly through state interventions where after the unification in 1871 it brought all of the Germans together into a centralized market that meant that they could start industrial operations. And so Germany industrialized quite rapidly from 1871 until 1914 although earlier on there had been patchwork industrialization in the Rhineland in the West and this meant that Germany had a very rapid social shift and a lot of the 20th century sentiment was due to populations which industrialized quickly they had maintained the conservative values and they were disturbed by the degeneracy of the city culture and which I was going to talk about the transition from the Kaiser's period into the 20th century, but I can see we've already taken so much time. We'd have to make a separate video on Weimar and the Nazis. But you saw the unification of Germany and you also saw a radical shift in the German character because the German military where conscription was mandatory leading up to World War One. And so all German men served in the military, especially with the world wars. And the school system was designed to feed in the military. So I've read many authors from this time period who talk about how Germany went in a huge shift from the mid 19th century to World War One. And that authors like Weber or Jung or Nietzsche or Hayek or Gustave Le Bon all speak to this where they talk about the Germans of the mid 19th century were more laid back and chill and artisanal. And you could see this where Germans would refer to Bavaria as the Athens of Germany. And then Berlin was the Sparta. And so the school system and the works, the school system and the military brought all of these Prussian norms across the population. And so most of the traits that we see as quintessentially Germans, just obsession with clocks and time in schedules and strictness and following rules were Prussian states instilled through the socialization due to the industrial revolution and unification. Which is kind of a bummer to me because that does conflict with my image of like German towns in the late 1800s as being more creative and like. Colorful and thriving interesting and beautiful then the kind of like dour Modern character which maybe is connected to getting like I don't know enslaved these shifts take time And so at the start of World War one Germany had the traits you articulate where people would talk of the Germans make the best Art the best philosophy the best wine and if you go to Germany, it's a place of culture people said Dresden or Cologne or Berlin were just places of high culture that were incredible Now they don't even salt their food. Germany was seen as one of the most civilized places in the world, but all of the cultural shifts that led to the Nazis and totalitarianism were already occurring. It's just that cultural shifts take generations to work through. Sure. And that's part, I guess, connects to my like critique or nuance of the Bismarck situation. It's like, it's possible his strategy was correct, but what his strategy was was fragile. Maybe it just made something a little bit bigger. Maybe it extended it. Maybe that trade-off was worth it to have like a positive 1870s and 80s and 90s. But it's like, yeah, you're right. As long as this like two, three balance happens, then you're good. Oh, but someone messed up, something changed? Okay, well, now it's over. Why don't you unify Germany? It's just what you did is so staggeringly difficult. Look at all of the switchboard teams. It's like, oh my God, how does a person flick all of these switches. Yeah. And well, I just kind of get skeptical too, especially when you connected to the Prussian system. And like, I feel like that could be a way that you went too far into like, not nationalism, but like a different conception of nationalism, where you're doing like a mandatory service, and stuff like that. And then it kind of then you capture the culture of the nation in a central point and that that can and of course we already have problems with public education if the education system wasn't so bad there wouldn't be as many people calling for something like national service but it just like I don't I don't that's totally fair I don't like getting captured in that system it's fair that Bismarck established a centralized social estate and he was one of the architects of that he made the welfare state he brought that out But this dovetails quite well into the Bellapok era, which saw all of these tensions of these aristocratic systems Which just increased the voter franchise and so people were thinking how do we relate to the creation of these socialist universal suffrage societies? Who said that they said that that's the Bellapok era Before World War one was dealing with the exact thing. We're articulating Right, right. So they are that'll be fun to dive into. Okay Well, that was good. I will see you next week. Yeah, I think the Bella Polk could be a complete mirror of our current time in terms of trajectory and baseline. So that's that's fun. All right. Catch you guys later. Bye bye. History 102 by Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen, live players and econ 102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.