Afleveringen
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We’ve been here on World War I for seven episodes, if you count the 2 on the Russian and Soviet revolutions. See? I’m getting more concise. It took me 10 episodes to get through the American Civil War. This time, I tried to not get quite so bogged down in explaining the battles, even though that is one of the parts that is most interesting to me personally. But now I get to explain a few last battles in World War I, and then some about how WWI shaped our modern world.
And the big battle that is going to really end the war is the German offensive of the spring of 1918.
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Well, last episode, we left the chaos of the eastern front and the founding of the new country of the Soviet Union. In this episode, we’re going back to France and Belgium and we’re going to look at the turning of the tide on the Western Front. And do you know what turned the tide? Yep, several million farm boys from the United States. This isn’t only going to change the war, it’s going to change America’s perception of itself.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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здравствуйте, еще раз, товарищи. добро пожаловать в советский союз
For Lenin, transforming a society from near feudalism to communism was a tall order. To do that, you have to change a capitalistic economy into a centrally controlled economy. You have to destroy private ownership of land, homes, and capital. You have to destroy institutions that supported the capitalist system, like schools, universities, and government offices. You have take full control of the media, and suppress any dissenting voices. You have to control the police, the jails, the judicial system, and the armed forces. It’s a lot like what the democrats were trying to do under Joe Biden.
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здравствуйте, товарищи. добро пожаловать в русскую революцию.
One of the weirder and more catastrophic side effects of the First World War was what happened to Imperial Russia. We’re about to see not just one but two Russian Revolutions, and then several years of civil war within Russia, that is going to leave the whole country in shambles for many years to come, and is going to set up some of animosity that will lead to World War II, the Chinese Communist revolution, the Cold War, the Space Race, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. But before we get to all that, things are going to get really bad in Russia itself.
And before I get to what I have to say about the Russian Revolution, I need to say that there’s really no way that you can cover something as complex as the Russian Revolution in one 20 minute podcast, so I’ve broken this up into two revolutions, and two episodes.
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One of the unique aspects of World War I was simply the huge scale of the battles, with numbers of soldiers, sailors, and even airmen that the world had not seen in a long time. Some of the Roman battles back in the day involved over 100,000 men on each side. Way back in episode 8, on the Persian Wars, I mentioned that the Persian army under King Xerxes might have had as many as a million men. But World War I dwarfed even this. There were more than 5 million men on each side over the course of the war, and that was only on the western front, not counting the several million more involved on the eastern front and in other parts of the world.
We’re going to look at several of these big battles today, including the bloodiest one of the war, the Battle of the Somme, which is going to feature the single bloodiest day of the war, and is one of the deadliest battles in human history. In fact, if it wasn’t for a couple of battles between Germany and the Soviet Union in World War II, the Battle of the Somme would be the deadliest, bloodiest battle in all of human history.
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World War I was a very different war than all the other wars fought before it. There main reason for this was that military technology had advanced incredibly quickly in the previous 50 years, as had manufacturing technology and capability. Because of the advances of the industrial revolution, factories could now turn out rifles and cannons by the thousands, and bullets and shells by the hundreds of thousands. And the weapons themselves could fire farther and more rapidly, and more accurately than ever before.
Even though the technology of warfare had advanced dramatically, the strategy and tactics had not. We talked a bit about this in the episodes on the American civil war, but World War I took it to a whole new level. The real upshot of the changes in technology meant that an army that was well dug-in to a defensive position had a huge advantage over an army that was trying to attack them. Men in defensive positions were relatively safe, but men advancing over open fields to attack the defensive positions were incredibly vulnerable to artillery, machine guns, and even just plain rifle fire.
The military leaders of WWI knew this, but they didn’t really take it to heart until pretty late in the war. So we’re about to go into about 4 straight years of brutal trench warfare on the western front.
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Last episode, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian empire, all of Europe began to mobilize their armies, and move them to the borders of the countries around them.
If you are the leader of a country, and your neighbor begins to mobilize an army right at your borders, what do you do? Well, of course you let them in and put them up in nice hotels in your big cities, and give them all free benefits and eventually the right to vote, right? Yes, of course you do. No, when your neighbor sends an army to your borders, you put your army at the border as well, to protect your citizens and your country. And that’s what was happening all over Europe. And when two armies, who are trained to fight, are facing off against each other, it’s pretty likely that they are going to fight. That’s what they are there for.
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You know, we had an assassination last episode, too, didn’t we? Well, this one is going to cause a lot more difficulty for the world, especially for Europe. Things are about to get really crazy. The first 45 years of the 1900’s were just an amazing, crazy time to be alive. Someone born in 1900 would have been alive for two world wars, the Great Depression, the invention of nuclear weapons, the cold war, and if they had lived to be 70 years old, they would have seen the first moon landing. What an amazing time to be alive. If you survived.
But before we can get to all that, we have to talk about a couple of other things first, including the tensions that are about to cause several huge wars. We need to talk about the crazy web of alliances that crisscrossed Europe that are going to lead to the first world war. But even before that, we have to talk about one of the most important inventions in all of human history. No, I’m not talking about the invention of podcasting, not yet anyway. I’m talking about - the Wright Brothers, human flight, and the invention of the airplane.
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Well, welcome to the 20th Century! I’m sure a fair number of those of you who are listening to this were born in the 20th Century, as I was, and the rest of you were born in the 21st century. I know I’ve usually tried to refer to the centuries by their actual numbers, like the ‘1900’s,’ but now that we are entering the century that we’ve all lived in, I think it also makes sense to use the common designations that we often hear in the media today. So right now, we are in the 21st century, but many of us also have lived in the 20th century.
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And here we are! Episode 100!!! It’s only taken us 100 episodes to cover the first 12,000 or so years of human history. I have a tentative plan to get us all the way to, well, today. It’s going to take about 40 or so more episodes.
Since this is our 100th episode, I thought I’d make this a sort of special episode, and instead of covering new ground, we could take a quick look back at everything that has happened so far. Well, not really everything, but kind of the big highlights. And maybe a quick peek at what we’re going to cover from here.
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Wow, episode 99. I like the symmetry of having episode 99 be a summary of the world in 1899. Last episode, we looked at the changes in technology, science, and worldview that occurred in the 1800’s, and like I said, there was an enormous amount of change from 1800 to 1899. This episode, I want to summarize all the big stuff that happened in the 1800’s, and give us a kind of starting point for the world as it goes into the 20th century. Or, as I prefer to call it, the 1900’s. I want to sort of set the stage for all the things that are about to happen in the early 1900’s.
But first, let’s do some summarizing of what happened in the 1800’s. I’m going to go kind of regionally, by continent, starting with North America.
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Well, look at that. We’re finally coming to the end of the 1800’s! Only two more episodes, then we’ll be in the 1900’s. It only took us 30 episodes to cover that 100 year period. I honestly have no idea how long it will take to cover the 1900’s, as I haven’t mapped that out yet. Guess I ought to get started on that, huh.
Next episode, I’ll review some of the history of the 1800’s, and take an overall look at how the events of the 1800’s shaped our modern world, but I felt like I needed to have a special episode just on the massive change in worldview that happened, particularly over the last half of the 1800’s. That change in worldview was the result of the western world moving from what could be called a mostly Christian worldview to the world embracing what we now call Modernism.
I’ll get into a bit of a definition of that in a minute, but first, I want to make the point that this change of worldview is huge. It’s a seismic shift of worldviews, perhaps the biggest shift in all of human history. The only other comparable shifts were the shift of the Roman Empire from paganism to Christianity, or maybe also the Middle Eastern and African shift from paganism to Islam. Those were big shifts, though they both took longer, and the process was perhaps a bit slower than the shift to modernism. And part of the story of modernism is exactly that - the pace of change. Things change over time, but in the modern era, things change much more quickly. It’s harder for any individual person to adapt, because things are changing so much faster.
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Last episode we talked about the robber barons, and the changes in technology and manufacturing that they exploited to become phenomenally rich.
Part of that growth of riches was due to the expansion of the US as an exporter of stuff to the world. And as part of that expansion, the United States began to see itself as a legitimate world power, and began to seek to enforce its will on other countries.
This had started back in Episode 73, with the Monroe Doctrine, as President James Monroe, the 5th President of the United States, said, in 1816, that the US would protect South and Central America from the interference of European powers. Now, in the late 1800’s, the United States had begun to build its own battleships and other steam-powered naval vessels, and for the first time, the United States really began to project force upon other countries in the western hemisphere.
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Last episode, we looked at the very last chance the south had to win the war outright. After Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the south’s only chance was the election of 1864, and the hope that maybe the north would elect a new, anti-war government that would just let the confederate states go.
But the federal government in Washington knew that risk too, and they needed to make sure that it looked like the north was clearly close to winning the war, so that Lincoln and the republicans would be re-elected.
Vicksburg and Gettysburg had ended in early July of 1863. In November of 1863, Grant and Sherman won an important battle in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which gave the Union control of almost all of Tennessee, and opened up a pathway into Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama.
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The dystopian surveillance state we live in today has been called by some people ‘Late-stage capitalism,’ and is perhaps the inevitable result of the capitalist system. When the very rich gain so much money that they can control all the media, all the politicians, and have zero accountability for their actions, everyone else in the world suffers the loss of liberty, privacy, and the loss of their voice in the political arena of their cities, states, and country. We’re in that stage now, but guess what? This isn’t the first time capitalism has gone down this path.
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Well, we talked last episode about the expansion of the British Empire during the 1800’s, but there were a lot of other countries that were trying to build their empires as well. No one is going to be as good at it as the British, but a lot of other countries did try to get in on the imperialism action.
So I should maybe take a moment to explain what imperialism is, first. Most countries have something like natural borders. Or there are sort of geographic limits to where people from one language or ethnic group live. For example, most of the Germans live in Germany. If you go west a bit from where the Germans live, you get to a whole other group of people, the Dutch. Or southwest, you get the French. Different languages, different tribal backgrounds, different cultures.
Imperialism is the idea that the people in one ethnic or language group should basically attack and conquer some other group in another area, and take over that area and make it their own, part of their empire. So when you think about Napoleon, who called himself an emperor - it was his goal to take over most of Europe and make it all kind of French. Or at least, controlled by the French. That would mean that the German people would be controlled by the French, and the Polish people would be controlled by the French, and the Russian people, - well, we know how that turned out. It didn’t end well for Napoleon.
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When we last looked at the British Empire, 15 !! Episodes ago, Queen Victoria was on the throne. And she still is. I mean, not today, today it’s King Charles and his weird red official portrait, but I mean Victoria is still queen at this point in our timeline. We did kind of spend a lot of episodes focusing on the American Civil War, but we really didn’t cover much time. I mean, it’s only 1877 or so. This brings up an important topic - who did the British support during the Civil War? Well, technically, neither side. They had their own Empire to look out for.
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When Lincoln died, Andrew Johnson became the President. Johnson was from the south, having been born in North Carolina. When he was 17, his family moved to Tennessee, which is where he grew up. He joined the Democratic Party, being a believer in states’ rights, and served as a US Congressman, then the Governor of Tennessee, then a US Senator. He was the US Senator from Tennessee when Tennessee seceded from the Union, but he opposed secession, and he alone of all the southern senators stayed at his post in the US Senate.
Once Tennessee was completely under Union control, Lincoln appointed him the military governor of the state. So as a sort of southern democrat, he was an odd choice for VP, in some ways, but Lincoln thought that it would help carry the northern democrats who were in favor of continuing the war. Luckily for Lincoln and Johnson, Sherman had captured Atlanta in September, just before the November elections, and so public support for Lincoln and the pro-war Republicans was strong. Adding Johnson ended up being helpful as well, as he took away votes from McClellan who had run as a Democrat.
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Well, the Civil War is over. Mostly. The big battles are over, and though there are going to be a few more battles, everyone knows that the south has lost. The question on everyone’s mind is, ‘What’s going to happen now?’ Is this going to be a smooth transition, or a rough one. Turns out, it’s going to be kind of rough.
And one of the reasons that it’s going to be rough is what we are covering in this episode - Lincoln’s assassination. What’s also going to be rough is keeping this episode short, because besides history, my other favorite topic is conspiracy theories, and Lincoln’s assassination is full of them. In fact, if I ever finish this podcast - this short walk - my next podcast will be on conspiracy theories, and I’ll probably start right here, with the assassination of Lincoln. For the sake of brevity here, I’ll stay to stick to the generally accepted story, which, oddly enough, includes a conspiracy as part of the story.
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At the same time that Sherman was burning his way through Georgia, but avoiding major battles, Grant was up in Virginia, trying to provoke major battles. In March of 1864, Lincoln had put Grant in charge of all the Union armies. General Meade was still the commander of the Army of the Potomac, so Grant took Meade and together they headed into Virginia to try to defeat Robert E Lee. Grant’s goal was to draw Lee into a huge battle, and destroy the Army of Northern Virginia.
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