EP21 Hollandansandbrook

What this episode is about

This content features a conversation between historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, exploring a range of historical topics, with Holland focusing on ancient history and Sandbrook emphasizing the 20th century. The dialogue serves as a continuation of a previous discussion, highlighting their insights and diverse backgrounds while encouraging listeners to engage with their prior work on the "Rest Is History" podcast.

Key takeaways

• King Arthur: a mythic mishmash revealing more about medieval imaginations than any historical hero.
• Legends evolve; Arthur's story echoes the cultural identity struggles of post-Roman Britain versus invading Saxons.
• Historical inquiry into myths often uncovers societal values rather than factual truths—who needs facts when there's drama?
• Geoffrey of Monmouth spun Arthur's tale, blending folklore and nationalism into a mythos that shaped English identity.
• The real intrigue? Not King Arthur, but how legends reflect collective longing for heroism in turbulent times.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dan Carlin (Host) · 40 min speaking
• Tom Holland (Host) · 30 min speaking
• Dominic Sandbrook (Host) · 30 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Tom Holland, Henry VIII, Tintagel, Dominic Sandbrook
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Alfred the Great
3. 40:00 – 50:00: Threads
4. 1:30:00 – 1:39:43: Tom Holland, Dominion

Notable quotes from "EP21 Hollandansandbrook"

• Books for research materials i think we used persian fire for the persian shows we definitely used his book on the fall of the roman republic rubicon for our fall of the roman republic series and he's got a recent workout.

  about Tom Holland · at 1:19

• Traditions get absorbed into the they become the matter of britain and the kings of england see themselves as the rulers of the whole of britain so just as they absorb the…

  about William the Conqueror · at 7:00

• Called arthur henry viii loves the story of king arthur i mean i'm not right i'm thinking tom that henry viii repairs the great painting of the round table and yeah has it done for the visit of the emperor for the visit yes he does.

  about Henry VIII · at 8:01

• Us who are romanticizing these stories people were doing it in the middle ages and so my favorite example of that is tintagel this incredibly romantic castle in cornwall i mean…

  about Tintagel · at 9:00

• Say edwardian schools tom early 20th century schools and one of the jokes in it is that alfred ev the book constantly mixes up king arthur and alfred the great but i think…

  about Alfred the Great · at 10:48

• Britain it showed the heroin the woman who we'd been following she gets raped and she gives birth to a child and the last still is her looking down to see what she's born and…

  about Threads · at 42:16

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Tom Holland — Person · Main guest · 4 mentions · first at 0:57
  Co-host of The Rest Is History; leads much of the historical analysis (Arthurian tradition, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Roman military system) and is referenced as an author used for research.
• Dominic Sandbrook — Person · Main guest · 1 mention · first at 0:55
  Co-host of The Rest Is History; provides commentary on King Arthur, Roman vs Norman military capability, and modern strategic issues.
  Hosts i mean they have very varied careers and while dominic's point of emphasis is usually more in the 1970s 1980s sometimes churchill stuff tom holland rolls around in the mud that we like to.
• William the Conqueror — Person · Referenced historical figure · 1 mention · first at 6:50
  Anchor point for discussion of Norman England and as the comparator in the hypothetical matchup 'Caesar’s Romans vs William’s Normans'.
• Alfred the Great — Person · Referenced historical figure · 1 mention · first at 10:55
  Used as a comparison point for how later English/British memory blends heroic kingly archetypes (Arthur/Alfred) and as context for early English state formation.
• Henry VIII — Person · Referenced historical figure · 2 mentions · first at 7:57
  Example of Tudor political use of Arthurian legend; cited for repairing/using the Round Table imagery for dynastic prestige and diplomacy.

Books & papers

• Dominion — Book · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at 1:40
  Recent work on the impact of Christian thinking on Western society.
  On the impact of i guess you could say christian thinking on western society called dominion all of it worth your time and as a podcast the rest is history is absolutely worth…
• Persian Fire — Book · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 1:20
  Book used for research in the Persian shows.
  Books for research materials i think we used persian fire for the persian shows we definitely used his book on the fall of the roman republic rubicon for our fall of the roman republic series and he's got a recent workout.
• Rubicon — Book · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 1:28
  Book used for research in the fall of the Roman Republic series.
  Books for research materials i think we used persian fire for the persian shows we definitely used his book on the fall of the roman republic rubicon for our fall of the roman republic series and he's got a recent workout.

Places & events

• Tintagel — Place · Setting · 2 mentions · first at 9:05
  Mentioned as a romantic castle in Cornwall associated with King Arthur.
• Glastonbury — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at 7:26
  Mentioned in the context of King Arthur's legend.
  The first who is the king who conquers wales he's obsessed by arthur i mean he's the guy who goes the glastonbury claims yeah the glass end and digs up the tomb that supposedly…

Media & podcasts

• Threads — Media · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at 41:37
  Mentioned as a British series about nuclear war that had a terrifying impact.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:02 it's hardcore history so the conversation that you're about to listen to was done through a format that i ripped off from the people that were talking with because i was on their podcast not that long ago and i remember thinking that the way that they put it together structurally was fantastic for three people because when you have three people in a conversation it can get unwieldy sometimes i thought they did a great job the show i thought went fantastic and in fact i liked it so much that i thought i'd like to do a version of sort of a part two if you will on our own podcast so perhaps it's fair to say part one is available from the archives of the rest is history podcast and well this is part two the guest on the program the host of that podcast dominic sandbrook and tom holland both writers tv presenters radio hosts i mean they have very varied careers and while dominic's point of emphasis is usually more in the

1:11 1970s 1980s sometimes churchill stuff tom holland rolls around in the mud that we like to roll around and often and i've used his books for research materials i think we used uh persian fire for the persian shows we definitely used his book on the fall of the roman republic rubicon for our fall of the roman republic series and he's got a recent workout on the impact of i guess you could say christian thinking on western society called dominion all of it worth your time and as a podcast the rest is history is absolutely worth your time and if you go if you haven't already and delve into their archives tons of fun stuff on offering so check that out if you'd like what you're about to hear if you like what you're about to hear remember it's kind of part two of an ongoing conversation check out part one on their podcast when you have a chance and without further ado let's just call this part two

2:12 all right gentlemen i'm considering this part two of the earlier discussion that we had on your program and so i'm gonna throw some questions out there and you feel free to take them in any direction you want but since i have two brits with me um when when my mom was working in london when i was a kid i was about five or six years old and i was completely enamored with king arthur at the time and yet even at five or six i could tell that there was a bunch of nonsense involved in the story but i was under the impression that you could just stop passersby on the street in london and ask them for the true story and as you can imagine um i still am unsatisfied with the answers i got so i thought i would tap into the brain trust here and ask you guys your opinion and it may differ from each other do you think that the king arthur legend is rooted in any sort of reality or is this a fabricated myth from the

3:02 get-go tom do you want to go first on this well i i i don't think that arthur a historical author existed is is the kind of blunt and brutal truth and it it saddens me to say that because i would always rather that there was some kind of root of reality at the base of a myth but having said that um i think that the way that the story has evolved um it's it's had different kind of resonances in different periods of time and so in that sense tracing where the story comes from actually tells you quite a lot about medieval history early medieval history um the beginnings of brit the beginnings of england um the forging of medieval culture so in in that sense i think arthur is is a really fascinating topic of historical inquiry but i think that kind of burrowing around assuming that there is some real arthur at the base of it i think that that's a fantasy yeah i agree with tom dan i think um

4:07 i i don't think there was anybody called arthur and i don't think any historian or archaeologist or you know ethnographer or whatever whatever uncover a single individual who's at the heart of the legend but i completely agree with tom that the legend itself is clearly i mean like all legends it's rooted in something i mean it wasn't invented as a fiction um so it based it clearly draws on on folk memories on myths on you know it tells you an enormous amount not so much maybe about what we now call england in the dark ages i would say but the way that later generations thought of that period and the way they thought themselves and you know the i guess the the myth is more interesting than the man now isn't it i mean if there were a figure like arthur he was he must have been a what would you say tom a kind of romano british warlord or something i mean ultimately how interesting is that compared with the legend of arthur and

5:07 the the way that's accumulated over time don't you think what do you think dan well i'm i'm i'm riffing off what you guys just said because if this is a part of of uh englishness if we could call it that then how do we well but that but dan actually it's it's that that's like one of the things that's fascinating about it is that it's not about englishness so much although it becomes that because of course the english are the enemies right i was just going to shut up that's exactly where i was going if this is a guy fighting the anglo-saxons which are a key component of the blending that will eventually happen how is this guy anything other than some sort of romano celtic hero or something like that in other words how did how did he get wrapped up into sort of english history when like you said here he is fighting the saxon invaders who are going to fuse with the various kingdoms to create what we think of as england

5:55 correct well there are all these kind of these traditions that are floating around but the guy who really compiles them is a bloke called jeffrey of monmouth right who is writing as a welshman essentially and his his book is arthur is a key figure but not the only one and it's a story about how um britain is founded by brutus who is a refugee trojan who comes to britain and fights various giants and that's very much the level at which this is operating and you're saying that that's not historical it's whatever yeah just just double check alas alas england is still a nation of giants down down that's what i've heard from every english but yes jeff jeffrey jeffrey is basically casting the the english the sassonax the saxons as the enemy but of course by this point um you have norman kings of england and how it descended from the um from from william the conqueror um and they end up conquering wales so

6:58 the kings of england and so those welsh traditions get absorbed into the they become the matter of britain and the kings of england see themselves as the rulers of the whole of britain so just as they absorb the mountains and the uh and the valleys of wales into their kingdom so also did they end up absorbing these traditions about king arthur and that's why you have edward the first who who is the king who conquers wales he's obsessed by arthur i mean he's the guy who goes the glastonbury claims yeah the glass end and digs up the tomb that supposedly has that yeah and the monks were maybe involved in that for a little bit of you know glastonbury publicity and whatnot and then of course it works there are further to his son because the beginning of the 15th century sorry the the 16th century i guess when you have the the advent of the tudors so obviously henry tudor landing in 1485 beating which the third of the

7:49 battle of bosworth um the idea of the tudors as the heirs to arthur is really important to them so henry the seventh son who famously you know dies at ludlow castle paving the way for henry viii to become king he's called arthur henry viii loves the story of king arthur i mean i'm not right i'm thinking tom that henry viii repairs the the great painting of the round table and yeah has it done for the visit of the emperor for the visit yes he does yeah and one of the things that's also so as as dominick says it has political capital because in a way arthur is a very very famous british export english export at a time when england is really quite a peripheral kingdom to the rest of europe arthur is a name that matters the matter of britain is something that uh resonates through all the courts of europe so um the upstart tudors by laying claim to that are you know that they're aggrandizing their

8:47 own dynasty and they're aggrandizing their kingdom but i think also the way that um henry viii repairs this supposed round table that's hanging in winchester shows the way in which um it's not just us who are romanticizing these stories people were doing it in the middle ages and so my favorite example of that is tintagel this incredibly romantic castle in cornwall i mean it's kind of one of the jewels in the cornish tourist industry and it's a jewel because it looks exactly what you would imagine um king arthur's birthplace would look like um it's on a kind of rocky island the waves are crashing into the rocks there are kind of beautiful bridges that span it it looks like something from a medieval romance and the reason for that is that that's what it was designed to look like it was built by um the the brother of henry iii who said with the first son um richard duke of cornwall and he

9:44 builds it to look like king arthur's castle so even then they're kind of constructing and fashioning the myth and now of course when tourists go to tintagel they're they're buying into a medieval idea of what a medieval castle looked like so they were just kind of you know reflection after reflection after reflection all these kind of mirrors held up to each other which is what makes it such a brilliant brilliant story and i think one other element obviously is that in 1707 um england scotland officially become great britain the kingdom of great britain and at that point i think arthur does become he's sort of he's both a british hero and an an english one because england and britain certainly in the minds of the english become equated with each other so one of the most famous books ever written about british history or indeed english history which most of your listeners i'm guessing will

10:35 will seem like gibberish to them is the book called 1066 and all that a comic book by sellers and yateman at the beginning of the 20th century and one of the jokes in that book so it's it's basically a parody of the history that kids were taught in in i guess would you say edwardian schools tom early 20th century schools and one of the jokes in it is that alfred ev the book constantly mixes up king arthur and alfred the great but i think that's what even now lots of people kind of mix the two of them don't they tom yeah they have a sort of sense that they fought invaders they did stuff with candles and time keeping they were good christian kings all this kind of stuff well i i think actually i mean i think that's it's intriguing that they they make that joke because i think actually one of the models for jeffrey monmouth's portrayal of arthur is alfred's grandson athelstan who um is the english king who essentially creates

11:28 the kingdom of england and it's the first really to to make the princes of wales pay the english crown tribute and the his history of britain ends with the coming to power of athelstan it's it's as though this is where british history stops because the english have completely taken over and actually um the portrayal of out of of arthur in geoffrey of monmouth's history it has lots of echoes of atherstan so it's kind of like jeffrey is trying to supply a british mirror image of azelstan so the short answer to your question dan is no no yes it's complicated i remember i remember buying books in london as a kid uh arthur's in search of arthurs britain all these kind of things where it seemed as though um the the british themselves were trying to get a handle on what this was and i remember that that the book was very unsatisfying because instead of giving me a yes or no answer it sort of just took you through the the post

12:27 romano british you know myths and countryside and all that but you folks mentioned the normans a minute ago so let me let me bring you into something that i said um recently and let me get your opinion on it so i've always been fascinated with the fact that you know nowadays if you try to fight a modern army against an army from 30 years ago it's it's ridiculous but for most of human history with technology moving either as slowly as it did or with these sort of let's call it ebbs and flows of capabilities right so someone from an earlier era could have a military that was more capable from someone perhaps in a later era which is of course anathema now i had said that i thought that julius caesar's romans would have defeated william the conquerors normans and of course there's you know centuries and centuries and centuries between the two uh took some flack for that do you folks have an

13:19 opinion on that i have an opinion on that do you i i would say gay friend caesar would would undoubtedly be in the normans undoubtedly so the normans i guess their big innovation tom you tom knows more about this than idea so once i've spoken tom will tell me where i've gone wrong you're absolutely bang on the money their their big innovation is knights isn't it uh mounted cavalry basically heavy uh armored cavalry i guess you would say yeah the abilities big spears alexander the great had big spears tom as we've discussed on our own podcast many times um so i would say that the romans would have won because they had infinitely superior logistics they gave much more thought to military strategy they had a more resilient political structure behind them you know they had these incredibly well-trained well-disciplined professional troops and what are the normans i mean the normans are if you were being harsh about the

14:11 normans you would say they're a war band you know they're just slightly superior vikings aren't they tom frank you know french fried vikings i i think that norman cavalry is incredibly proficient um and as a kind of you know a norman boy you're trained to the saddle and you are raised to handle a lance from the saddle because it's a very very difficult thing to do apparently i've never tried it but it it it doesn't come easily um so they they are very very formidable cavalry but i agree with dominic and i completely agree with you dan i i think um caesar's legions would have wiped the floor with the normans because they were the most lethal fighting force that the world up to that point had seen um and in due course they would become even more lethal um because they were they would become these kind of professional armies and i think that the really the only way to defeat that class of infantry was the way that

15:11 the parthians did against um crassus's army in the desert which is to have kind of fast open blank expanse of of land and have very very mobile horse archers um but i think otherwise the romans are always going to defeat the normans not least because of course infantry against cavalry that's what you get at hastings that's the kind of you know the elephant against the whale kind of situation but caesar had great cavalry i mean caesar caesar recruited gaelic cavalry he recruited archers he had all kinds of auxiliaries who would have been part of the mix as well um and as a roman commander he would have been perfectly happy to sacrifice them whereas so the romans probably some tom during the romans have much larger numbers anyway because of the logistics they can support it greater numbers their military machine is far greater and also you mentioned hastings i mean the normans they don't want it's

16:00 lost yeah they almost lose that and the saxons the tax i mean the saxon heavy the anglo-saxon heavy inventory was reputedly the best in in europe which is why after hastings so many of them go to constantinople and serve as the bodyguards the varangians yeah um but but even so i mean you know the the anglo-saxon military cannot compare for professionalism or training or discipline to the romans well and that army had just come from fighting in the north too it wasn't even the best example of an anglo-saxon was it yeah right so i think i think if a close run thing at hastings against harold's army i i think i think they would have i think they would have been annihilated by caesar's army and that is centuries and centuries beforehand so so what do you think accounts for that and what makes it so because i'm fascinated with with the fact that the dynamic is so different today than it was throughout military history

17:03 right where or armies from centuries previously could i mean alexander's army would have given i would say many of the later armies ago there there was a book um by arthur farrell um uh i forgotten the title at hand but at the very end of it he had talked about he tried to imagine um napoleon trying to fight alexander and he said if you could discount the the um the effect of firearms on a morale level that that even might be a near-run thing what do you folks think about taking it that far into the into the recent past well i will it's it's technology isn't it yeah i mean it's technology that makes the difference um so i mean essentially the so the evolution you know the discovery of iron say as opposed to bronze an iron age army is going to defeat a bronze age army because because of the difference in the metals yes because because the effect of an iron sword is going to be you know lethal on a bronze sword for instance um

18:03 and likewise the development say if the stirrup facilitates um a quality of cavalry that you wouldn't have before that and obviously the development of of um gunpowder completely changes the equation but if you are measuring uh say a roman legion against um any any kind of army that is uh pre-gunpowder say from the haters say say from the first or second centuries a d when it when they're at their most professional i think that they are likely to win simply because they have the mass infrastructure of this vast empire behind them and that empire essentially that that empire is conquered by the legions but it comes to exist purely to keep the legions going so you could describe the roman empire almost as a a series of military bases uh you know with an with attack space attached that's that's essentially how the roman empire functions and when you have that amount of money that amount of

19:11 professionalism basically anyone that you meet is likely to be defeated and even when uh you know the roman armies do lose they do get defeated they always come back it's it's an absolute premise of of roman military doctrine that um the romans never lose so even if the germans wipe out some armies or the judeans wipe out some armies the romans will come back and they will inflict devastating punishment and nobody basically can withstand them and that includes the parthians um you know apart from karai basically the the the romans can always have the romans know that they always have the beating of the parthians that's me couldn't make the case couldn't one make the case though that carry it was it was bad general ship too i mean there was there's some yeah sorry i didn't mean to interrupt you dominic yeah no no go ahead i was gonna say that what tom was saying um i completely agree with tom's

20:03 point and i think military success is is often a question of technology and political organization and um i think we tend to because we emphasize so often generals and battles we lose sight of the fact that i mean tom said infrastructure and i think infrastructure is absolutely key there's a there's a brilliant book about the second world war by a guy an american who's based in britain called philip it's called phillips payson o'brien and um he basically argues that in the second world war all the battles are completely irrelevant and if you tell the story talking about the battles you're missing you know why the allies won which is all about logistics and infrastructure and um and i think you know anybody tons of your listeners i imagine will have played computer strategy games where you know you know that if you've got if the spreadsheet is is working and you've got all your resources and you've

20:56 got your logistics all sorted out then in a way it doesn't matter if you lose a couple of battles because you can you know you can recover from that and i think actually the roman roman political organization let's say was so robust so resilient so effective so efficient that it it was just infinitely better wasn't it tom than the organization of kind of western european medieval kingdoms much more sophisticated much more reliable tax base you know sort of it's it yeah it's seasoned it's it's professionalism yeah pure professionalism and it's not some bloke who's another woman who spends his time kind of you know molesting the daughters of the local peasants and then once every now and again is called on to fight the french or the english or whoever it might be of course he spent all his time in the saddle and all that but that's not the same as somebody who spent his life in roman military bases as tom says you

21:47 know trudging up and down the road practicing training being drilled you know i think that's and being full yeah and it's the drill for sure being forged into a single unit and and that's why really um you know it's it's only when states in europe are able to raise sufficient taxes again to keep professional armies yeah and therefore to have them drilled and there and and to operate as entities that you start to get anything approximating to the the profession exactly and that's why and that you don't get that drill and all that stuff without the political organization so what i would say i'm sure tom would agree is that the the roman empire at its height or the roman system at its height represents a kind of apogee of organization and then there's a long period of fragmentation and then i guess what would you say to on the early modern period you get organized european states organizing out

22:36 raising taxes at a level comparable to that so that's why napoleon for example who was able to draw on the power of nationalism in a way that people hadn't really done so powerfully before that that's why napoleon undoubtedly would have given the romans a very a good run for their money in a way that i don't think you know oliver cromwell's army uh as much as excited as they would have been about reading their bibles and you know i don't think they would have but i think i think also talking about napoleon and also thinking about the um the armies in the american civil war um the the idea of citizen citizen armies that's also a crucial part of of the way that legions are organized so a legion a legion is lit was literally a levy it it's it's the roman people in arms um and in time as you know the empire gets larger and larger and you need more and more legionnaires more and more legions

23:34 um that that sense slightly starts to diminish but he but but say in the first century a.d the roman republic has collapsed but if you want a microcosm of rome as it was in the republic this idea of a kind of a body of men who are their strength lies and their coherence and their discipline in their sense of comradeship you would go to a legionary base to find that you wouldn't go to rome and that sense of a kind of a martial civic identity is what the french revolutionary army uh napoleonic armies the um the armies in the american civil war and then the um the citizen armies um in in the first world war that's what makes them it's also crucial part of what makes them so lethal well it's interesting because you would think you would think that if the romans were beating you all the time that you would simply try to copy what they did right we all know that phalanxes spread across the ancient world once that became a

24:35 popular way of war and we know that there were things like imitation legionaries uh that were created once the romans started to show that the the roman way of war was so dominant but it never quite lived up to the original and it reminded me of um for example the the um the early history of modern battleships where certain countries could produce battleships and other countries would buy battleships from countries who could make them because this was going to be the equivalent of their roman legionaries if you didn't have battleships you couldn't compete and yet these states that couldn't build their own never quite seemed to rise to the level of the states that could why do you think that certain kinds of military technologies are transferable and other kinds of military technologies aren't is it because they're wedded to the society or the system or i mean somebody like victor davis hansen back

25:30 in the day would have said it's a cultural question you know the western way of war and all this any thoughts on why certain kinds of military technology aren't i mean barbed wire is transferable roman legionary seems to not be a step cavalry you know mongol hun uh scythian cavalry not really transferable any thoughts on that well surely the answer to that is that barbed wire is transferable because barbed wire is just a very simple you know it's just a very simple thing it's a device whereas a roman legionary is a political and cultural construct and you can't just it's a bit like i would say trying to to copy a roman legionary or indeed a kind of let's say an early 20th century dreadnaught or something it's a bit like thinking you can transplant it from one society to another it's like thinking you can just pitch up in any given part of the world and implant them you know western-style democracy or something

26:24 because these things are not they're not sort of i would say they're not accessories that you pick up at the shopping mall they are and they are an expression a reflection of a political and cultural sort of of of a landscape so in that sense i would completely agree with victor um dave what's the name victor david said yeah yeah i i would completely agree with that i think there was a western way of war that's obviously rooted in western you know let's say by the 20th century western democratic industrial civilization you can't just transpl plant something as complicated as a battleship or indeed a legionary from one setting to another whereas barbed wire which is relatively simple you can what do you think tom i completely i mean if you're a technologically advanced civilization then you're going to have more lethal weaponry i mean it's that that's always the way i mean you talked about computer

27:16 games if you play something like civilization where you start off with a band of hunter-gatherers and then you end up flying to alpha centauri that you know you know that going to war with a phalanx against a squadron of tanks you're absolutely going to be flattened and i think that um we can we can see that actually playing out in front of our eyes at the moment in ukraine where the russian armed forces had had the kit but because a lot of that kit derived from western sources now that they are subject to sanctions their ability to source that kit is diminishing and the more it diminishes so they have to kind of start shopping around in tehran or wherever to try and find the drones or whatever that they need and you realize the degree to which military proficiency is a reflection of industrial proficiency technological proficiency that's why the west has always been ahead of the game for so long is that

28:20 you know since the industrial revolution at least maybe before that it's always been at the cutting edge and perhaps you know one of the unsettling things if you're in the west at the moment is the notion that that perhaps that age is fading not with russia but with china okay you guys bring up now first tangent of the program here because you bring up something that i find fascinating i remember um as a kid we were wargaming and we we would talk about the the 1973 uh conflicts in the middle east and this idea at the time and you folks have certainly studied this that that hand that they that the handheld weapons of infantry were going to make tanks obsolete and that you could already see that um being foreshadowed in the 73 war well of course you know tanks sort of made a comeback and the the long struggle between offense and defense that you can see going back to armor and all those kinds of things in the middle

29:12 ages came into play and tanks would have got a second lease on life if you guys had to guess are we seeing the the predictions of 73 finally coming true now with ukraine and drones and and better handheld weapons that are anti-tank weapons or is this going to be another case of of a premature uh a premature writing off of of armor i've seen a lot of stuff on um debate on social media about this dan um the arguments that uh i think there were a lot of people who were overpraising the russians before the war started who were great enthusiasts for tanks and said oh the russians are you know their brute force is unparalleled and all this sort of thing and then there was all this sort of amateur footage of ukrainians with kind of you know sort of stuff they built in their kitchen taking out a tank yeah whatever hauling them with tractors right exactly so i don't know i mean the death of the tank has been predicted many times

30:09 hasn't it since the invention of the tank in fact the tank skeptics even when the tank wasn't was invented i would guess that tanks i mean it feels to me such a 20th century weapon of warfare and i would guess that in a world of drones and of handheld you know anti-tank sort of launchers or whatever i i would guess that in 2050 will tanks play such a part as they do now i would i would think not i i don't know and i don't envy um defense secretaries at the moment having to having decided how they slice and dice their defense budgets kind of knowing that um a wrong punt and you might be stuck with completely obsolete equipment um well that brings you the pentagon tom you wouldn't invest in tanks would you if you were the if you were if you were yeah but if i'm the pentagon i can afford to you know contact right you could hedge your bets yeah we have plenty of tanks yeah but but that but that then brings the

31:10 question from the land warfare element to the naval warfare element could one say the same about surface vessels i mean we're talking about big slow large targets um what do you think about that well i guess we'll have to wait for the chinese i know the straits of taiwan looms doesn't it to uh yeah and actually we in britain are the worst people to ask because we're of course completely because we still have the very strongly the romance of the royal navy so in the 1980s which is really my period um britain was very close to basically scrapping most of the royal navy and then the falklands war happened and we ended up keeping far more of it than we'd planned to and now we're sort of slightly i mean if people from the royal navy listen to this they'll be appalled to hear this but we're kind of stuck with it and it's a bit of an albatross because we're very unlikely to use it away so we we've got two huge aircraft

32:01 carriers that i don't think we can actually afford to send to sea because we don't have the um the necessary uh flotilla that would guard these aircraft carriers from being attacked by kind of underwater missiles or whatever um however however we have two aircraft carriers the french have one yeah it's very important that we shouldn't be overtaken by the french essentially that is justification enough well but you guys bring up now an interesting point and and i think it applies to the tank question too so if i say to american uh military people that the tanks are obsolete and you can see that this lesson is being taught in ukraine et cetera et cetera and one can make the same thing maybe about about surface vessels on on the on the high seas they will counter with the line that this is a system not a weapon and that that the system requires things like infantry that would fan out you know on

32:52 either side of the armored columns to prevent people from being able to get close enough to use handheld weapons uh they would say that that in in order to prevent for example your aircraft carriers being destroyed by you know surface-to-surface anti-ship missiles that there's an entire system involved you have you know picket ships and everything else could one make the case that some of this is poor handling of the entire system rather than criticism of an individual weapon well dan i don't in any way want to imply that i am in any way a military expert and oh that's how we're treating you no we're advertising that yes but but when it when it comes to the united states it does seem that there is um a problem which is that essentially the u.s is preparing for two kinds of war the first is the war kind of war that they've been fighting over the past 30 years so the 9 11 wars in afghanistan in

33:49 iraq whatever where all kinds of the the amazing kit that you've got is essentially useless because the people that you're fighting the enemy it's all so asymmetrical that in a way you have to invest all your money in intelligence and counter counter-insurgency and all that kind of stuff i mean i suppose it's a lesson in vietnam the other is of course the that the us is preparing for a superpower conflict first with the soviet union and now i suppose with china um and again the prospect of that is so horrendous that you know the exchange of a few nuclear missiles would again render all the tanks and the airship the aircraft carriers and so on useless nevertheless the us is the number one superpower and it's a number one superpower because it has the most proficient military so in a way it's a kind of badge of superpower status but it seems to me a badge that you can never really use i mean you can never bring to bear with

34:45 the full intensity perhaps that you know in a kind of a dream campaign you would because you're never going to be fighting those kind of you don't see vast tank armies clashing in the in the plains of china tom i don't no that's very important no i don't i don't at all when they're going to use all these tanks and you know and and there was a kind of brief upsurge of dread i suppose that maybe this is what we faced in europe that tanks russian tanks would would um drive across the ukrainian plane and then perhaps into poland or you know and who knew where they might stop but i think that that that prospect now is looking fairly fairly improbable as well well which brings us to one of the reasons that it's fairly improbable and i would say nuclear weapons come into play and i've been having discussions with people about this lately and i find it appalling the the willingness you know when we

35:36 were all we're all from a generation where where thinking about nuclear weapons was something that was on our mind immensely more often and more deeply than it's on anyone's mind well maybe maybe it's changed in the past year but but two years ago three years ago i would find an appalling lack of let's call it respect maybe for what these weapons can do um if and i i had written this down to potentially talk about but if we could imagine what a nuclear bomb or missile being used today filmed with iphones you know from on the ground in full living color with sound what this really meant i feel like it might be the kind of thing where you would you would you would fully understand i mean i mean let's put this had we never used nuclear weapons in the second world war atomic bomb doesn't get dropped on hiroshima and we have nuclear weapons but we've never seen what they had done i would imagine it would be

36:35 much more likely that they would be used had nuclear weapons been used after the second world war maybe let's just say 20 years afterwards do you think that would be something that would prevent or or or inhibit their use more this is a weird way to phrase this question i'm trying to figure out maybe the value of having an object lesson versus the theoretical idea of oh we have these terrible weapons and they'll do terrible things but you can't even imagine what that might mean there's a wonderful and i'm sure you guys have seen something like this there's a wonderful thing online where you can see how far the blast radius of a of a big nuclear weapon i think it it's paris or something that they use or maybe you could you could choose the city and you can see exactly how far the damage is do you think when we're talking about unimaginable weapons like this that they almost lose their ability to

37:27 deter because we can't even imagine what we're talking about here so danny you basically implying that hiroshima and nagasaki are too far distant to serve as object lessons now i i here's what i would suggest i would suggest that if you look and and i know you guys have probably done this too if you look at the example there are so few i mean you know as a former television news reporter they used to teach you the value of pictures and sound and stuff like that to have black and white photos or the tiny little things that we have imagine the imagine if we had iphones at hiroshima and nagasaki and the different levels of intensity that something like that would have on our collective psyche versus and also let's be honest if you're a second world war um uh uh what's the word i'm looking for uh aficionado it sounds so strange to say you're a second world war buff or something but i mean there is so much violence and so much

38:25 disaster from the strategic bombing campaigns and everything else that it all sort of blends together but had there been a nuclear weapon used in 1958 for example with color photos and i i feel like the object i mean it's almost like a generation has to almost learn these things over and over or we forget them um i don't know that there's a question there gentlemen but maybe pick up from work they're actually two different issues there so one is our fear of nuclear weapons but the other one um which i don't think is the question you're asking but i think it's just as interesting actually it's about the way in which is a society we regard moving color images as so close to us so we say look at the beatles in the peter jackson documentary they look just like us yes they do you know and then we look at people from the second world war and we say you know they look ridiculous they're wearing old-fashioned clothes

39:19 they're moving jerkily in the back black and white footage and so on and i do think you're absolutely right that black and white footage and black and white still pictures act as a kind of barrier to our empathy maybe because we just think old people from history so they don't kind of count in the same way that that people do now having said that to return to your the your real point i think in a way your question is is too kind to human nature because you're basically saying if we had incredibly picture-perfect imagery of you know the effects of a nuclear bomb we would learn we would be chastened we'd be horrified and we would you know mend our ways in some way but you know we had we had in color imagery of the effects of bombing in vietnam let's say or or so many wars since then so many atrocities and human beings haven't changed people have carried on fighting wars and disgracing themselves in various

40:19 ways so i don't actually think even if it was in color even if it was so vivid and palpable i don't think we would change i i i mean i think that say i don't know um america and china and russia each had 10 nuclear missiles the likelihood is that they would use them um because it wouldn't mean the end of of of them as countries and it wouldn't mean the end of human civilization the reason that that we were all terrified of nuclear war and we lived in its shadow was that it wasn't because we we'd seen that the horror inflicted on hiroshima i mean if just as much horror was inflicted on dresden or hamburg or tokyo or whatever um it was the knowledge that human civilization would be destroyed and perhaps life on earth would be destroyed and that that hardcore of scientific knowledge was then played upon by filmmakers and science fiction writers in ways that because it was rooted in reality

41:31 certainly gave me nightmares and i think gave gave an entire generation nightmares so you had the day after in the united states we had a series in britain called threads um and the the impact of this was terrifying and i remember a a a science film of exactly the kind that you were describing that that was themed around what would happen if a nuclear bomb went off over st paul's and i i must have been about 10 when this went out and i still remember that they wanted to show what the impact of flying glass would be and they put a pumpkin on a stick and then smashed the sent the flying glass and the the pumpkin was completely lacerated couldn't sleep after that for for weeks and weeks and weeks and then at the end of threads the um which tells the story of a nuclear war that destroys britain it showed the heroin the woman who we'd been following she gets raped and she gives birth to a child and the

42:24 last still is her looking down to see what she's born and she's screaming with horror and that was the thing that the the film ended on that absolutely stays with me and it means that the very notion of of nuclear war is a shadow that hangs over me to this day i think that the interesting contrast is say with um global warming or climate change which is often described as the equivalent challenge facing um people the generations younger than ours the problem with that is firstly that the science is less absolutely grounded and secondly that you can't sum it up with a kind of image of you know a pumpkin being smashed to pieces by glass or a pregnant woman looking down and and seeing that she's given birth to some monstrosity it it doesn't lend itself to images of that horror even though in the long run i i i don't know i'm not client scientist the results may be um maybe analogous so i i think that when you said that we we

43:24 need to kind of re-educate ourselves about nuclear nuclear weapons i think you're right because essentially for what um 30 years now the world has been able to assume that it won't happen and part of what happened with ukraine and part of what is a kind of you know it's like the first onset of a migraine with taiwan is the possibility that we might be plunged back into the kind of scenarios that gave rise to those those terrifying films in which this isn't it interesting that those films i mean they're about us as the victims right and i think what's held what held the world back so i think that's an excellent point about the if they'd only had a few nuclear weapons that have used them and i think the reason is because what deterred nuclear war was not the fear of inflicting terrible you know atrocities and damage but it was the fear of encouraging us yeah what happened to us it was if i would say human history shows that if

44:23 people are presented with an opportunity to inflict a horrendous horror on their competitors they will by and large take it it's the fear of incurring that that is that has held um that held the superpowers back in the cold war let me throw an a let me throw an angle in there too that makes it uh if not unique then very unusual in military history uh you don't have to be a belligerent to be a victim in the nuclear conflict right in other words if you're india and you're going to be uh you're not going to be involved in this war for example it doesn't matter in a full-on nuclear exchange people in india are going to suffer all that so it's almost like all of a sudden real war total war as as we used to call it is something that that involves everyone now and so so i mean it's it's a fascinating way of looking at at something that's been a human construct since civilization first arose right i'm

45:18 gonna fight you but now if i fight you maybe you could say that that that the person right over the border is gonna be affected because you know refugees might stream over the border but now this is a you're gonna be involving everyone in your personal um in your personal sort of conflict in a way that i mean there is no neutrals right movie i remember um i remember reading about years ago but i mean the polluted milk in scandinavia from radiation that i mean you start to realize okay all of a sudden if we want to use all the weapons that are in our arsenal um it's going to involve people that are not part of the conflict at all what did bertrand russell say he's you know he talked about that it was unreasonable for man to expect to walk a tightrope you could walk a tightrope for a certain period of time but it was unreasonable to expect you to be able to do it forever and i feel like um to

46:11 piggyback up on what tom had said um we've almost forgotten that we're walking on that tightrope and it's it takes something like a a ukraine and nuclear powers uh being angry with each other to potentially remind us that we're still on that tightrope and it's just as dangerous as it's always been if not more well i i i mean i think that um obviously having your city uh pulverized is is an utter horror but a deeper horror is to imagine that it's permanently poisoned so that's what you have with chernobyl you see it's happened decades and decades ago but people are going in there now in the war and they're they're dying from going there and the idea that the whole world would be poisoned in that way i think adds an extra dimension of terror and then in the 80s um scientists both in the soviet union and then the west combined on a paper to argue of what was called a nuclear winter the idea that

47:08 so much debris would be thrown up that the sun would be blotted out and therefore even if uh you know radioactivity weren't completely lethal to life on earth the sunlight would would go and without some crops would die and people would starve to death and the whole world would starve to death and i remember that they the scientists that presented that paper they chose a poem by byron and a translation of it by pushkin to put at the head of the paper and byron's poem he wrote it in um 1816 which was the year without a summer the same year that um gave rise to uh to frankenstein the story of mary shelley's novel frankenstein was a big volcano in that year right that's right it was the year before i think and it it kind of spewed it up and and so the sun was blotted out um and and actually it was the last time of mass famine in europe um but uh in byron's image the whole everything just goes dark um and the theme of it is

48:05 is that no one is responsible they wants to blame for it it's just a curse that happens and the last thing is is two people discover some wood they set light to it they realize they hate each other they kill each other and that's that's the theory note on which it ends the one thing one thing we do know interestingly though is that um these kind of things did have an effect on policymakers so we know for example that ronald reagan was really interested in things like the day after he was strongly affected by them he was personally had a horror of nuclear weapons i mean the irony is that all the time you know his critics were sort of calling him a gun-toting cowboy and stuff who was poised to start world war three but we know now that reagan read a lot of this stuff that he was really interested in the day after um and profoundly affected by all of this so a responsible you know these these

48:56 i guess that that bears out your point dan that these reminders if you like whether they be scientific reminders or or fictional kind of science fictional reminders they mattered during the cold war and they they helped to instill i guess you would say a kind of responsibility and restraint let me explain for people who maybe don't know what we're talking about we're old enough to remember that the day after was a movie right the day after middle 1980s it came out and the day after was a dramatization of what would happen in the nuclear war and the story is and i'm not sure it's true but i've read it on in several different memoirs was that ronald reagan used to have movies screened in the white house and they screened this movie for him and he was profoundly affected by it in a way look this is a man who had studied you know i mean he should have understood without having to see the movie but the movie made all the

49:45 difference and it and supposedly the story is that this led to him taking uh mikhail gorbachev aside for a private conversation during a summit which led to all i mean one could argue that there were a lot of dominoes starting to tumble right then that created a lot of the world we live in right now and and wouldn't that be amazing if you were the filmmaker that made the day after if you could somehow tie your your artistic decisions into something as monumental as that and there's another element to that which is that um uh some of your um listeners may know about the able archer oh yes the near miss yeah yeah yeah the near-miss so when so this is a there was a nato war game um i think it was in the low countries and the kremlin were very worried that this was actually the prelude to war because their own war games envisaged that nato would strike during a war game so they they you know they got in a

50:42 terrible sort of um state about it i think it's oleg kordievsky um the the man who saved the world right right who passes the who passes the story to his british handlers and it finds his way to the white house and when reagan heard this he was really struck and astonished because of course up to that point reagan thought of the soviet union as the evil emperor and he thought you know these guys are the villains they're out to kind of you know they're part of the great the great conspiracy of international communism and um for the you know he he sort of i think he writes it in his diary or his journal or something for the first time he thinks they're just frightened old men and they and he he's stunned by the idea that they think the west would strike them first and um i think it's such an interesting you know he it never occurred to him before that the russians were as frightened of being nuked by him as he

51:40 was by them because to be afraid of nuclear war you've got to think that someone who has his finger on the nuclear button would press it and that requires you to think quite dark thoughts about um people who may be your enemies and i think that people both in the west and in the soviet union did think that about their adversaries and you know as dominic says that is was a crucial part in opening reagan to the notion that perhaps um the evil empire wasn't so evil but i also think that that is one of the reasons why people are so unsettled by what's happening in ukraine now is that um putin has the look of dr evil about him and he he has he has the kind of sheen of uh you know a super villain in the kind of film where the villain is threatening the world with nuclear blackmail and the fact that um you know russian propaganda has made play with that has kind of hinted at devastating responses kind of breaks a

52:40 taboo because actually even you know the the idea that you would threaten first use was something that both sides i think is that right dominic avoided during this yeah i mean both sides i mean i mean either side was doing that um of course i mean it's a slight difference isn't there because putin presumably is talking about tactical battlefield nuclear weapons so he's not talking about incinerating although his tv his tv networks you know they yeah well they're all they're really i mean they're stuck this has got a huge airplane down in britain because they yeah there's a whole fascinating subject here about how the russians actually rather like the iranians they they take the attitude that britain is the real villain in the and it goes back to the 19th century and all that that's a great game britain is the real villain and uncle sam is the sort of rich naive sort of cats poor for the british royal

53:34 family the bank of england and the other sinister conspirators who are really plotting to destroy russia or whatever and so they we we are the bond villains yeah right and so they they their images their images i mean they have they show again and again images of nuclear weapons destroying britain i mean there's so much so that they had a protest from the irish um foreign ministry because those missiles also showed them blowing up ireland well they had they had they had that they had that classic british the classic bond film thing where they were going to detonate a nuclear missile in the north in the atlantic and a tsunami would wash over both britain and ireland you know what's interesting though guys is that is that all it would take was for someone like vladimir putin to to use a nuclear weapon in an out of the way place in the middle of nowhere blow up some factory out and the taboo would be broken and i mean

54:28 i i believe that there you know when we talk about needing a reminder and we were talking about how long it's been since these weapons were used there's this sense that okay well no one would really use one and i think something like that would would you know i don't mean to to put ideas into someone's head but certainly the ideas are already there something like that would be a game changer because it would literally be the way of saying you think this could never happen we're going to show you that we're serious you know it it's funny because after the soviet union fell because you'd mentioned abel archer but i mean the the last time we almost had a disaster was during the boris yeltsin era where there was a mistake right where somebody had misunderstood radar or something and you turn around you go okay when i was i don't know a television news guy in my 20s that's how we thought a nuclear war

55:17 might happen right no one would obviously go go and and declare the third world war but these things i mean there's a great book called the dead hand which is about the um the the soviet uh system that was in place in case their entire command and control structure were wiped out it could still launch a retaliatory strike um and i think during the yeltsin era we thought okay the only way this is going to happen now is is because of a mistake and now we're back where we were 40 years ago where you could actually envision someone like putin saying okay i'm going to use a nuclear weapon in the middle of nowhere just to show everybody that they're out there we can use them and you're not safe from them but i mean to be positive just to be cheery he's hinted at that and that this is clearly what he's brilliant at is making people's flesh creep and you know menaces it's you know kind of mafia type uh intimidation of

56:18 shop owners or whatever i mean that's he's very british as shop owners is that the nation of shopkeepers is that what we're talking about well okay i mean he's kind of you know it would be awful if if you did something and i had to you know doing it something terrible in response without actually saying what the terrible thing nice country you had here be a shame if something happened to it yeah yeah exactly but but actually there have been a kind of number of dogs that haven't barked in the night so obviously the use of a tactical nuclear missile uh battlefield nuclear missile is one of them but also and i don't know whether this is because our cyber security is so good or because actually russian cyber attacks aren't as good as as we thought they were but there hasn't there haven't been kind of devastating attacks on western cyber infrastructure and you'd thought that perhaps there might be bear you know

57:08 certainly a kind of defense institutions or whatever uh and that is is a kind of the raft of hope that i cling to yeah there's a reassuring element of shambles i guess i guess you could say though dan that's actually not reassuring because it's out of incompetence and chaos that mistakes yes are made and accidents happen so i suppose you can see that two ways you know will a nuclear war start because a dr evil thinks it's in their interest or will it start because people are in a complete mess they're frightened everything's falling apart around their ears i mean that's the that's probably the more likely scenario isn't it than a than a villain starting you know bond villain starting about i think the implication of the fact that these kind of horror options haven't been taken up i i i i suspect must be because there are channels of communication that remain open between the kremlin and the white house between

58:04 the pentagon and the the russian military establishment and it must have been intimated on both sides that there are red lines beyond which you shouldn't go but you guys know probably sufficient you you know that that sometimes dynamics get ahead of decision making i mean that's the whole first world war idea that's the cuban missile crisis and which brings me back not to change subjects radically but we called uh the series that we did on the first world war blueprint for armageddon because it was it was um as gwen dyer the military historian had said you know the the entrance into the idea of total war that makes the second world war possible and the kinds of conversations we're having now possible can i shift and ask you guys another question similar to the one we did about the romans and and the normans in but i want to ask you your views on uh first world war germany versus second world war germany and i had made the the

58:56 statement once that i thought uh relative to the other powers involved that the first world war german uh state was the stronger or more dangerous foe than the second world war one now in the united states there's a fascination with the second world war um the nazi state the technology is enticing and entrancing and all those kinds of things uh but it was my position that the first world war was the more stable society the more deep society with the with the stronger foundation do you folks have any um views on that maybe you differ from each other i don't know i i totally agree with you damn um so i'm a complete heretic on this because i think we discussed when you came on our podcast i think britain should have fought on the other side in the first world war which is not a view you will often no no so i'm a great fan of you know i like it yeah i like a central european those damn belgians were asking for invasion

59:50 right right this was our chance you know it's a deal with the french once in favor we blew it anyway listen i think um i think i think i i would say i agree with you wilhelmine germany um was in many ways you know an infinitely as you say deeper more stable more secure society than nazi germany so you know if you think i mean germany entering the 1910s highly educated very high level of political participation very strong labor unions for example um it's it's not obviously much less democratic than britain or france let's say uh and i think it's you know it's in many ways remarkable given the forces arrayed against it by the end of 1914 that germany fights on as long and almost forces a draw you know it could force to draw conceivably in 1917 or 1918. nazi germany on the other hand it's obviously led by um somebody who is descending as the war continues foot deeper and deeper into into paranoia

1:01:05 um it's unstable um it doesn't have clear war aims um everything is being improvised you know as they go along it also has this distraction of its kind of anti-anti-semitic mission um which they they feel more and more motivated to accomplish as the war goes on and hitler's sort of obsessive anti-bolshevism as well which obviously leads him to invade the soviet union i mean it's a much more it's it's a more what's the word it's more dysfunctional more hysterical kind of society so i would say yeah the 1910s germany is a much more formidable um proposition it's also got it's got i mean the austrian hungary is not the greatest ally in the world but it's also got the ottoman empire um you know which which britain makes a terrible mess of fighting at first at gallipoli so yeah and i think you know that the first world war could easily have entered in a draw um whereas there's a good argument i would say

1:02:09 that hitler was always going to lose the second world war once he does not britain out in 1940 and especially once he invades the soviet union and then declares war in the united states a draw is unthinkable from that point onwards i would say i i completely agree that uh will hermione germany economically culturally militarily is formidably strong i mean it's it's probably with the united states a vision of the future if you're standing there in in 1910 um britain already seems antiquated in comparison to both those countries um and and bill hermione germany with its i mean it's kind of universities it's you know we've said at the beginning that technology and ability to innovate is fundamental to military prowess and power and in that sense germany is absolutely cutting edge however i mean obviously the one thing to say about nazi germany is that ideas kill as well as tanks and the ideas that the nazis embody are

1:03:10 lethally dangerous uh way off the scale compared to any of the combatant powers in the first world war and that has to be factored into you know i think any any comparison of the of the two germanies that um six million people were destroyed for ideological reasons by nazi germany um and that simply wouldn't have happened uh even had had the kaiser won the first world war nothing comparable to that would have happened i don't think that um that being defeated by the kaiser would have been a pleasant experience but it was um you know it was nothing comparable to being occupied by the nazis let me say that i think that plays a role into why the first world war state was stronger than the second world war that you go to the to the cemeteries in the first world war the german cemeteries and you will come across the graves of jewish german patriots who fought for that regime and you look at the for

1:04:07 example nuclear scientists who defected from uh from the nazi german state and then help the allies these are all people who conceivably in a less ideological less anti-semitic sort of society would have perhaps been fighting on the other side it doesn't that by its very nature when you're when you're taking people who are members of your population and i mean even at the end of the war when the resources were so strained they're still sending you know the train cars to the death camp right absolutely and i agree with dominic that um basically the moment that hitler fails to not britain out of the war he's going to lose the war i think but suppose he had not britain out of the war suppose he'd occupied britain suppose he had um established a kind of um empire a reich over over continental europe and and britain um the the impact of that would have been immeasurably more devastating than the allies in the

1:05:08 first world war being knocked out do you even see that as paul you see that when i look at it and maybe i just lack imagination i i can't imagine that happening i mean churchill talked about you know everybody you could always take one with you and all that but but was a cross-channel invasion and you guys know i mean i mean simply i mean a d-day in reverse seems to have been well again i did i don't think that that there was ever any prospect of an invasion but i do think there was a prospect of britain suing for terms yeah i agree that's which is why i think i think what is it ten days in may nine days i mean i can't remember the john lucas book yeah brilliant analysis as the kind of the pivot of the 20th century this this this period while dunkirk is happening in the and france is in the process of rendering and there's a possibility that churchill will be toppled and that the british

1:06:01 government will open peace feelers to italy and therefore by extension to germany and the very process of opening up peace feelers would have crippled britain's ability to maintain morale uh and that perhaps there you would you know britain might not have been occupied but it would have been a kind of vicious regime and would the united states have become engaged then if it was a kind of continental europe with this lethally anti-semitic racist regime that essentially was kind of trampling pretty much every ideal that the modern contemporary west holds sacred i i think i think that would have been possible i think um the the scenarios are interesting because let's imagine that um the kaiser's germany either wins i mean it wins the first world war i think by britain not becoming engaged in the war so let's imagine that kaiser germany uh wins the first world war the kaiser germany is then hegemonic in continental

1:06:57 europe in the 1920s um but it's it's a it's a triumph it's triumphalist it's kind of strutting about uh it's it's sort of preening but there are other there are still counterweights to it i mean britain is still a counterweight presumably um but also it doesn't necessarily i mean the kaiser's gym at that point has achieved its aim it has you know it has shored itself up against itself up against czarist russia it has put france very firmly in its box presumably the kaiser now has his place in the sun that he's always wanted but i'm guessing the kaiser's journey doesn't have many more complicated war aims in the 1920s hitler's germany by contrast is so unstable it's based on constant conflict and constant on chaos and so i don't see a nazi new orlean you know that world of the kind of the man in the high castle the the amazon drama where nazi rule continues for decades i don't really see that happening

1:07:58 because i just think that sort of that sort of furious his sort of i use the word hysterical before that almost hysterical dynamism at the heart of the nazi project would unravel i'm not sure eventually i i because i think that at the heart of nazi ideology is the idea that the strong have the right to i mean not only the right but they have a kind of moral responsibility to crush the weak i mean the nazis do what they do not because they want to be evil but because they think they're doing what's right for their race um and if they've won a kind of victory then that legitimates that perspective uh and it only has to last for say you know a generation or two and that then becomes part of the fabric of the way that people tom you think people can copy them you think people would you think nazism would become ingrained in the way that i know you think because tom i mean i'm not going to make tom's a

1:08:52 great argument for him but tom one of tom's great themes is how even if we are not you know um consciously christians everything we do is sort of permeated with kind of as it were christian ideology but you think that would have happened with nazi ideology after one generation i i think that um part of the reason why the nazis in the contemporary west serve as the embodiment of evil is that um they they did kind of target some of the key kind of ideological foundation stones of christian europe of which obviously one is the idea that um the stronghold duty of care to the weak the nazis repudiated that and the other is the idea that all human beings have an inherent dignity and that there is no jew or greek uh and again the nazis repudiated that um the fact that they were defeated kind of has demonstrated even if it's subliminally the fact that those ideas are not just morally wrong but are

1:09:55 are kind of that they're unsustainable that you can't organize a society on that basis um and and that i think is is is very important to the way that the west understands not just its politics but the very essence of human nature but it had the nazis one had they kind of enshrined that as you know their their own victory as evidence that what they were saying was right that that their race the nordic race was superior to other races and that strength was more important than weakness and that the the the powerful did have a responsibility to crush the powerless and they could point to a prostrated europe as evidence for this and they were not overthrown they were not humiliatingly defeated they were not crushed they they were not obliged to surrender unconditionally then those ideas would have had a currency in a way that they haven't in the uh as a result of what actually happened a world in which fascism was not

1:10:59 conclusively defeated would be one in which it continued to thrive because it does play with with the way that that you know lots of people do instinctively think people do instinctively people are instinctively chauvinist people are instinctively inclined to think that the stronger more important and and better than the weak and it's only kind of you know centuries and centuries of christian conditioning really in the context of europe that has changed that view and if the if those values have been seen to be defeated then i think that the corollary of that would would reverberate through the the decades so this is going to be a strange transition so i'm going to going to try to transition it this way one could make certainly for the first world war germans one can make a case that there's there's a colonialism aspect involved right the the place in the sun question is much more open but even in the second

1:11:50 world war strategic war aims of germany that's a colonialism too in a sense right we're gonna we're gonna take over the slavic lands and we're going to to rule over the slavs and they're going to be the slaves for the nazi state we had talked earlier about um colonialism and i'm curious about you know in the united states we have certain figures in history one is tecumseh for example who tried to unite the native tribes against uh uh the united states at a certain point to try to figure out how you could um fight back against the colonial powers and the colonial movements i i find that um if you go into the history of say sub-saharan africa north america central asia south asia you have all these attempts to try to fight back against the divide and conquer strategy that's so important in the colonial approach i wanted to ask you guys if you had an opinion which region would you consider the

1:12:46 greatest odds-on favorite to resist colonial subjugation if they were ever able to unite in a tecumseh-like way against the colonial powers so any any region of the world that was ended up being absorbed into a european as part of the divide and conquer sort of strategy yes no question india um the british conquest of india was was a kind of anglo-indian conquest i mean it was it wouldn't have been possible for the british to because the numbers were in the company yeah and you know it's a private company taking over this the whole subcontinent i mean there's no way that they could possibly have done that unless india was completely fragmented and there were substantial uh segments of um indian society and different states within the framework of the whole subcontinent willing to work with the british and in a way to use the british just as the british were using them so the raj was it was a kind of anglo-indian

1:13:47 condominium but i think that it was entirely possible in the 18th century for you know say in south india uh the sultanate of of um hyderabad uh of mysore uh tippy sultan in my saw was i mean he he a heroic fighter against the british had had hyderabad had mysore perhaps that they allied with the americas there's no way the british could have could have conquered india um so i i i would you know and the moment that the sense of a united india came to be formed in the in the late 19th and 20th century it became obvious to everyone that the raj was going to end i mean even the most kind of died in the wool imperialist had to accept the moment that there was a kind of indian national consciousness emerging there was no way that the british could hold on to india because the the mismatch was too great i agree with tom but i think that the reason india works tom is because india had there had been empires in india so it's

1:14:48 perfectly plausible to imagine that in the 18 you know had history worked out differently that there would have been some dominant empire in india that would easily have been able to see off the east india company do you not think i mean but that's not the case with other parts of the world so if you i mean that thing of all colonial i would say almost every single colonial european colonial empire works because it works with local collaborators and local allies and that starts right at the beginning when um the spaniards arrive in the valley of mexico and then later on when they when they arrive in what's now peru so in both cases that the traditional view that we have is completely wrong so the idea a tiny band of spaniards pitch up and through their amazing technology and the fact that everybody thinks they're gods they're able to overcome colossally superior numbers i mean that's just obviously

1:15:43 nonsense what happens is that in in both cases they're working with lots of local allies because the societies in which they've arrived are deeply fragmented and would always have been fragmented so you know the the what we think of as the aztecs they have lots of local rivals i think flash carla are there the most obvious ones that the spaniards ally with and their spanish are only able to defeat them because of their local their local allies same thing with the incas the spaniards arrived the incas are divided this but they were probably always going to be divided because they had a history of division and there were lots of people who resented the incas so that's slightly different from india because i think in india you'd had hadn't you tom kind of big powerful rich united civilizations that could easily have seen off european institutes and i don't think that's true in the americas you know it's impossible

1:16:37 to imagine i think the native americans of north america forming this massive confederation that would have seen off the french and the british i mean they had no history of such a such alliances no but here's what's funny they they imitated exactly what you were talking about right they they did it in reverse so someone like tecumseh for example tried to use the british to help him defeat the americans in the same way that before there was a united states certain tribes allied with the french or the british to try to see the other side in other words that's almost the reverse of what you're talking about right by that point it's too late isn't it it is too late but but also i i mean i think technology does matter um and scale of size matters as well uh but to go back to the technology i mean dan you were saying you know why were people i don't know beyond the frontiers of the roman empire not able to replicate the

1:17:35 legions because they didn't have the the the society the culture that had generated the legions and likewise if you're going through a kind of an industrial quantum leap if you're going through the industrial revolution if you are developing weapons that are are fearsome and devastating on a scale beyond the imaginings of people uh who don't have factories who don't have steel mills and if you are a civilization that is able to feed vast numbers of people and generate a huge population growth then there's no way you can resist it uh and that essentially you know going right the way back through uh through the entire span of time that's why we all now have urban civilizations and we're not hunter-gatherers it's because ultimately there are technological there are societal advances that will make certain societies stronger more powerful more devastating more lethal than others and when there is a total mismatch

1:18:45 those who are the weaker will be there's no way that they can withstand so i would say that that um i'm sure that the the aztecs could have seen off the spaniards but i don't think that there was ever any prospect that uh the the native americans of the great plains could have seen off the united states i don't think that there was ever any prospect of um the native people in australia seeing off the settlers in in the 19th and 20th century uh there was just no way it would ever have been possible okay so so i'll make this the last question but it's certainly a trap door kind of question because it may so one of the things you get here in the united states and i think you get them all over the world is this idea of of that these technologically superior or i don't know what you would call it a logistically infrastructurally superior uh entities should not have done what they did right they so so for example

1:19:42 the the the people who came from europe should not have done what they did in a broad sense not we're not talking about individual massacres or this but in a broad sense should not have done what they did i find it in a in an almost um i find it impossible to imagine the counterfactual in these situations when you have societies that are so dominating in terms of technological or or as we said logistical infrastructural advantages it's hard for me to imagine for example the the europeans finding the new world and then just saying well you know we're just going to sit aside and uh yeah and not do anything i mean in other words yes this wonderful open land when john wayne once said it was okay for the europeans to take the land from the natives because they weren't properly using it i mean is it one of those things where are we are we assuming something that almost would be a defying human nature to expect something

1:20:41 like that to happen well i trapped your question emerges tom before you go can i just you know what i'm going to say i know you're going to say it and tom will take a week to say it so i'll that's okay we have it we have it what's your podcast dan i mean the podcast we have no time women obviously if you've ever heard me so i would say whenever people tell this story and they now tom also knows what i'm going to say and it's probably rolling his eyes i think whenever people tell this story and they start sort of you know as it were i don't want to sound like i'm a lunatic so but but i will and when they start sort of ringing their hands and saying this is dreadful behavior this is very awful we should feel very sorry about it all this sort of stuff i i just think that's a historical i think um people behave in inverted commas badly uh throughout history all the time um reliably big rich

1:21:39 technologically adept aggressive societies will behave aggressively i think it's impossible it is i think it's literally impossible to imagine a scenario in which columbus sails west and then the spanish don't do what they do in the in in in mexico and peru for example i mean they don't all behave badly because they're all villains they behave badly i would say because they're human and because that's what people do so i think the sort of expressions of slight shock that we have now as 21st century spectators looking at all this which sort of oh how could the spanish do what they did how could the british behave so meanly in india and africa and all of this kind of stuff we should feel very sorry and kind of render garments and and we've been well about it i mean again i know some of your listeners will probably think i'm being too flippant but i think the story of history is that this this is part of being human i mean as

1:22:37 awful as that may seem to many of us and i know tom will talk about why that seems awful to us and the sort of ideological um to the coaching we've had to to think that and of course we all have that because we want to think of ourselves as nice people but yeah i completely agree with you dan i think it's impossible to imagine a scenario in which europeans can travel vast distances in great numbers with you know with weapons with firearms with all of their diseases as well by the way um and in which they don't subjugate these places um and i don't think it's because something intrinsically wicked about early modern europeans i think it's because to be brutal about it that kind of competitive acquisitive um sort of exploitative is is deep inside human nature and it's an interesting aspect of being a 21st century westerner that we shudder at that and we recoil from it even as we as i think

1:23:45 deep down we can see it in ourselves so dan what i would say to that is you know was it bad what is the definition of bad what's the definition of good what is wrong with going and conquering other people what is wrong with uh if you if you're much more powerful subjugating those who are weaker than you uh and they they may sound kind of shocking questions but they're only shocking because we take the answer to those questions pretty much for granted but if you look at the vast sweep of history it's not at all self-evident that um people regard uh particularly in in powerful and self-confident and aggressive civilizations that they regard conquering people who are weakened them as as something that is quote unquote wrong so going right the way back to the beginning if you look at the the narma palette which is kind of one of the foundational emblems of ancient egypt it shows uh the figure of a pharaoh

1:24:43 combating the forces of chaos and the images of um people on that freeze who are not egyptian who lie beyond the borders of egypt makes it clear that they are the people who are the object of the pharaoh's wrath and and might and that their subjugation is the right thing to do that this is this is a moral positive that this is the correct thing to do and it's very difficult to think of an empire in antiquity that did not see its conquests as in some way the expression of what either the gods wanted or kind of moral abstractions being worked out so whether it's the assyrians or the babylonians or indeed even the israelites uh their conquests are mandated by the divine um same with the persians but the persians introduced this incredibly novel idea that the world is moral and that their empire is the expression of of kind of an abstract force of truth and order that permeates itself throughout the entire fabric of

1:25:48 the universe and that's an inheritance that um that christians and and and muslims have inherited uh so the caliphate the the the arab conquests they are justified by this is what god wants god wants the world to become muslim i think what makes the thing that is slightly more complex is the christian attitude to this because on the one hand chris christianity is a missionary religion that like islam um sees itself as a gift given to the whole of humanity and therefore christians like muslims have a duty to spread their faith to the ends of the world but what makes christianity more ambivalent in its attitude to this kind of imperialism is the fact that christ himself dies the victim of a great empire namely the romans and of course the cross is an emblem of the right of the powerful to torture to death the powerless and this becomes the emblem of christianity it's the emblem that the spaniards for instance take to

1:26:46 the new world um so when the spaniards conquer mexico of course there is a sense of triumph they are the conquistadores the idea that god has given them this world and that it redanced to the glory of spain that it it um it's something to to celebrate of course that is a an element of it but there is also a nagging sense that perhaps what they're doing is is offensive to god and it's really summed up with um the kind of the great debate between two spanish uh theologians one of whom bartolome las casas argues that the indians have souls and that what the spanish are doing essentially is not justified by god's law and his opponents when they argue against this have to draw on classical tradition to say you know certain people are natural slaves of course they should be they should be conquered and i think that that ambivalence towards empire so you know if you're if you're if you're going out under the emblem of a cross

1:27:54 are you playing the romans or are you playing the guy who gets tortured to death by the romans i think that that is an ambivalence that has lied laying at the heart of the kind of the the western conquest of the world the the hegemony that the west has exercised over the world um and in a way the fact that people beyond the west have bought into this the fact that they they they too kind of buy into the idea that there is a kind of dignity in being oppressed uh that victimhood brings its own status the paradox is in a way that is an expression of continuing western hegemony i mean there's nothing really kind of more more western than the idea of decolonization for instance if you're decolonizing something you are expressing deeply deeply western ideas but it's a kind of massive it's it's it's a kind of moral mobius strip are these ideas inherently correct or are they do we think that they're correct because

1:28:53 we've all of us been weathered by the effects of empires that believed that and were kind of the vectors for it there's a split the difference though there's a split the difference in this i mean if you like when i was um when you go read the primary source materials uh from an era where people absolutely believed that there is eternal damnation and eternal hell fire if you're not saved by by a religion if you believe that your conquest of say a native peoples who is who are pagan or heathen or whatever word you would use and because you have you have shown them the way that you have saved them from an eternity in hellfire then whatever you did to them in this one life is by comparison meaningless in other words how do good people justify this i think that's how good people tell themselves that they've done a good deed by conquering and enslaving other people as long as you saved them from an eternal damnation

1:29:50 does that make sense so what is good but what what is good i mean that's the thing what's the definition of good because your definition of goodness is is constantly changing oh sure oh sure um i mean i said so i think you know the aztecs they were they were themselves imperialists um their their their their extraordinary city their extraordinary civilization was itself founded on conquest and as far as i know there was no one in aztec society that questioned that there wasn't the kind of questioning of the right of the powerful to conquer the powerless that say the spaniards brought even though the paradox isn't the spaniards were infinitely more lethal and destructive i mean i would say dan i mean i don't know whether tom agrees with this i just think asking the question bad or good is the wrong question to ask about history well unless you're a theologian yeah i guess so but i mean some of your

1:30:43 listeners may well be thinking well what do you expect you know you get two british guys on and that guy that's right that's right excuses for colonialism but i mean one way if they think that is it's to ask this so some of the most effective conquests in history were the arab conquests yes um and and and you know here's the question were the arabs wrong to conquer egypt was that bad i mean if you went to cairo today and you proposed that argument and you said this was a terrible thing it was exploitative it was aggressive it was unprovoked um it shouldn't have happened the people who did it were bad and they were villainous and sure they did if they claimed they were doing it for religious reasons but no doubt there was a lot of greed and cruelty and say all this sort of stuff i mean if you made that argument in the center of cairo people would think you would dement it i mean and i don't think anthony and

1:31:35 most people i think would feel very uneasy making such an argument about the arab conquests because we tend to make those arguments about good and bad actually with relation to western colonialism don't we and we think of colonialism as a purely western phenomenon as a european phenomenon um but i mean imagine making that argument about the ottoman empire and saying the ottomans were wrong to have conquered constantinople they were wrong to have taken well the greeks certainly made that argument well the greeks would make that argument but then would you say the greeks were wrong to have landed in sicily and to have established their colony syracuse or something i mean that would seem well you know you know my answer to that i mean good you know right and right and wrong good good and evil are cultural constructs of course they generally agree with you generally are propagated by the powerful

1:32:25 and you know the the the ideas of good and evil or right or wrong or justified invasion or whatever are generally created to sustain structures that have been created by the powerful because if they're not powerful then they don't last well i mean in the united states you could say if if uh if we have a problem with the invasion of the spaniards into the new world for example uh and they come in i mean i mean the comanches had a genocidal war against the plains apaches um but but that is beyond the pale of the sort of um ethical discussions we have about this sort of stuff because these are indigenous peoples against other indigenous peoples in other words it's like golic tribes fighting other golic tribes and then caesar comes in um is is there any difference between having an outsider well now your argument is who are they who are okay no but surely your argument here is who are outside i mean how far are you

1:33:20 allowed to travel to fight surely that's it because let's take the other example of the aztecs the aztecs were not indigenous to the valley of mexico they had moved south so is it okay for them to move by land but not okay for the spaniards to move by sea i mean i think that the trouble is these are you when you start to look into these those sort of moral boundaries i think just begin to to crumble i mean i don't think you can say it's fine for the aztecs to come to trudge over land and then start fighting people but because the spaniards have come by ship and have paler skins that's not okay okay so so unless you're a theologian as a historian i think you have to regard morality as relative as as culturally conditioned as something that evolves and changes i in other words not as something absolute because if you're treating in something absolute then you're you're you're engaging in a

1:34:14 slightly different discipline i think it doesn't say that discipline is wrong i mean that's that's what theology and and and philosophy and ethics is all about but if you're looking at history to talk about ideas of right and wrong as absolutes you have to recognize that the sense of these as absolutes is culturally conditioned so to look at the gauls was it wrong for the romans to conquer the gauls i mean to the romans no and probably not to the ghouls either because the gauls had had sacked rome the gauls were constantly rampaging around that they were tribes they were endlessly attacking each other the romans conquered them and the gauls ended up kind of acknowledging the romans as the most powerful tribe of all and and that was kind of part of the moral universe that both romans and gauls in the first century bc inhabited if we look now say the question the question you asked um can

1:35:08 white americans sit in judgment and say that say the comanches were wrong to attack other native american peoples in the in the great plains inherent in that is the idea that because native americans ended up being conquered and subdued and subordinated to the power of of the white settlers therefore they have a status as victims that that white settler society privileges because that white settler society brings with it the idea that it's god suffered the death of a slave at the hands of an imperial power and even if people you know particularly on on the liberal wing and progressive wing in the united states are no longer overtly christian they're not denominationally christian morally in their hearts they remain christian and they retain the conviction that there is a status and a moral value in being a victim that that being a victimizer being an imperial power does not possess and that therefore

1:36:15 people do people who come from a position of privilege are not entitled to sit in judgment over those who are not privileged but that is a culturally conditioned assumption that is bred of the distinctive character of american history i would argue i mean you could go further and say well that's a that is an absolute moral position but if you're doing that you're no longer engaging in history in my opinion you're engaging in in philosophy or theology and for more on this tom holland's book dominion thank you very much i can continue this all day but it's about 115 degrees in my studio right now and i am melting um where can people hear your podcast so it's called the rest is history uh you can hear it on spotify you can hear on itunes and you can hear it on youtube and we do two episodes pretty much do two episodes every week don't we tom um yeah sometimes a few more covering everything they're much i have to say

1:37:11 compared with dan's your your opuses i mean these are mere pamphlets some of them are only 45. oh that took 15 minutes that is a great way to rationalize my lack of productivity thank you i appreciate that um but no it's uh we do two a week and we have a club called the rest is history club um where and if you join the club you can um have chats with all the other club members and they all get very excited and they tom um basically they do they spend they basically spend most of their time telling us how terrible our most recent episode was or whatever um but uh yeah so it's the rest is history um it's not as hardcore as as hardcore history i think it's fair to say isn't it tom um we wish i think it's it's less epic and sweet but we are kind of inspired by you down we're upping our game so we've just done um we've just done a five-part special on on the uh the american civil war uh and and you may be appalled at

1:38:05 the idea that we could possibly do the american civil war in five episodes but but wait when we tell you that we did the whole french revolution in i think about an hour oh my gosh you'll see that we're we're doing better okay well you guys are delightful i'd love to have another conversation with you someday thank you so much for taking the time thanks for having me so much for having us my thanks to tom holland and dominic sanbrook uh for coming on the program today uh their podcast the rest is history something you should absolutely check out if you haven't already it's been a long hot summer full of challenges in uh you know the family stuff and everything else so it's been a while since we've spoken to you thank you for your patience i know many of you've had similar summers but i feel back in the saddle again so we should have some offerings on tap for you before too long and uh you know if i don't talk to you

1:38:59 until then well remember we have a twitter feed at hardcore history maybe you can hear from me in the interim and i hope you're all having a good summer and a good year and uh here's to hoping that things pick up and get better you know as the end of the year rolls around it's it's difficult times for a lot of people isn't it and we hope you'll stay safe talk to you soon folks support us with patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash dan carlin or go to our donate page at dan carlin dot com forward slash dc dash donate for hardcore history t-shirts or other merchandise go to dan carlin.com

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP21 Hollandansandbrook"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Tom Holland (Host), Dominic Sandbrook (Host).

What is "EP21 Hollandansandbrook" about?

This content features a conversation between historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, exploring a range of historical topics, with Holland focusing on ancient history and Sandbrook emphasizing the 20th century. The dialogue serves as a continuation of a previous discussion, highlighting their insights and diverse backgrounds while encouraging listeners to engage with their prior work on the…

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

11 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Tom Holland, Dominic Sandbrook, Threads, William the Conqueror, Alfred the Great, Dominion. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP21 Hollandansandbrook"?

The episode runs 1 h 40 min; the transcript is about 18,106 words in 105 timestamped sections.

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