Transcript

EP7 Hardcore History On Fire

From Dan Carlin · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 43 min · 19,733 words · 114 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "EP7 Hardcore History On Fire", an episode of Dan Carlin published February 18, 2019 (1 h 43 min, about 19,733 words). It mentions 17 people, works and ideas, including Daniele Bolelli, Nazism, Fascism, United States (states), Communism.

What this episode is about

The discussion explores the complexities of redefining political terminology, particularly the left-wing and right-wing spectrum as it relates to historical phenomena like fascism and Nazism. Additionally, the conversation emphasizes the importance of evaluating ideas based on their merit rather than their political alignment.

Key takeaways

  • Political labels are slippery—definitions shift, often leaving us lost in translation on ideology.
  • The political spectrum is like a historical selfie—ever evolving, often misinterpreted, and fraught with filters.
  • Redefining terms can spark healthy debate, but often leads to intellectual laziness and factionalism in discourse.
  • Nazis on the left? That's like saying cats are dogs; definitions matter, but clarity is often sacrificed.
  • Trying to simplify complex ideas into a political spectrum is like cramming a masterpiece into a post-it note.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Fascism, Nazism, Daniele Bolelli, Communism
  2. – 20:00: Germany, United States (states), Nazism, Communism
  3. – 30:00: Nazism, Communism, Socialism, Joseph Stalin
  4. – 40:00: United States (states)
  5. – 50:00: United States (states), Daniele Bolelli, Fascism, Nazism
  6. – 1:00:00: United States (states), General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Communism, Germany
  7. – 1:10:00: General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Daniele Bolelli, Theodore Roosevelt, World War I
  8. – 1:20:00: United States (states), Communism, Germany, Socialism
  9. – 1:40:00: Germany, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt
  10. – 1:42:48: Germany

Notable quotes from "EP7 Hardcore History On Fire"

  • Actually which is good because like i said i have a cold now but danielle came on he had a couple of things he wanted to talk about and so that's sort of the gist for how the show kind of went in the direction it did.
    about Daniele Bolelli · at
  • Political spectrum what's left-wing what's right-wing where phenomena like fascism and nazism fit into the spectrum and you know personally i find the whole left-wing right-wing discussion almost intellectually lazy because to me.
    about Nazism · at
  • Philosophies but extremist philosophies and so that's where it started so the far left when we were growing up was always communism the far right was always fascism and so that's why you and i are confused.
    about Fascism · at
  • Movement and got rid of the things he didn't like but the name stuck you know i have minecomp sitting here in front of me and you know i read it for our little conversation here for like the 15th time i always feel like people that call the.
    about Mein Kampf · at
  • This anti-gay group was trying to link nazism to gay rights as a way to tar and feather them i mean the nazis have become the wonderful and i use them in my own show this way…
    about World War II · at
  • There are master people and there are subject people what's more communism and socialism have this you know you remember the phrase right workers of the world unite right every everybody who wasn't of the ruling class around the world.
    about Communism · at
  • Something about it and it would take a very special kind of person so i always go to eisenhower disclaimer general slash president eisenhower did a lot of things that i think were awful and that got the country into worse situations for.
    about General Dwight D. Eisenhower · at
  • So what is that i like about the and just to clarify again theodore roosevelt very different from franklin delano roosevelt so just as a reminder but theodore roosevelt one of the things that i did is.
    about Theodore Roosevelt · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Daniele Bolelli — Person · Main guest · 4 mentions · first at
    Guest co-leading a cross-cast discussion about political-spectrum terminology, historical framing of fascism/communism, and modern discourse dynamics.
  • General Dwight D. Eisenhower — Person · Referenced historical figure (preferred past president) · 8 mentions · first at
    Raised as the host’s pick for a past U.S. president suited to manage modern U.S. imperial overreach and the military-industrial complex, due to his WWII leadership and warnings about defense-industry influence.
  • Theodore Roosevelt — Person · Referenced historical figure (guest’s preferred past president) · 2 mentions · first at
    Chosen by the guest as a model leader for today due to conservation/environmental policy and anti-corruption posture (trust-busting; willingness to challenge both parties).
  • Joseph Stalin — Person · Referenced historical figure (comparative example) · 3 mentions · first at
    Used to complicate simplistic Nazi/Communist equivalence: the host suggests similarities may stem from Stalin’s personal dictatorship ("oriental despot") rather than communism’s stated theory.
    You know much of the comparison between the nazis and the communist involves joseph stalin he's a bit of a white you know in other words instead of bolshevism we're getting a little deep into the woods here but you have stalinism.
  • Barack Obama — Person · Referenced political figure (not substantively discussed in provided excerpt) · 2 mentions
    Appears in the entity list but is not clearly present in the provided transcript segment; likely referenced elsewhere in the full episode as a modern political comparison point.

Books & papers

  • Mein Kampf — Book · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at
    Cited as evidence in the debate about Nazism's political alignment.

Concepts & topics

  • Nazism — Concept · Core topic · 11 mentions · first at
    Central to the discussion about political spectrum and historical ideologies.
  • Fascism — Concept · Core topic · 6 mentions · first at
    Key concept in the discussion about political spectrum and historical ideologies.
  • Communism — Concept · Core topic · 9 mentions · first at
    Discussed as the far left in the traditional political spectrum.
  • Socialism — Concept · Core topic · 6 mentions · first at
    Discussed in the context of political spectrum and ideologies.
    There are master people and there are subject people what's more communism and socialism have this you know you remember the phrase right workers of the world unite right every everybody who wasn't of the ruling class around the world.

Places & events

  • United States (states) — Place · Setting · 14 mentions · first at
    Primary location discussed in the context of political spectrum debates and historical comparisons.
    But in the united states we were taught when i was a kid that the united states and other western democracies fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and that both ends of the spectrum either the far left or the far.
  • Germany — Place · Setting · 11 mentions · first at
    Central to discussions about Nazism and World War II.
    And so that's why you and i are confused when we hear people today speak about for example the nazis being on the left side of the spectrum because on the traditional one it…
  • World War II — Event · Historical context · 2 mentions · first at
    Central to discussions about Nazism and political ideologies.
  • World War I — Event · Historical context · 3 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as part of the backdrop for the rise of Nazism.
    You know built his whole platform in absolute opposition to communism he was he blamed socialist for contributing to germany losing world war one he you know or if you look at when he took power.
  • Italy — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of personal experiences with fascism.
    When we were a kid in the united states again i can't speak for italy because when i went to italy as a kid they were they had a red flag with a hammer and sickle on some of the buildings in rome so yeah there was like 30 percent of the.
  • North Korea — Place · Comparative example · 2 mentions · first at
    Used as an example of misleading political nomenclature.
    Party right so for everyone out there who doesn't know it if we asked what the what kind of a government the north korean government of today was it's a hereditary dictatorship isn't it.

Media & podcasts

  • The Princess Bride — Media · Cultural reference · 1 mention · first at
    Used metaphorically to describe misuse of terminology.
    A major attempt to change the way the terms have been used historically kind of reminds me of the princess bride you know when they say you keep using this word i don't think it means what you think it means.

Full transcript with timestamps

it's hardcore history so in this hardcore history addendum we're going to have a friend of mine on the program and it's going to be kind of a cross cast between his show and mine and i hope you pardon me i have a cold right now so things are a little less than perfect um his name is danielle bolelli by the way you may know him because he's a famous history podcaster does history on fire uh he has another podcast uh called the drunken daoist and we've been friends for a long time and uh he's wonderful that wonderful lyrical voice of his and the way he looks at the past and we had been talking about doing a program together for a while and the stars just kind of aligned this was recorded a couple of weeks ago actually um which is good because like i said i have a cold now um but danielle came on he had a couple of things he wanted to talk about and so that's sort of the um the gist for how the show kind of went

in the direction it did i'll have a few thoughts afterwards because you know as it always seems to happen right i thought of a good point or two or something i should have brought up during the discussion and didn't so we'll call that a footnote to the show you're about to hear the crosscast between uh yours truly and uh my friend the great danielle bulelli okay then let's get playing one topic that i found fascinating as of late i'm seeing a lot on social media some efforts to kind of redefine terms this is mostly happening in u.s i don't know if this is a discussion that's really happening in other parts of the world but in us i'm seeing a lot of discussion regarding the political spectrum what's left-wing what's right-wing where phenomena like fascism and nazism fit into the spectrum and you know personally i find the whole left-wing right-wing discussion almost intellectually lazy because to me

is like i'm not even an interest in if it's an idea it comes from the left wing or a right wing to me an idea is either a good idea or a bad idea who cares where it comes from so even thinking in those terms to me and encore just factionalism however having said that if we insist on using these terms like left wing right wing then we should probably use them correctly and what i'm seeing these days is a major attempt to change the way the terms have been used historically kind of reminds me of the princess bride you know when they say you keep using this word i don't think it means what you think it means that's sort of the feeling i'm getting in this discussion so i would love to get your take on uh and you know we can jump into a whole discussion on this thing regarding the political spectrum where how it's changing the meaning of it what it used to mean historically and all of that well i

think a little background probably makes sense before we get started because sure i think we should acknowledge one thing right off the top and that's that the idea of the political spectrum is a human created thing um and so and so and not just a human created thing but something that sort of developed organically in revolutionary era france that was then sort of morphed into something that was used ever since and and ever since people have been trying to figure out how you make it better because it's such an imperfect way to describe political positions um so as you and i both know but let's review um in in pre-revolutionary early revolutionary france you have an assembly where all the the people meet and and from the speaker's platform on the assembly the people who were the honored aristocratic movers and shakers blue bloods in that society sat on the right side of the assembly and the bourgeois we were today called

the middle class or upper middle class the businessman all the the merchants they sat on the left and then that became you know the beginnings of where people would say you know a man on the left or a man of the right and so that's where that initially comes from and then that became sort of the shorthand that was transposed onto later political systems forever afterwards whether or not it was a really good description of other societies other countries political systems and places far removed from revolutionary france so that's how it starts and then from there on what we have here is a human created system that is designed to try to provide a shorthand if you will for people's political persuasions and ever since people have realized how inadequate it is to describe you know something as complex as people's political beliefs and that's why ever since there have been attempts to three-dimensionalize it or

create another axis to measure other things that the left-right political spectrum doesn't measure and so in in that case what we have here now is a um a spectrum which doesn't resemble the one that you and i grew up with i'm 53 uh you're younger than i am but both of us grew up in an era where this the original traditional let's call it traditional for lack of a better word political spectrum was in force and in that spectrum just so that we have a benchmark from where we can have this conversation from uh speaking as an american you grew up in a different environment but in the united states we were taught when i was a kid that the united states and other western democracies fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and that both ends of the spectrum either the far left or the far right represented extremist philosophies different kinds of extremist philosophies but extremist philosophies

and and so that's where it started so the far left when we were growing up was always communism the far right was always fascism and so that's why you and i are confused when we hear people today speak about for example the nazis being on the left side of the spectrum because on the traditional one it was always the right side of the spectrum right now i should point out that i had a political science professor in the 1980s in college and this was the first time i ever heard anybody say this who said that really maybe we should think of that linear political spectrum as more of a circle and that the two halves the two extremes actually have many things in common so maybe they touch on the other end but so so when we have this discussion let's remember that this is the spectrum you and i were operating from and that most people from our era and before understood so now let's let's let's go

from there so why don't you start by explaining what you're seeing out there that is so discomforting well start like to throw a wrench into into that political spectrum which by the way it's exactly correct right that's exactly how we grew up that's how it was always defined but take something like anarchism anarchism traditionally was considered an extreme left position and here you have you know communism and fascism or communism and nazism being one consider extreme right and one extreme left but they are both share the fact that they are totalitarian systems anarchism on the other hand by going radically against the very idea of the state seems to be at the opposite end of totalitarianism and yet he was never defined in any way shape or form as a right wing concept he was considered ultra extreme left so what i find weird in this is plugging certain movements that you know they have defined themselves as conservative

right wing their opponents define them as conservative right wing everyone involved was very clear about who they were and what was up and now kind of trying to completely change the meaning of what used to be something that was pretty much understood by everybody i mean to me it's like it's funny because growing up in italy i'm i've been very familiar with lots of people who are fascists i've been in conversation with people who are neo-nazis so to me this is not even like a theoretical debate these are actual flesh and blood people who have spoken to and if you tell these people that they are left-wing you don't want to see the consequences because they hate anything to do with the term left-wing already make them go berserk and they hate that so the feather today in usmc in this redefining of the spectrum that basically places all of the totalitarian movements from communists which everybody argue they are left

wings there's no disagreement there but from fascists and nazis who are traditionally considered right-wing suddenly plugging the mold as left-wing phenomenon i find that really bizarre like to me it seemed like a post-modernist attempt to redefine to rewrite the dictionary well now let me interrupt you because that's exactly what it is uh but the and here's the thing the people who did this redefining were very open about it this wasn't a secret the problem is is that many of the people who quote them or who or who or who um who who ascribe to the same theory don't realize that it's a redefinition so for example i i said in our little introduction that there have been many attempts since since we were kids to try to figure out a better way to define people's political positions other than this very limiting linear way well there's one of the examples out there that was done is a person who

decided to make the question of freedom the defining force so right so the political spectrum kind of plugs in x and y what you want and they can end up showing what you want to find depending on the parameters you choose so if you decide that freedom is going to be the basis for what moves the needle on your spectrum well then yes one direction might go in the direction of more free in another direction and less free in which case all the totalitarian systems regardless of their economic viewpoints or whatever belong on one end and as you said anarchism probably belongs on the other far extreme i don't have any problem with people redefining the political spectrum as long as they understand that that's what they've done well and also not using the wrong terminology because if we're using freedom i completely agree you can put an orgasm on one extreme you can put totalitarian ideologies at the other extreme but

there's nothing left or right about this this is just a new way of looking at things so we shouldn't probably use the terms left wing right wing which traditionally a completely different meaning and plug them into a spectrum that just is something else entirely one let's understand too um a little bit about what the the differences of this always were sure um so for example when you go back to the original french version i mean those people that were sitting on the right side of the assembly those are monarchists right so so the extremes in the original system we're talking about here are people that support the church the aristocracy the monarchy and the status quo the people on the left side until you got you know the the jacobins and all that were actually the equality liberty uh uh for laissez faire capitalism maybe you know take that with a grain of salt but by the standards of the time

um and those things change with the times i mean certainly if we were going to talk about what left wing and right wing were in the 1930s it's going to be very different than what they were in the 1790s but i mean from that basis there are there are fundamental differences between um you know the views of the i mean let me give you an example sure so so when you look at the um the nazis one of the things that catches people up in the united states is the name the national socialist german workers party right so so for everyone out there who doesn't know it um if if we asked what the what kind of a government the north korean government of today was it's a hereditary dictatorship isn't it it's what it is right this is the guy in charge there is the third generation uh father-son grandfather of a dictatorial regime that that brooks no opposition and and has no has no legislative body with any power at

all yet the official name of that country is the democratic people's republic of north korea that is marketing yeah right that is that is marketing that is exactly what the national social the german workers party is i mean to hitler and and his people the the nazi party of that early era workers was the same as voters and this was a a political marketing attempt to try to swing voters and by the way the centrist party of germany in that time period had workers in their name so this is not an unusual thing and so that but that but americans get get so hyped up when they see the word socialist uh or workers that they automatically assume okay what we have here are bolsheviks which is nothing of the sword as a matter of fact i can't think of anyone more opposed to bolsheviks than nazis yeah i mean hitler blamed them you know built his whole platform in absolute opposition to communism he was he blamed socialist for

contributing to germany losing world war one he you know or if you look at when he took power he got rid of the more left-leaning element where sympathizing with the nazi movement squashed them all with the knight of the long knives some of the first people he sent to labor camps were socialists so i mean it seemed like there's enough evidence there that the little market employing the name should be pretty obvious to everybody well and for those of you there are german scholars out there who realize i mean it's known as strasserism otto strasser was was part of the very early nazi parties uh let's just call it the philosophical wing for lack of a better word and he would have been more what americans think of when they accuse the nazis of being a socialist movement but he was purged uh early on i mean so that side of it i mean hitler took over we would call it today a corporate shell he went in

saw a a group of people who already were meeting i think there were like 20 of them he said in mein kampf and he went in there and stole their movement and and got rid of the things he didn't like but the name stuck um you know i have minecomp sitting here in front of me and you know i read it for our little conversation here for like the 15th time i always feel like people that call the nazis left wing have never read this book because hitler actually slams the left by name the left over and over and over again he says they chose red for the nazi flag colors just to piss off the [ __ ] right i mean we're stealing their stuff and we're rubbing it in their faces yeah it's like it literally if you open minecraft and read five pages it would all be clear right it wouldn't even be an issue so i again i find like some of these part of the reason why it bugs me a little is because i feel that it is a

disingenuous attempt like that some of the people who have been pushing this notion are doing so not because they actually believe it but because it's a slander to call somebody a nazi or a fascist in the modern political climate so the idea becomes let's uh let's paint those guys as the nazis and fascists because then you know we score a point over them more because they actually believe it because if you actually believe it now you got a serious problem with really comprehension because it really doesn't take much to see the difference you know it's like well you see you jumped in front of where i was i was going to set that whole cui bono thing up here like it because the more interesting question isn't were the nazis left winger right wing it's why does anybody care right right i mean wha what's the practical i mean you know we have arguments over this today and you go why i mean this is a a 75 year old issue the

only reason it matters is how it applies to the modern political situation so there's a reason that tarring one side or the other with this label is important now to get back to our political spectrum when we were a kid in the united states again i can't speak for italy because when i went to italy as a kid they were they had a a red flag with a hammer and sickle on some of the buildings in rome so yeah there was like 30 percent of the country was communist or something exactly a little different than what i grew up with but but in this country the reason that we were taught that that the two extremes of the political system were bad was because you know this was to to teach us first let me back up in 1964 barry goldwater a senator from arizona ran for president against lyndon johnson uh barry goldwater is often labeled as the father of the modern conservative movement so where you get away from the

country club republicans and you get down to the ronald reagan kind of republicans a very different sort of breed yeah those guys um you know uh um goldwater had famously said that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice he's the kind of guy that would have approved of a political spectrum where liberty was what moved the needle one way or the other um in in a case like goldwater um the idea that we can look at different movements in the united states as extreme it was a warning right don't go too far to the left because if you do you take the left leaning ideas that form something like liberalism and you take them to the extreme and you get to a dangerous territory like communism and if you take the right-wing views which you know would be a conservative political viewpoint america and you take them to extremes you end up with fascism well in the modern i mean i remember jonah goldberg

wrote a book called liberal fascism and he's he he along with others try to trace a development that links liberalism to nazism as a way to warn you about the dangers of liberalism right this these people are on the road to nazism because nazism is the worst thing we can think of it's also a way you know to to to say that you know if you move farther and farther to the right there's no bad thing on the edge of that right in the old days you would say hey don't go too far to the right or it's bad for everybody well if you redefine the political spectrum so that the right has no connection to nasty political outcomes well then hey just moving farther to the right is always good right so there is you know i used to say to right wingers if we go farther to the right what happens that's bad does it ever reach a point that's negative and i think that's the qui bono part that there are people trying to redefine

the idea that going to the extremes to the right side of the political spectrum have any bad outcome at all um that to me is the problem so when when when goldwater said extremism and the defense of liberty is no vice this is the attitude that if you go to the extreme right there's nothing bad about that because we're going to get more free yeah no you're absolutely correct and i think that's exactly the issue with uh framing it as a left-right thing as opposed to totalitarianism versus freedom i understand totalitarianism versus individual rights that make perfect sense to me but don't plug it into a political model that doesn't reflect that at all because traditionally there have been extremely totalitarian left-wing movement and extremely totalitarian right-wing movement what makes them left-wing a right-wing is not how powerful the state is because again both sides did it it's other issues like for example in

the case of the nazis a few of the things that clearly would mark them more on the right wing side of things and why people were more conservative supported them you had the desire to crash labor unions was a key thing that helped them be popular with some of the industrialist in germany the desire to go against minimum wage also big in terms of culture wars you know there was a whole wave of gay rights feminism more open sexuality that was sweeping in germany and that nazism was strongly preaching against so taking a more conservative attitude in terms of uh even issues that would be recognized today as part of the culture wars so you know to me those are the things that stan that's what makes somebody in the in that case that and also sorry one thing that i forgot and that's probably the most important one of all is that the base of the whole nazi movement was built on nationalism and

race whereas traditionally the other extreme you know the communists were all about the more international global perspective and class exactly you know the one was about class the other one was not the other one the focus was on race and nation one was hierarchical one was at least theoretically of course not in reality but at least theoretical in favor of equality one was heavily embedded with the traditional religious institutions the other one was a taste or pushing them or liberation theology if they ever flirted with religious ideas so i mean when you look at it in those terms they couldn't be more different despite the fact that they were both totalitarians who wanted a strong state well look at the company they keep that's always what what i i mean for domestically as you pointed out i mean the nazis were taking donations from big business i mean that the whole idea behind socialism is that

the people on the means of production well i mean my goodness the the germans of the 1940s had companies like crop and messerschmitt and porsha and henschel and and i mean you know uh ig farben i mean the and those guys didn't go away uh that's not at all like what you would see in a communist country and look at the allies that the germans had i mean you mentioned the italians but let's look at the the japanese i mean you could never spin the japanese as a left-wing regime under any system i mean that's a divine emperor system right um and you know i mean for these people that say that that dictatorships and that kind of lack of freedom is is left-wing well what was the czar of russia before the communists took over right i mean that is the ultimate right-wing regime by any stretch of the i mean that's that's right-wing by the french assembly definition of right wing right those are those are authoritarian

monarchists the japanese are not going to ally with a left-wing regime look at francisco francisco franco look at all of the people that that fall into the the um the fascist orbit even you know juan peron in places like argentina later none of these people fit the socialist model even if the name national socialist seems to imply that that's what they are absolutely and i think that's what uh i find upsetting also i think for me there's a little bit of a personal element because you know when i think about just not long ago when i think about family history you know my grandmother was literally placing bomb to blow up fascists my you know there's a whole without even going into the whole family biography there's enough there where these were things that people felt very strongly about where it wasn't like some academic philosophical debates about terminology and it was very real in terms of who your

enemies are and who they aren't and so this effort to muddle the waters i find it uh really insulting ultimately because it's kind of like changing history to suit the ones or need in the present it's not unusual either i remember when i was on the radio in the 1990s here in oregon um there was a group called the oregon citizens alliance and they were an anti-gay group i don't even know if they're still around but but one of their members wrote a book called the pink swastika and the whole point was the same thing you're seeing in the modern day world where people are trying to link nazism to uh to the to the current american left as a way to uh tar and feather them in this case this anti-gay group was trying to link nazism to gay rights as a way to tar and feather them i mean the nazis have become the wonderful and i use them in my own show this way because they are the benchmark for evil

right but i mean i mean like for example i have a quote here from from a story that i that i uh printed out for this discussion today and uh it's from some historians who are talking about the same thing we're talking about and they were explaining let me read the the the post because it they're talking about all these different right wing writers that have tried to redefine nazism as a movement of the left as a way to tar and feather modern people on the left and they wrote as a concluding line this they wrote herewith we come to the effect if not the point of the revisionist exposition it is not only to transfer the stigma of the second world wars genocidal violence from the right to the left so that criticisms of radicalized populism can be dismissed as leftist fascism it's also to suggest that the war was a crusade against state collectivism of all types including the welfare state for which

many westerners in fact fought they reasoned by means of a simplistic ahistorical syllogism since socialism is statism slash collectivism like public health and public transport and nazism was statist and collectivist and promoted public health and public transport social democratic public health and public transport measures must be fascist in other words if if you have a and we have a you're all a right um and and that to me is what is what becomes a sneaky little debating trick is the best way to put it because anybody who's read minecomp and thinks that hitler would put up with being called leftist hasn't really read the book very carefully absolutely and i think and i think it really boils down to i believe that there are people who honestly read these things today and believe it probably because they haven't really read enough before but i think a lot of the people who are putting this stuff out are doing so

in a very disingenuous matter not because they believe it but purely as a political weapon to use in their political fights today and and again you know if we want to throw out completely left-wing right-wing i'm all for it because i agree i'm interested in policies that increase the degree of individual freedom and increase ultimately interesting policy that help the quality of human life i don't care where they come from you know so if you want to throw that out completely i have no problems with it but not redefining existing terms according to what benefits somebody in terms of their own political fights because that just dishonest that's something else entirely well and you know it's worth bringing up what i think is a key ingredient in the whole thing that isn't talked about enough and that's the fact that you know much of the comparison between the nazis and the communist involves joseph stalin

he's a bit of a white you know in other words instead of bolshevism we're getting a little deep into the woods here but you have stalinism there's a decent number of historians that think that joseph stalin wasn't really a communist that he hid behind the communist sort of um uh uh doctrine but was and i'm quoting here an old style oriental despot in which case that makes him yes more like a hitler or a mussolini but you can't call him a communist then right he's just an old style dictator right right with a facade of communism because communism for all its faults was not supposed to be a dictatorship there was going to be a dictatorship of the proletariat stage but decisions weren't supposed to be in the hands of one guy who like hitler called every shot now the fact that it actually works out that way in soviet union in red china in uh in the the khmer rouge in cambodia yeah that's a different that's an actual

interesting point of its own but that's not what it's supposed to be like and so those who say that communism and nazism are very similar it might be less because hitler's like a communist and more because stalin's like a nazi right no in fact and i think that's where that's where the whole conversation gets interesting where the examples are and i think that the one you brought up is a very interesting one in its own and maybe another time we can explore it you know the why an ideology that in theory is preaching this radical equality turns out to be monstrously hierarchical despite saying no no we are all equal when obviously you know anybody can see through it it was crap it was just something to hide behind that that becomes in fact one of the contradictions in that movement that's interesting to explore and i love churchill's line about the the equalization of misery yeah right exactly

and and then it's even that like that clearly would not be a good scenario but even that's not real because it's not really equal you know the guy the last guy in the soviet union and stalin are gonna have a very different lifestyles you know they are not in the same boat at all so yeah fascinating and i guess one thing i wanna i don't know if you wanna add anything to this or do you mind if i switch slightly in the conversation i know but but it's worth pointing out one thing and you brought it up earlier and that's this question of equality um whether or not it's possible and whether or not that's actually what the bolsheviks or the red chinese or the khmer rouge were actually out to do that is a key plank in the the communist socialist uh world view whereas the nazis did not believe in equality they specifically believed in the opposite the ubermensch concept basically that there there are master people and there

are subject people what's more communism and socialism have this you know you remember the phrase right workers of the world unite right every everybody who wasn't of the ruling class around the world was part of the potential convert pool the nazis are race oriented to them being part of the convert pool had nothing to do with your ideology it had to do with your blood and so i mean this this the idea this is a problem americans have with terminology and that's why i use the the people's republic the democratic people's republic of north korea to start with you got to get past the national you know socialist uh workers party name in the nazis party i mean the national socialist thing too many people buy that at face value if you took that out of the equation and you just looked at the beliefs this is how you know so many people are just parroting what they hear from let's call them influencers rather than doing their own

research because it really doesn't stand up to historical scrutiny and it's hard to find a lot of historians who'll back you up on the idea of the nazis as a left-wing group and as we said if they're a left-wing group what the heck are they hanging out with all these right-wing countries yeah exactly it's just yeah that's why it really makes no sense on every level and i'm glad to chat with you about it to sort of help clarify because i'm sure there are a lot of very nice sweet listeners who have bought into it because they have just heard it enough times uh so that's why i think laying down some actual facts you know laying down some actual evidence in that regard is very important because otherwise this is uh oh god sir well i was just going to say here's what's interesting to me though to wrap this conversation up we started with the qui bono idea that you know the who benefits right

i'm i'd be interested in who's angry that we're pushing this point of view right and why are they angry um so so i mean to me it arguing about where the nazis stood in the political spectrum is 75 year old news having somebody get angry at you today because of where you say the nazis are in the political spectrums much more interesting to me that that's that gets deep into the psyche of not just american politics right now but let's call it politics in the entire western world well and that reminds me this is actually funny because you got into it as well i remember a few months ago i tweeted this image that i found scaringly chilling where there was this image of these guards at auschwitz having a picnic and all laughing all happily and so you see these people and they all seem like sweet nice young german people and then you remember that they are the guards at outfits so you know the ultimate image to display

the banality of evil now you would figure that that would be a relatively uncontroversial thing in the sense that we understand that yeah ordinary people do horrible stuff we understand yes the nazis did horrible things clear enough right we're talking about 1945 not and sadly there was a whole storm of angry people about why aren't you showing the the communist guards if you show these why aren't you and he was just like whoa whoa whoa where does this even come from and you know and it was clearly an effort of uh you know we need to score a point for our team kind of thing even though if you ask them nobody would say no i'm defending the nazis but that's kind of where he was he was still framed in a left-wing right-wing fashion and he's weird because i mean i get the feeling that your hiatus from common sense has a bit to do with the modern political situation where if you say that the sun is out

immediately you're gonna have people from all sorts of sights yelling at you that how dare you say that the sun is out the sun is not out what are you talking about and that there's such a degree of functionalism in modern politics that you cannot say even the most obvious thing the stuff that's like saying two and two equal four you can barely say that without it being perceived as either promoting one camp or another which automatically means that 50 percent of the other 50 of the people are gonna hit your guts well let me even take it one step farther in the contradiction if the people that said that to you really believe the nazis are a left-wing movement and they're coming at this from a right-wing point of view why on earth would they care right i mean theoretically you're just making their point for them right the nazis are evil that's right those left-wing nazis are evil but those are people who think the nazis

are on the left but get mad when you're not giving equal time to the crimes of the bolsheviks that doesn't make sense right there so if you say why did dan give up his current event show temporarily maybe um it's because if how do you even deal with such basic contradictions that the people who are making them don't see i i don't know how to have a conversation with people who don't recognize such a basic contradiction and i think that's the problem that um it's hard to to even have a public discourse and i mean social media doesn't help because of course you're not sitting in front of somebody where you can pick up body language and other things or that are more likely to make you less aggressive but still the point being we hear this uh it's very hard to have any kind of conversation when immediately people start yelling at each other and are just looking for a reason to score a point for their

team and it doesn't even apply to politics almost it seems to apply like any topic seems good enough to start a fight about and i'm not sure if this is a result of alienation of people not seeing each other face to face if it's i'm not sure what it is a result of and i would be curious to hear your opinion but i definitely see it and i can see why doing a show like common sense may not seem like the happiest prospect in the world for you when anything you're gonna say you're gonna get yelled at well you know it is interesting to me that that in these particular times that we live in to to be someone who tries to see both sides is seen by both sides as somehow validating or enabling evil on the other side right if you aren't 100 condemning the other side you're part of the problem well that's not the world i inhabit right we started that program as a way to find things that we had in common

so that we could solve common problems that both the right and the left would agree upon things like you know a need for government corruption reform stuff like that you know i will say though let me push back a little on this idea about division or uh the anger or the lack of ability to have a civil conversation because at least in the united states i think we have a long history of that um you know i don't i don't i don't think there was some golden age where we could have these wonderful calm discussions about politics people always would get i mean there's a reason that they say there's a few things you shouldn't discuss at dinner religion sex politics right um so i mean i think people have always gotten worked up over that but if you go back and you look at the kind of arguments and once again you know the average folks in the middle of the country uh weren't writing long uh intelligentsia

sort of college type treaties on this but it does seem to my naked eye that the conversations were held one on a higher plane so that you're really discussing issues as opposed to the the hyperbole and name calling we do now i also think and you know this is another topic too i think we miss having a common sense a common common a common framework of reference let's let's call it truth while understanding that there never was any truth um but to be able to cite sources in an argument used to be really valuable whether or not we really believe the sources nowadays i mean the media is in such disarray the the the people who you used to rely on to provide at least some window even if it was a flawed window into reality are so disorganized disoriented and um and let's let you know i mean totally uh uh their reputations are in tatters that that leaves nothing to a conversation but name-calling and and whatnot i mean what

facts would you argue with you have your facts and i have my facts and they never come you know they never they never cross over you know yeah what was that uh rudy giuliani's line through is not true no what is that he said something along those lines that was like the most postmodern statement i've ever heard where he was just and it's a knowledge in the fact that yes there basically is no agreement on objective truth that uh the death of investigative journalism because that's what you know as many amazing things as internet has brought has also brought to that of investigative journalism because you know nobody has the money to spend to make it happen in an environment where people are reading stuff online and are not buying newspapers anymore and all of that there is no commonly agreed set of facts it's all uh it's all that that's why people can i mean people have always made a propaganda but there was a little bit of

fat checking going on now i think anything you quote automatically people are going to say that's not a good source screw it i'm not going to listen to it that just no no no i have my fingers in my ears that's just a bad source or at least you could quote somebody who you read right you may say i don't agree with what you're saying because you know i was just reading this book by so-and-so and he said i mean the discussions don't happen at that level um it's you know it's funny because when i was in talk radio they used to say that you can't ever delve any lower beneath the surface than the very surface issues because you have to assume your audience is turning over all the time people are getting in and out of their cars and whatnot so you always have to keep the conversation at the introductory level because new people are joining it all the time i almost feel like that's become the way the national

conversation and the international conversation has gone now where nothing gets below the surface level because once you get below the surface level either people are incapable of having a conversation at that level or i mean it's you know if i come up with facts against somebody and they say well you're just a fill in the blank i mean already the conversation is over so there isn't a conversation yeah and in a functioning you know there used to be a line that in a in a democracy or a republic an informed citizenry is what's required could you call our citizenry informed and if you said no is it their fault i don't know right no i agree i think it's uh that's why it's a really messy situation which is why i see the tremendous appeal not just in us but around the world of really kind of like the strong man authoritarian type who's gonna tell you i will take care of it all because people are confused people are scared there's

so much so much contradictory information so much quick change happening at a incredibly fast pace that people feel like the ground underneath them is not as solid as it used to be and so the appeal of the strong man was going to fix it all seemed to be very popular pretty much i wouldn't say all over the world but in many many many different parts i'll tell you what reading mind conf again uh for the first time you know probably in two years three years i read it for a show a while back but i'm reading it and and it's funny because obviously the situations between you know post-first world war germany and where we are now is totally different we're not in a defeat period we haven't had just you know the the great depression all these other things but when you're reading what hitler is saying you're going wow a lot of this would apply to now in terms of you know he's slamming the parliamentarians

and he's talking about how they come out to talk to the voters right around election time promise them every i mean it's the same sort of um anger that would play very well in the current society and i have to say listen i don't have a nazistic bone or really a bolshevistic bone in my body but i get it but i mean i get the frustration when you see government slowly but surely not functioning at all and certainly not functioning for the common people but what's funny is how often i don't know if you want to call it cyclical or whatever but how how you know the very things that hitler's saying in mind comp specifically to appeal let's remember that that book was not to be this great historical document so we could read it now it was meant for a political treatise for himself in that era how well that would play today you know i mean i think people would be scared if i said go read mein kampf to

find out where hitler is on the political spectrum because i think they would think don't tell people to do that because they might like it absolutely i think is i mean has been done time and time again the whole uh quoting from minecraft not saying that it's hitler in front of cheering crowds who go this is great and then you tell them by the way that was hitler and people flip out you know it's like there's a reason for it is people as much as it's not very popular thing to say people like that stuff oh let me give you the converse one that upset me so much i remember i was on the radio in the 1990s i was always talking about freedom and liberty and the this america that was disappearing and right around the time i was doing this i remember i was coming home from work and i'm listening to the radio and there was a story and it was some democrats who had re i'm going from memory here but they had

sort of rewritten the bill of rights in modern day english so that it didn't look like the original and then submitted it i forgot what this was i want to say it was the house of representatives and a bunch of republicans came forward and said that it was awful that it would destroy you know in other words just really we can't have this kind of stuff and then of course they sprung the trap on them and said oh it's the bill of rights and you would have voted against it um i i you know i mean i think there's a little of that too where you turn around go there's a lot of and this is another reason that i think my current event show has a problem right now is that it's hard for me to relate to a current um generation of americans that very well might look at the bill of rights and say way way way i don't agree with one four seven and you know i mean i i'm i feel like a dinosaur politically and so having discussions

with people along the lines that we used to consider to be normal you know 20 30 years ago elicits responses that surprise me and not just from you know young liberal americans but from young conservative americans too here is one thing though that i'm getting a lot when i bring this up with people is that i always got the feedback of don't listen to those people just go ahead and and this applies probably to you more than to than to me but like many people miss your point of view many people miss the the presence of a voice that's not ultra that doesn't push this ultra functionalism all the time a voice that's actually trying to make sense out of the current scenario not through not through particular ideological lenses you know and it's a pain because inevitably if you do that you will get the hatred from multiple sides but at the same time there probably is a need for it precisely because the times

are so ugly in that sense on the other hand is better this is a secret secret danielle bolelli attempt to try to find the [ __ ] in my armor to get me to go do that again i know what you're up to well i mean no and you know it well and we agree but also let's look at what i'm doing is very easy for me to tell you to do it right he's like dan this is a really important thing that somebody should do it wink wink why don't you do it he's like well yes that's great except that that means you have to deal with all the annoying aspects that that would not entail so and as much as i'm pushing you in that direction i also acknowledge that i'm not the best of friend in this because i'm telling you to do something that i'm not doing so you know no well speaking of that let me shift this a little bit because no no i don't like it because we've spoken of of this specific american milieu here which is where i

live right and i don't mean live like like geographically i mean i am i am i am a product of this right it's a very american uh point of view and a very american attitude and i realize my my my blind spots and my blinders and when i talk about you know the national socialism and people talking about the loss all of these are such american phenomenon but the united states is of course but one part of the planet let me ask you you go home to the old country a lot sure how does how does how do these trends that we're talking about here in the states how much is this internationalized and tell me what do you think we'll talk about european youth in general but let's talk about maybe uh mediterranean youth or italian youth specifically if you have any connection to them at all how much of this is is apparent how much do the situations match and in what ways do you see differences i mean other than the damn discussion

about nazism fascism left-wing right-wing that kind of thing and i mean them in a sense that we have established it's based on no historical evidence whatsoever that stuff probably because people have lived through it is not really up for discussion in italy but everything else applies you know everything else is the same degree of extreme brutal angry functionalism the same lack of solution from one side that then push people into voting the other side only to find out that the other side is equally clueless so then you swim back to i think these are i don't want to say universal trends because what do i know about every country in the world but i if we stick the discussion to at least italy yeah i do see the same dynamics at play okay can we call this a um you know that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction could we suggest that this is a natural um attitude you know populism being the

response to uh a a government that is uh deaf or that or that is ins working for someone else i mean another one of the reports came out again you know backing up what everybody already knows which is the people that influence policy at least in the united states uh are are people with tons of money and the people that have almost no say over policy are the great mass of people um how much you know i would say that in my mind populism whether you want to say populism of the left or the right or wherever is a is a natural reaction perhaps to a government that is deaf absolutely or unresponsive or or seemingly working for someone else and and i think you could say in in the global sense i mean look at the reaction to the eu in europe and some of the critiques against it sound an awful lot like critiques against washington dc by americans here yeah and i think that's the problem that you know our the human mind is very

binary you know we are used to good and evil black and white if these ordered no realizing that often the solution is a mix of different impulses it's not a one extreme or another which doesn't mean it's in the center either because the center is also a stack position the solution is dynamic it's constantly changing and you have to find the right balance in the right situation now that's not the way our minds work most people feel if faction a is doing something that clearly is not working if the government is not working following this philosophy then faction b will be the solution if uh the powers that be in washington are screwed up then some populists to show up will be the solution or vice versa and what i see is just a ping pong game between stupid ideas where you know it's like the opposite of a supposed to be b but b yeah they talk a different game but in terms of result is they are equally poor and rather than

realizing okay face doesn't deliver results if b doesn't deliver results maybe we could try something else i just see the ping pong game going back and forth forever and i'm just like really this is the game we're stuck on this is like do we really not think that there are maybe more out there than just these two supposedly different alternatives except that they deliver similarly bad results that's the part that i find frustrating that i find is not even about modern us or modern italy or even the left right political spectrum i find that like a virus of the human mind that we think in these binary opposites that very rarely actually match reality let me propose another idea um there's a a wonderful punk rock singer john lyden he used to be called johnny rotten he wrote a wonderful book and the title is wonderful called anger is an energy um and and i would i would propose that and i'm speaking for the united states here

specifically i would i would suggest that most americans in normal times don't care that much about politics but when it's apparent that life is getting difficult and that and that the situation appears to be extremely unfair that the anger rises and all of a sudden people who are not normally interested in politics are interested because it affects them so for example i've said forever uh that if if the united states can't figure out a way to do better for poor people and lower middle class people that those people will make the rest of us feel their pain eventually right they will only put up with it for a certain period of time and there's a tipping point if there get to be too many of those people no matter how much you want to justify and i'm just you know parroting a line here right the united states is this great capitalist system where you know if you've got what it takes you will

make it and if you don't you won't uh that sounds great on paper but if enough people fall into the we don't make it category they're going to decide that that system is unsustainable and they're going to change it whether or not on paper this is the right philosophical system um that to me is the is where you get populism where people are just saying uh the system as constructed is not working there are people who are doing very well and then they convert doing very well into uh influencing the government with their cash which you know even doubles down on the situation it makes it worse eventually you get populist anger on all sides uh if those people could ever unite you'd have a real interesting i mean that that is a little bit where you wonder if this isn't the shiny object uh being used by our typical politicians to keep us from uniting against them right fight against each other and don't

notice what's going on behind the curtain but i i think what you may see now globally is if you get enough people that can't feed their kids or can't afford any health care and they're sick and there's enough of them they're not going to put up with it i mean history shows they're not going to put up with it forever so i don't know why we should be surprised when they don't and as everybody knows you have two choices when they flip out either you get into some radical changes or you crack down on them which leads to a more repressive state which nobody in this country wants absolutely and i think that's i think you really hit the nail on the head on that one because as much as i'm not a big believer in conspiracy theories and i tend to think that those usually are based on very lazy thinking but you can't tell to think that when there are real major issues at play that are ever discussed where the

spotlight is hardly ever shown there where the real business is happening closed doors and in the meantime they have you fighting about transgender bathrooms or something that i don't mean to trivialize but really in terms of the great scheme of things not quite as big of an issue as let's say where we are going today in terms of the sustainability of our relationship with the planet of sources of energy of you know ten thousand other things that are at the key of whether the human race is a future or not i can't tell but think that there may be an element of destruction i played there that is like yeah get them to fight along ideological lines about completely relevant topics to the to the real business not irrelevant to any single individual life of course it's relevant to some individual life but i'm talking irrelevant in terms of what the real business is about what the big decisions got to be made of

and that way we still get to do business as usual behind closed doors while the idiots are fighting each other over something something else oh we are very manipulatable and this isn't a conspiracy theory this is this is how politics works i mean you can't call that conspiracies when when the political systems understood how to do this forever i mean a perfect example is i used to interview politicians all the time on the radio and some of them became good friends of mine and they were very upfront about how things work i mean for example they would talk about the problem of fundraising when you would get between elections so when you would get to this dead zone that was quite a distance between maybe call it an equal distance between two elections and it was hard to raise funds they would go and agree the to the republicans and the democrats to bring up a bill affecting one of those issues that just gets money

pouring into the coffers on both sides abortion or guns or whatever as a this this was a bipartisan effort to fan and whip up the base so that they started you know so you had something to go back and ask for contributions for that's not a conspiracy that's politics exactly um so so i mean if people get upset with that i understand the populist anger because you know as problems that we all see around us get worse you become more and more frustrated with the lack of attention to them now this kind of leads into another subject you wanted to talk about you wanted to talk about if not these political leaders who and i'll let you set that up yeah i was playing with the dan carlin time machine concept and so if you had to pick one past u.s president which of course is crazy because one past us president wouldn't have the knowledge of the modern war that we have but in a more you know let's say you give

them a few years to catch up to what's going on today personality wise if there was one past u.s president that you wouldn't mind seeing in the white house today is there anybody if there's anybody who would that be well you sort of screwed up my answer too because you issued the disclaimer that i was going to throw out initially which is um i don't think you could bring back any 19th century presidents and bring them up to speed with the america of today so that they could operate that's because that's because i know you too well and i closed the way out of the quest you know i was like i know where he's gonna go so let me close that way out it just it limits the choices that's all it would do you know it's funny because it this is a question that gets to one's own political beliefs because obviously i'm going to pick the president that solves the things that i believe are problems which may not be what other

people believe are problems um i thought about this a little bit um to me i i think i got to bring back somebody who's going to figure out how to uh give the united states a soft landing from where we are now and there are going to be people that don't believe we need a soft landing or any kind of landing but what i mean by that is if you look and this is again my personal opinion if you look at where the united states is now let's call it what it is it's an empire and it's not just an empire i always blow people's minds when i point this out it's the most powerful empire in global history okay and it's not even close so when you say that you know americans are so are so conditioned to believe that they're not an empire that that simply strikes them incorrectly it feels right it feels like you're making a political statement by even saying that right because we're not like nazi germany we're not like the mongols

no we're a commercial empire think athens right or or or something like that right think carthage um that's what we're like and we and we we exert a very light touch uh with with client states and friendly states and alliance systems uh we have a navy that controls the seas protects the trade routes all these kind of things um but that to me is unsustainable right whatever it is six 800 bases whatever it is around the world i mean if that's not an empire i don't know what is um so so i always say to people how do you think that's going to turn out long term right in other words project 100 years from now whereas the american empire project 200 years from now if it's not there 200 years from now what happened to it right um my attitude is is that this is unsustainable but i think the people in the united states government and the halls of power and many americans assume that the conditions we have now

u.s global dominance or the word we'd like to use is global leadership that this is ever-present and unending that this is the status quo for the rest of history moving forward which is ridiculous and as we all understand from what was it foreign policy 101 the balance of power principles it naturally when you have one overriding power it naturally uh creates an interest for other global powers to coalesce to counterbalance it uh which leads to either terrible wars uh eventually or eventually some country bankrupting itself trying to keep the status quo um so when you ask me which president i would bring back i would bring back somebody who both recognized that and would be in a position to do something about it and it would take a very special kind of person um so i always go to eisenhower uh disclaimer general slash president eisenhower uh did a lot of things that i think were awful and that got the

country into worse situations for example he was a fervent user of like the cia to undermine countries and all these kind of things but but i would suggest that that is part of the era he lived in and certain challenges from that 1950s um you know war against communism that um that i would give him a little bit of a pass on what i would say about eisenhower though and why i would choose him over those 19th century guys is he's a guy who straddled the divide he was born in one america and he was president of another america and he remembered what the old america was like right what you know what i always get angry at with when americans will talk to me about my political beliefs on on the empire thing they will always say to me well you're an isolationist and i will say i'm not at isolations i wanted the american foreign policy that existed from the beginning of the country to about the second world war i don't if

that's isolationist you know i'm sure the mexicans and the native americans and the canadians and a bunch of other people would go well it doesn't seem very isolationist to me um but but my point is that eisenhower was born in a norman rockwell upbringing and understood that that's the america that if we could get back to that we should and when you look at his comments he understood totally that it was an unsustainable and temporary situation that we were in in the post-second world war world and he was looking for ways out right when can we get out of europe and let the europeans resume you know their normal operations and they control their area and they defend their area he was looking for landing zones right how do we get out of these commitments in a way uh that's safe right he didn't want to leave anybody in the lurch he realized that you know you had to be careful but that's why he gave that

military-industrial complex speech at the end of his presidency because he realized that this is not sustainable nor is it healthy long-term but it is profitable for some people so you have to be careful because eventually that profitability for some people becomes addictive and it's funny that so many of the people that decry u.s social programs don't realize that the number one transfer of wealth that i can think of especially if you're talking about the discretionary part of the us budget is from the american taxpayer to a bunch of companies that make military hardware i mean that that is military keynesia ism right there um so so when you ask what president i would get you need a president that can one see the unsustainability i think eisenhower pointed that out when it was a lot less bad than it is now by the way i also think he understood what america really was because he grew up in it

so so in his mind's eye he would like to as much as you can you know given the realities of the 20th century get back to that and he remembers what the road back looked like finally i think the fact that the guy was a general makes a huge difference because in our country it is so easy to tar and feather a civilian when they start talking about changing you know the global military balance of power and all this whereas eisenhower knew all those generals air force guys and and admirals by name personally he played bridge with them right he he did not fear them he could go right up to them and say you know bob this is ridiculous the country can't afford it or whatever and no american person is going to think he's soft on defense um so when you talk about what dan carlin thinks the country should have to get back on an even keel this is my own personal you know bias you're going to take in my

mind a guy like eisenhower is going to be required to do it now did he do a lot of things i don't like he absolutely did but i don't have any presidents who are perfect were there 19th century guys i would like sure but they're not going to be able to con i mean if you put them in the white house even if you tried to bring them up to speed the country that they're going to be dealing with doesn't even resemble not the one that they came from so to me it's got to be somebody who at least existed in a time where the country had some semblance of what it's like now in order to adequately you know contend with the problem so i'm picking eisenhower do you have a person you would pick well i mean as you said there are no perfect guys and in some cases we are really just looking at very different degrees of imperfection because some of their downsides are very heavy but one guy i like i can't help but in

personality probably because it's a little mental in the range which seems to be one of the characteristics i i resonate well with but um i did this three-part series until the roosevelt and as much okay let's start with the negatives roosevelt never saw war he didn't like he was ridiculously impulsive very hawkish in terms of foreign policy all stuff that i'm not particularly fond of so what is that i like about the and just to clarify again theodore roosevelt very different from franklin delano roosevelt so just as a reminder but theodore roosevelt one of the things that i did is um two concepts one his environmental policies i thought they were awesome you know he's the one guy that i've ever seen who pushed the best environmental policies in terms of a president and i think that to me something that should be a bipartisan issue should be something that everybody goes behind because it doesn't matter where you fit

ideologically if you have uh poison in your water or in the air you breathe so somebody who made that a priority is important to me and also i really like his willingness to challenge the corruption in both parties you know he's to this day he's the best third-party effort ever in modern times he he was very open about going hard against the people in his party as well as people in other parties you know there's a court office that i really love that and granted you know quotes are easy to stuff is easy to say every politician can deliver a good speech and then not follow up but in terms of the way he did follow up on some of these issues something i like but there's this quote where he goes political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people from these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside instead of instruments to promote the general welfare

they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes behind ostensible government seats and thrown an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people to destroy this invisible government to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statementship of the day i don't disagree with a coma in there you know it's like everything is that on and i found that his actions in terms of cracking down on corruption were particularly needed so when you put those two together you know his environmental policies and his attitude in terms of factionalism slash corruption those are characteristics that i think are extremely important to this day you know i always was fascinated with the you know if you talk about like life lessons it would have it would have been

interesting had roosevelt gone through in my opinion i mean one of the things i find interesting about the guy is he he's a very uh for those who don't remember or know roosevelt was um and i i always called him an adrenaline junkie yeah i always think about teddy roosevelt in terms of how what kind of a present he would have been more at the end of his life than when he actually was because when he was president in some ways he reminded me of my grandfather who i always thought was like batman and teddy roosevelt always wanted to be like batman and when i was a kid i loved teddy roosevelt because he was like a big kid who played with toy soldiers and thought all that would i mean yeah i mean that to me that that's that's i liked that as a present but as i got older i thought okay this is a dangerous guy who thinks war is wonderful and heroic and grand but but here's the thing you know he goes through it and and by

the way his experience as we all know when he was fighting uh in the spanish-american war in his mind was glorious at grant and he had a great time and it was wonderful you know war was a game then but then you get to the first world war which he actively wanted to get into and he loses kids right his kids die in the war um and it changed him you know i mean and and that is the roosevelt that happens after that happens might have been in my mind a more well-rounded figure than the guy who was actually in the white house um so so in that sense i think in a weird way and it sounds like like uh disrespectful to say so but i mean i feel like the guy grew up uh in a way that would have made him uh like you said i mean a president who fights corruption and he was known as the trust buster i mean he would have gone in and taken on some of the big corporations today which you know what i always argue by the way this is on the

side but what i always argue these americans who want a tiny tiny tiny little government is then who's going to protect us against the giant giant giant corporations right there's there's a balance there and teddy roosevelt understood that the government needs to be like a fire which is what an a early american uh writer once said a president once said the government is like fire uh that you know if you don't have it you freeze to death but if it gets out of control it burns everything around it but what that means it is it needs to be tended at just the right level just the right level is one that could protect the people from something like a giant international corporation that runs roughshod over our rights and freedoms but not so large that it runs roughshod over our rights and freedoms so uh yeah i get it it's interesting that both you and i picked republican presidents isn't it i know it's fine well i mean even the

definition of that's why you know democrat republican to me is like especially when you go far back in time you know that's why eventually roosevelt didn't fit in with anybody you know he didn't fit in with the republican party he didn't fit in with the democratic party he was his own thing because he upset them all you know he did things that the powers that be didn't like on in any direction and in some way ideologically he would be considered very right-wing and in some ways ideologically would be considered very left-wing that's another thing that i dig about him the fact that he didn't seem to be a slave to an ideology always going with the playbook of his party but very much making up his mind as he went not feeling the need to constantly fit in with what's considered acceptable by his voters which i think was kind of what made him fun you didn't know what he was going to argue before he jumped in

well and maybe we could put a wonderful bow tie on the whole conversation here because you had mentioned that the you know to talk about democrats and republicans uh before the modern era is to talk about parties that were so different that the comparisons don't even work anymore um a perfect example of that is when i was uh looking for roosevelt franklin delano roosevelt speeches for the latest hardcore history show i was listening to some of the campaign speeches uh of that era so we're talking about the 1940 presidential campaign so roosevelt's opponent was a guy named wendell wilkie who was a a businessman the republican and he's giving speeches and if you went and looked and you can find them online to his speech or his conversation to the camera i don't think it was an official speech it was more like a a um what would you call it a filmed campaign commercial maybe by that standards of that era you can see how

much the united states has moved to the right totally because if i if i played wilkie's speech today and i didn't identify what it was there is not a person who would hear it who would think that it was anything but a leftist speech but remember that this is the guy to the right of the guy who's gonna crush him in the election right so uh so to me that you know we talked about goldwater being the real person who changed the american conservative movement uh from where it was to where it is which was a hard move to the right and then what reagan did who supposedly you know goldwater laid the the foundation for reagan who 15 14 years later you know comes to fruition reagan moved the democratic party to the right both parties are to the right of where they were in 1940 which if you said to somebody who wants to make america great were we great in 1940 they would probably say well greater than we are today go look at the

campaign speeches from both the democratic and republican presidential hopefuls in 1940 and see if you could agree with either one of those if you're on the conservative side of things now yeah that's one of the funny things about looking at it historically and not just being stuck in the present that yeah you do see these changes and you can't help but smile at it because yes there would be a shock to a lot of people well listen as you know i'm not saying that this is right or wrong i'm simply this is not fake news i mean people can go check this out for themselves you may say thank goodness the united states and the world has moved to the right politically or you may say it's a tragedy but it's fascinating that we have and that things i mean the republican presidential hopeful in 1940 is talking about expanding social programs that today people on the right side of the ledger want to get rid of totally so it's it

again you know when we talk about going back to another america i don't think people understand what the other america was and this is why i have such a hard time doing my current event show now because that was always what i was suggesting that we need to get back to some of the foundational ideas that when i was a kid nobody would have argued with you might have argued over um if i said we need to get more liberty because we've been reducing our personal freedom and all that a lot of people say yeah yeah but then when you get down to the specifics might argue with oh i don't mean that or i don't mean this but today when i say things like that i get pushback from young people on both sides of the political spectrum in other words i as an old-fashioned american am so out of touch with today's political world because they're not like that so i so i have a hard time i mean in the old days you used to be able to base an

argument on certain fundamental truths that everyone agreed with and now no one agrees with those truths so even something like liberty that's a bad word in some circles now and when you use it in the circles that use it and like it they don't mean it the way i mean it absolutely i think that's one of the things that i've always noticed like when i argue with some people who are pushing it's all about freedom freedom freedom i'm like i get it i like freedom freedom is a cool thing so i'm assuming you are in favor of ending the war on drugs legalizing prostitution and legalizing euthanasia and they're like no no no that's not what i meant i'm like okay then probably we should have a dictionary talk first about what you mean when you say things like freedom because to me that's individual rights you know you have the right to put whatever you want in your body as long as you're not affecting somebody else if people want

to sell sex as long as nobody's being forced they have the right to do so and they have the right to die as they wish you know and i'm not even saying that's a good or a bad thing i'm just saying if you are gonna scream freedom probably that would be a consistent way to go about it but often as you say what people mean by certain words is not really it's not really the same meaning that everybody see and and that's why i think certain words are poison like we should the less we use them the better because they are so hopelessly vague that everybody project their own meanings on it you know when's the last time you were a candidate anywhere saying that they are against freedom that yeah we hate freedom and we need to squash freedom or when is it that we are you know terms even like left-wing right-wing as we started with are so vague terms like socialism communism there are all things that are like

you can have a discussion going on for hours with somebody never realizing that you were not talking about the same thing in the first place because you assigned different meanings to those concepts and i think this is amplified on social media where you don't have the time to go hey wait stop a second what did you mean by that and so this discussion go on forever where really there's not even an agreement about what it is they are talking about except that you're using the same word well it's like what we had said when i said that there was that uh translation of the bill of rights into common language and people were against it uh there was a famous quote i forgot who said it but it was it was years ago so it shows you how how little in some ways things have changed where i think it was a political figure may not have been who said the bill of rights would not even get out of committee

if you tried to pass it today people today adhere to a bunch of marketing slogans like when you say uh uh the national anthem or the pledge of allegiance or any of these things and all these wonderful words come out uh uh and we cherish them and we almost treat them with a sort of a religious devotion but never delve into what they mean nor talk about you know what when you say something of liberty what is the practical meaning of that right and this is where you get into the devils in the details question but if i was in charge of the school curriculum these are the kind of things we would be asking right what do we mean are we talking about just political rights which is in one time period what they were talking about because in you know 1787 you had a lot of states that felt just fine cracking down on people's morals and didn't think about that as an infringement on their liberty at all

but you go to the 1960s and there was a whole new generation of americans that were saying wait a minute we believe in liberty too but liberty means my right to do what i want as long as it doesn't hurt someone else what was that justice oliver wendell holmes said the right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins well what i've said is we live in an era where everybody's noses are growing euphemistically longer right and so so i mean if you if you change what constitutes harm that's the equivalent of being pinocchio and it becomes a time period where now nobody can swing their fist without contacting someone's ever elongated nose which means that our liberty is all being is all being constrained because now we hurt people with comments on twitter right as opposed to uh the real infringement on liberty is telling somebody no you can't walk on this side of town that's an infringement on liberty that

everybody 50 years ago would have understood didn't mean that they were going to let black folks cross over the tracks and go to their side of town but they would have understood it um in this day and age we're so easily hurt and if that becomes the oliver wendell holmes point at which we can restrict people's behavior and liberty we aren't going to be able to do anything yeah and that's a funny thing that everybody and this is across the political spectrum everybody seemed to love playing the victim the people who scream about how everybody else is playing the victim or often are doing it in a can you believe what they are doing to us kind of way there's this culture of victimhood that's people it's almost like you're scoring a point if you are the beaten underdog and people seem to really thrive on it like it seemed to be a popular concept today let me ask a question because i don't know the answer but i wonder about it a

lot i'd be curious on your view sure i i can't decide if americans today and when i say americans today i'm talking about the grand hole but i think when we're talking about technology being the way we've we figured this out we're probably skewing young on that right um are americans today just more jerks than they used to be or are we more able to express ourselves and so we see that americans and i'm saying americans but this is a global phenomenon um is this a culture where we're just trolls to each other all the time or is this because of our ability to express ourselves has become democratized with social media and everything that we're just seeing how americans and other people around the world would have been 50 years ago had they had the tools i mean had had nazi germany been on twitter with uh with with uh uh chamberlain's britain and france of the time period and imperial japan i mean can we imagine

the 1940s world with our social media now would we have been any nicer to each other or is this in other words i guess i'm asking is this a human phenomenon or are we seeing a change in people's attitudes that is a result of the interplay between social media and our political situation i think my feel on it is that it's 80 human nature and 20 some social conditions that have changed partially because of technology but also just loneliness and alienation you know it's very different if you're having discussions if there's a community that you're part of if you have discussions face to face if you are used to mediating in their regard or if you are in your lonely four walls and one roof and you don't need to have that kind of you don't grow that muscle that allow you to mediate with other people on a regular basis because you don't have to and so your communication is going to be inevitably much more abrupt and

harsh i think both fact i i tend to say human nature is human nature it doesn't change radically but i do think that uh online communication and and heavy loneliness that most people feel by not really being part of something larger than often what's going on within their own four walls that contributes to not developing that ability to have more nuance or metal conversations with other human beings let me tie in something that may or may not be relevant but it's interesting because as you say that i'm thinking about something i was discussing with somebody just the other day and it has to do with several articles i've been reading about young people not dating as much as they used to uh not having i mean in other words not going out to clubs to meet each other the way we used to when i was a kid in other words if you think of young people as having a constant sort of a temperament throughout most of history

right we're going to go out we're going to meet some girls we're going to go out you know i mean all these things that we used to consider to be just normal human things when we were kids fast forward to now where we've introduced a variable uh the technology right something that had never been a part of the debate before and now we're seeing a generation of people and again broad generalizations here but i mean i've got two kids who are teenagers myself they don't date as much as we did they they don't have face-to-face conversations they don't know how to walk up to somebody that makes them nervous and ask them out i mean maybe this is something that's a variable that changes an equation that used to be pretty consistent throughout most of human history because we were dealing with human beings and they can be pretty consistent you know across a variable spectrum but but but you add this social media thing

and and i say social media but it's the whole thing right social media encompassing everything including texting i mean everything um and you have an entire uh maybe generation and it's going to be interesting when they're the parents raising the next generation of people who interact with each other in very different ways and so maybe you know in the same way that i would have thought it would be much easier to ask a girl out on a date just by texting her than having to walk up in front of her and deal with the the embarrassment of being shot down in person if that happens maybe it's easier to call somebody a jerk or maybe it's easier to say you know to pick a fight or call people names when you don't have to do it face to face maybe that's a function of the technology absolutely and i think that is uh i mean we're changing the rules of human communication in within a couple of decades and

we have no blueprint for how to do it you know it's kind of like somebody who gathered the wheel of a car and has never known anybody who drove a car never drawn a car they don't have any user manual and it's just like go ahead let's see what happens kind of thing we are playing a dangerous game it's a health in some ways a beautiful game because so many amazing things have happened in the last 20 years because of technological innovation so by no means the back in my days before this evil technology screwed us all up that's not what i'm saying at all but there are clearly some issues that we haven't really figured out how to deal with that are as much as they are contributing to creating more opportunities and some amazing stuff they're also contributing to some serious problems that we have no solution to i think that leads into the last thing we were thinking about discussing today the

the trends and forces and the ability of an individual uh to make a difference in an era where it seems like there's so much um uh uh how would you describe it danielle i mean we always used to just call it trends and forces uh versus individual initiative but i mean in this social media thing i mean i was just uh i was reading a review of a book by uh shashana zubov it's called surveillance capitalism and it's just another one in a long line of books that's explaining how we're being diced and and and categorized and files are essentially being kept on all of us based on browsing histories and all these kind of things and how dangerous this is if you think about you know what's going to happen down the road with all of this and yet how passive so many of the younger generation are about this and passive not so much because maybe they don't see that it might be bad but passive because they feel

powerless it what are you gonna do right are you not gonna participate in the modern world just because everybody is is putting together uh uh predictive technologies that will begin to be able to to know where you're going to be next week ahead of time um maybe let's let's introduce this topic because it was the last thing we wanted to discuss today but the question of of how much individual initiative can play a role versus the trends and forces that are we're all operating in and i think that is the problem sometime with slow moving catastrophes you know you see where it's going you can tell way ahead that the direction is not a healthy one and yet there is nothing you can do to steer it or at least you don't feel like think like things like uh you know your series that you did on the fall of the roman republic for example it's very clear that the trends you analyze don't happen overnight they

don't happen in one year or in 10 or in 50. you can see them from like 200 years before this process is beginning and many people are seeing it along the way they scream and shout saying we need to do something about it and clearly nobody is able to course correct for real and avoid where the whole scenario is going sometime you know there is something to be said about you don't want to say oh throw up your arms and say we're all powerless forget it let's just have fun while we can because it's all going in a bad direction anyway but at the same time sometimes you wonder how much as an individual you have an impact on major historical forces i think you know in history we have examples of both we have examples of individuals who have managed to make a humongous difference but we have even more examples of times where you see where things are going without the ability to do something about it i mean

i mentioned earlier since something like environmental issues the fact that we live on a society that's essentially polluting the very food we eat or the air we breathe and we we all know it we all understand that that's a problem nobody likes it and yet we're not able to make a switch or you know if we are able we're taking very small steps when something is moving faster and more action is needed that tells you a lot about this scene and you know you can look at basically every major civilization that has collapsed usually the warning signs were there long before they did collapse it didn't happen in one day and yet despite the fact that there were probably very smart people living in those places didn't help being able to fix it so i'm not sure whether i have a pessimistic or optimistic view of things in this because i can't think of examples where occasional individuals have made a big difference

but i also get your i kind of see it as the same discussion as you do in common sense where you feel like easy really worth it am i making a difference is these uh can these really impact things or not i look at you know for me i think some of this problem i have a hard time with it because you know i've just spent some of this conversation talking about how much i believe in uh liberty and freedom and and and people and all these kinds of things and yet there are certain uh kinds of problems that don't lend itself it seems to me and again i could be wrong about this i think we're watching it unfold and i'm trying to to learn as we see it also but i mean there are certain kinds of issues that it seems like uh um ap instead of democracy because some of them are republic some of them are parliamentarians i mean people get hung up over words uh but we'll call it a voter driven system maybe

there are some problems that seem to be difficult for a voter driven system to deal with and usually they are long-term problems there's only one aspect of the um of the totalitarian systems that i've ever been jealous of and that is their ability to plan long term so the the the communists used to have in the soviet union five-year plans and 10-year plans i'm jealous of those because to me something like that would be unsustainable because we'd elect a different president if we didn't like the plan and we change course but but so many of these problems require trade-offs between the now and the later uh and people i mean for example if you said to me listen dan we're gonna have to make changes because of the environmental situation that will hurt you and your family now but will benefit countless generations into the future that is a hard pill for people to swallow who are trying to keep their

heads above water now right um think about i always think about superman if you go back and you read the superman origin story it seems terribly prophetic for now right krypton's gonna explode uh superman's dad goes and tells the people on the council listen we have to plan for this it's gonna happen and they laugh at him and of course we know what happens right um there's something to that now where i mean look at what happened in france where uh the government there tries to implement climate change protocols and disagree with them or agree with the specific plans they chose doesn't matter but the people then rebel because they're the ones who are going to have to pay the tax for that now you know people who aren't making enough money to make ends meet now and so they rebel against that it you kind of go god i don't want to live in a system where the only way we're going to make the world survive

is to overthrow the will of the voters because the will of the voters can't possibly sacrifice now for generations yet unborn and yet that seems to me to be you know a [ __ ] in our armor in in a democracy or a parliamentary system or a republic any thoughts on that i think that plays into the trends and forces thing because i think i think if the trends are bad long term and they require us to all sacrifice maybe sacrifice for our lives now for you know children yet unborn i think that's really difficult for us to imagine doing and then you throw in the corruption where there are people who are going heck i'm making money now this isn't i'm not going to not cut these trees down now i won't live to benefit from these the money these trees will make you know 100 years from now 200 years and i certainly won't benefit from using them as a carbon sink i think the system works against us solving those kind of long-term problems

and if the long-term problems are existential then what does that mean yeah there was a great line of uh congressmen debating with theodore roosevelt back in the day about environmental policies and the guy said i kid you not posterity what has posterity ever done for me well and listen and it's more than that because everybody likes to focus on the climate change question because it's right in our face and we get into the question of is there or isn't there and blah blah to me once again that's the shiny object because there are even if you want to say that we must do something about that okay have that debate elsewhere but who's against clean water right i mean there's there's a number of these pollution issues where you're going really can't we agree on let's not pollute the fresh water but we fight this pretty basic exactly it's like it should be is clean water a republican democratic

that's crazy but it's that same short-term long-term deal yeah it is and i think that's precisely the problem that you know as long as uh short-term special interests are ruling the conversation it's very hard to have any kind of long-term discussion about what benefits humanity as a whole for sure well and how does it how does it fare into the imperial debate i mean there was a wonderful 60-minute story a while back that was talking about tanks you know armored vehicles right and uh congress was voting on should we or shouldn't we build more tanks and the military came to congress and said we don't need any more tanks we have them all sitting on lots they're all covered up we have more than we need and yet they voted for more tanks because the people in the districts of the representatives make a living building stuff for tanks so in other words it's the tail wagging the dog there and we have a system where we're going

to continue this imperial sort of thing for what eisenhower talked about right the military-industrial complex not just because it benefits the big fat cats in the in the in the corporations that make this stuff but because it benefits the workers themselves who are trying to feed their family and put food on the table absolutely and i think that's where sometimes the clash of interest is what leads to decisions that seem to make no sense well let me just for the sake of not bumming everybody out let me try to throw a light-hearted one on you that we can maybe wrap things up on the don carlin time machine forget bringing back u.s presidents forget i know there are places where you would like to be a fly on a wall in terms of historical curiosity you know being at the battle of canada would be fascinating in many ways would probably not be fun right it would not be like a happy occasion it would be a

what would be a happy one what would be you know if you do have your don caroline time machine a place where you wouldn't mind hanging out for a while for fun not for wow i wonder what it would be like to see that live but for no i think i could have a good time there for at least a couple of hours oh you know i think of silly things that that gets kind of personal where i'm sitting here going you know i want to see a boxing match between you know jack dempsey between jack dempsey i want to see i want to see things that were happening before i was born that i'm interested in so instead of a real giant historical event like you know the signing of the declaration of independence i get down to silly little personal things like i i want to see this or i want to see you know i'd i you know i there's a movie and you know it field of dreams right uh where where the uh the guy goes back and gets to play

baseball with his dad uh in in a sort of a ghostly sort of sense and i get personal with that like i'd like to go meet my grandfather when he was 30 years old and pal around with him i mean so that's that's not really like global history that's personal history of course so that's what makes it fun sometime but that but those are the kind of things that that fill up like the top 10 list of things that like to go back to i'd have to get down to number 20 number 30 number 40 on the list before i'm at these giant political events unless you're talking about the dark stuff and then i get you know i mean when you talked about wanting to see the battle of uh of kenny or any of those kinds of things those those are because i don't know the answers so uh and a lot of people don't know this but nobody has any idea what ancient warfare was like and you can't reconstruct it and there's been a lot of attempts to do so so of

course you know my mind says i want to be suspended in a hot air balloon 150 feet above that battle so i can see exactly what the physics of you know ancient combat looked like right of course um so those are and those really aren't about history they're about answering long-standing questions that i've had uh so i but what about you let me let me return to and turn the question around me where would you like to be um and again where i would like to be probably for two hours because before modern medicine the lack of modern medicine kicks in and all of that is a whole different scenario but uh i am absolutely fascinated with pre-state societies so even going way back in the day like what is life like in a hunting and gathering tribe like the way we have lived for most of human history uh 10 000 years ago as the last ice age is giving away and a new world is coming into being what would that feel like now

again i give myself two hours because by then you know i feel like between predators hitting me and the tribe next door clapping me on the head or things like that may get unpleasant really fast but that would be one that fascinates me quite a bit i was reading some interesting books on some of the um some of the studies that were done in the early and mid 20th century by some of these people that were trying to to recreate as best they could exactly what you were talking about so they were going to the last few societies on the planet that still basically functioned as they used to so new guinea was one of the places that they used to go to and there are photographs of these tribes in new guinea that are fighting each other that the archaeologist or it's an anthropologist the the anthropologist took photos of and then tried to extrapolate what you learned from watching those tribes to every other pre-industrial state

throughout history i mean to me that's the closest you can come to a time machine to try to see what it was that you wanted to see and you know it's it's a little sad it's a little like the extinction of an animal species but it would be a lot harder to do that today if you wanted to you might have to go invade some of those few islands off the coast of india or whatever where there are still although although that could be dangerous too yeah as we have seen exactly see i have to turn it dark somehow at the end i know man i was trying to go for the lighthearted one but no no this is proprietary daniela we leave it on the dark side i see okay that's that's the way it goes cool man well thank you so much for the conversation thank you you too buddy

my thanks to danielle for coming on the program or did i go on his well probably little of both uh i enjoyed talking with him as always i talked with him more than you hear me talk with him so this was just one of those times where we you know let you all listen in um i did have an addendum as i said to hardcore history addendum um after that discussion i thought of something i should have brought up when we were talking about the nazis and the company they keep and how this should somehow be factored into where you want to place them on any political spectrum we neglected we the royal we me all by myself neglected to bring up the groups in germany after the first world war that were associated with the nazis in other words um we had talked about countries that wouldn't have associated themselves with leftists but what about elements in german society i mean how do i forget to bring up the paramilitary

groups like the stall helm and the frei corps right these these groups that um were formed mostly of disgruntled and maybe rootless and lost veterans after the war who signed up to police you know germany's streets and root out and beat up or kill communists um these are people who fought for the emperor they are people whom um there's no leftism attached to them at all i mean these are people that that wanted a monarch and were fiercely anti-communist and anti-marxist and think that those people stabbed them in the back remember that phrase and that that's how they lost the first world war the person that will begin to associate himself with the nazis early on they will break over competing weird conspiratorial beliefs but early on is general ludendorff eric ludendorff you remember him right guy who commanded the entire german army for a bunch of the war and um was basically one half of a

military dictatorship that commanded germany over the last couple of years of the first world war this is an ardent anti-leftist this is a monarch i mean why would ludendorff be taking pictures with hitler and associating himself with the nazis and by the way during hitler's great march you know they're trying to take over the government the one he ended up in jail for where they got shot at by police and hermann goring took a bullet in the groin um one guy supposedly didn't fall to the ground when the rifles went off and that was ludendorff marching in the front with everybody he supposedly walks right up to the to the police holding the rifles who just shot down a bunch of people including his own butler uh and ludeng george just moves the rifle to one side and walks past him this guy is not going to associate himself with you know marxist leninist revolutionaries you know the old line from the french

king holds true here be this guy is the virtual representation of the old state and the old regime this is everything that the leftists were fighting against why on earth would he associate himself with the nazis and why would groups like the frey corps and the stall helm do that if they thought the nazis were anything like the leftists that they loathed and that they blamed for the stab in the back theory i mean it just as i said there's a lot of ways to create a political spectrum as something to graft the political beliefs of people and there's no question that the one i grew up with the traditional one is extremely limited but as we said if you're going to change this then we ought to acknowledge that and there are people that you'll see that will make other people out to be idiots because they don't realize nazis are on the left um no that makes the person who says that maybe look like they don't know that the rules

have been changed as i said there's nothing wrong with that but you kind of have to say that you changed what you know you put in the equation for x or y when you you know slam somebody for getting a different answer than you got especially if they were using the old math stay safe everyone you

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP7 Hardcore History On Fire"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Daniele Bolelli (Guest).

What is "EP7 Hardcore History On Fire" about?

The discussion explores the complexities of redefining political terminology, particularly the left-wing and right-wing spectrum as it relates to historical phenomena like fascism and Nazism. Additionally, the conversation emphasizes the importance of evaluating ideas based on their merit rather than their political alignment.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

17 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Daniele Bolelli, Nazism, Fascism, United States (states), Communism, Germany. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP7 Hardcore History On Fire"?

The episode runs 1 h 43 min; the transcript is about 19,733 words in 114 timestamped sections.

More from Dan Carlin

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 26, 2026.