World War II - Part 1 (WWI)

[Music] all right so what I'm starting and it'll take a long time to complete so uh I have no expectation that will compl come close to even completing what I'm starting tonight is a multi-part series on World War II and uh let me start by explaining why I'm doing World War II as a topic first of all I'm obsessed I mean like that just just to be clear um I probably have a mental illness around World War II and I'm not entirely sure why I'm so obsessed if I believed in reincarnation I would assume that

I had fought in World War II because that would kind of explain it but I don't so I'm stuck with I'm just mentally ill fortunately I'm lucky enough that I have a group of friends who have the same mental illness and we get together every Saturday morning to do uh World War II reliving events so just just to start with with my own problem um also I'm from five different ethnicities in World War II one was neutral three were axis and the fifth one declared war on Germany like I want to say it was maybe

three months before the war ended so uh I'm mostly on the wrong side just just to be clear to get my my own personal bias on the table I am extremely anti-nazi uh I hope that if I lived during that time period I would have joined the German resistance and been killed um just just so that I could have the you know the closure of not having to survive the the horrors of what Germany did um I am part German right and it is part of my identity and I speak German and I have lived

in Germany so like I I am really part German I am not eligible to be a German citizen I checked and I was told I was actually called because I sent out an email and uh I think he was the Consulate General for Houston he called me on the phone and I thought to myself well that's a good sign maybe I am eligible and he basically interviewed me and he was like you're a really interesting person and I was like flattered thank you and then at the end he goes there's no way we can give

you German citizenship and I go wait what and he goes yeah yeah the instrument of surrender that we signed when we surrendered at the end of World War II basically made it so we can't offer German citizenship to people who fit in your category and I was like wow that's so obscure was I specifically targeted how did they know I was going to be born and exist anyway so that's my own personal piece another reason why I'm doing this lecture series on World War II is um I've been asked to do it on multiple occasions

so uh I just felt like okay I've heard enough I've had enough requests to this I wrote the University of Maryland University College's course module for World War II when I was teaching in their history department so I I guess I have the chops to do do this it's it's a daunting thing so I've kind of resisted doing it in part because there are just so many moving parts and they're intertwined so from a storytelling perspective it's not like a a linear story where you start with an individual and then you just sort of follow

the individual as things happen in their life it's more like you've got a 100 individuals and you're trying to pin down what each of the 100 individuals is doing and they're inter interacting with each other and going in different directions so that that's one of the reasons why I think this is going to take quite a few episodes is just because because I'm going to have to keep pulling things back and bringing them back and it'll be a mess but that's the cool thing about World War I was this epic scale nightmare from hell that

really was a mess with all these interlocking Parts another reason I'm doing this is because my oh my God it's the 1930s again alarm bells are going off and I'm freaking out and I and I kind of feel like it might be good to remind people what ended 78 years ago because 78 years is too long for us to really remember and so maybe maybe if we start a conversation about how bad things could become in the future that would be useful for the record I don't think World War I will be like World War

II uh first of all I think it'll be a lot shorter uh World War II went eight years I hesitated because I know when I say this somebody's going to write in a comment it went six um but I'll explain why I went eight hopefully maybe not this one but the next one um I don't think World War II will go eight I'd be shocked if it went three and the reason is I think the global economy will collapse really fast and people will begin to starve to death on a grand scale I don't really

think we should do World War III I don't think it'll be the kind of amazing epic Saga that World War 2 was I think it'll just be really brutal and short and I don't think you'll get a lot of good movies out of it it'll be more World War I right but World War I was trench warfare I don't think it'll be like that but what I mean is we don't get a lot of good movies out of World War I and it's just too brutal it'll be like it'll be like that like uh All

Quiet on the Western Front the it's on Netflix I will not watch that I am too I have too much trauma car that I'm already carrying around with me I am good we don't there are some things you should just know you're limit on and that's one for me um so having said all that the other thing I want to do is I want to set World War II up I don't want to just dive into it and the reason is is because first of all I think it oversimplifies what happened and then second of

all I think it's really important to understand why it happened so right because really that's my ultimate goal in doing this at some level is let's avoid another big event on the scale and so I think it's worth going into why it happened to begin with one of the crazy things to think about is World War II ended 78 years ago another way to frame where it is historically is it was a it started 150 years after the United States's Constitutional Convention so in other words we're just barely over halfway to it from where it

was to the Constitutional Convention and then all of a sudden you realize right like the United States was just 150 years old in a way when it happened what's even stranger though is Germany didn't even become a state until 1871 Germany's 95 years younger than us in other words for German it was an even stranger event because it's World War II starts for Germany in 39 but at that point Germany was uh 29 plus 39 68 years old like in it was a brand new baby on the scene and here it is playing this star

role as the evil bastard that basically declares war on planet Earth so one of the things I think that we kind of lose Lo track of is its position in this larger story um this larger story that I'm actually going to start in the 18th century because what I first want to do is I want to I want to set Great Britain up because even though in World War II it's it's really the United States Germany and the Soviet Union the British obviously play a critical role I'm not trying to diminish their role but when

you think about it from like the grand scale the E the economic scale it's really a slugfest between Japan Germany on one side and the United States and the Soviet Union on the other side with Great Britain playing a major role um but the thing that leads to World War I is entirely the British Empire and the thing that causes World War II is the outcome of World War I so in other words in other in order to understand World War II you have to understand the British story in addition to the German story so

um the place I want to start is the end of the Seven Years War which lasted nine years the British win it and at that moment that was critical for the British Empire the British had this dream of Empire they already had established it because they had the 13 colonies and at the time there were 17 colonies and what they wanted to do was keep expanding and eventually make a larger more Global Empire than that if they had lost the Seven Years War that was probably it for them they would have probably never been anything

more than a second R Empire by contrast the French could afford to lose the Seven Years War and they'd be more less okay they could still build an Empire they might be number two right Great Britain would be number one but they were still in the game to get to the point though where we got to the Seven Years War something really strange strange had to happen a few centuries earlier and it was this if you look at the history of England and France from 1066 when William the Conqueror conquers England he's the Norman Duke

of the French duy of Normandy uh the Normans were french-speaking Vikings when he conquers England it's kind of like France conquering England right because the Duke of Normandy is effectively like the governor would be to the president he's a subordinate to the king of France at least on paper in reality it wasn't quite that clear when when that happens from that point on for the next five centuries basically France and England fight each other all the time and England is regularly trying to conquer whole swaths of France and eventually it actually does in the aftermath

of the battle of aunu in 1415 basically Henry the fth does take over France briefly but even before that uh under the reign of Henry II whole swaths of France had been absorbed by the English so in other words England's mind was always towards conquering France but because the French had done it first with William the Conqueror the official language of England was French until Henry viith at the end of the 15th century flips it so in other words the story is just a bunch of Henry's um and a William in the end some reason

the English go you know what we're done with France well they'll still keep fighting France but not in France the the scale of England's thinking shifts and instead of it being this knockdown drag out fight in Europe between the English and the French the English basically surrender their their claims to France not a they don't do it officially until Queen Victoria but they they do it in Practical combat purposes well before her and they turn their eye to the rest of the world which is what gets them into the colonies so when they beat the

French in 1763 by the Skin of Their Teeth they almost lost but by beating the French what the English did was they set themselves up to become the world's dominant Empire but it's actually really strange my my son asked me this question the other day he went I don't get it how did little itty bitty off the beaten path England somehow become a global Empire and of course part of the solution is that they they became the world's first drug dealer Empire their first drug was tobacco they later later on upgrade to Opium but that's

going to generate huge amounts of money but the real trick that the English did was they they they figured out first of all how to assess Victory and defeat in such a way that they could they learned how to manipulate defeats into little victories and also in the process they realized something critical they could conquer a country and then transfer its wealth to England and so 20 years after winning the Seven Years War which lasted 9 years they will fight a six-year long battle against us a six- year long war against us called the Revolutionary

War which was really a Civil War and they quit the war even though militarily they're winning and the reason they quit the war is because they discover something really interesting they had the Royal proclamation in 1763 with the Native Americans it gave the Native Americans everything from Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi which meant that they couldn't exploit that land but in the meantime the agriculture practices that they were using in Virginia and North Carolina had wrecked the soil Maryland had wrecked the soil so the the southern colonies which were the big cash crop colonies were

no longer productive Virginia the Virginia soil was so ruined in fact that Virginia had to import tobacco by the time of the Revolution actually by 1754 Virginia was already importing tobacco so the English were no longer making money off the southern colonies not the way they wanted to what they realized in 1781 was if they surrendered to us effectively the British Empire cut itself in half by land not population right but in terms of square kilometers they basically chopped the British Empire in half it it freed the British Empire to become the good guy in

people's minds they would do things like pursue the abolition of slavery but in the meantime it would allow us to keep slavery terminate the relationship with the Native Americans genocide them steal their land bring slavery there and then grow tobacco and cotton on that soil the surrender treaty that the British signed with us the Treaty of Paris 1783 specifically allowed the British to to stay economically in the United States so for all intents and purposes the United States remained part of the British Empire economically the reason that mattered was because it meant it was for

economic purposes it was if we had never gotten Independence which meant they could still make money off of us so some researcher I should have looked it up before I came but I forgot to do it some researcher had done this really amazing research project where they looked at the amount of money that the British made off of us for the 75 years from 1783 when they signed the surrender treaty until they finished the conquest of India in 15 sorry in 1858 and the researcher discovered that the amount of money they made out of the

United States was equal to the amount of money they spent conquering India in other words what the British had successfully done was figured out how to have their cake and eat it too by splitting the Empire in half it allowed them to go grab India in India was brilliant when the British began conquering India in the 17th century little piece they captured basically two itty bitty little pieces on the on the west coast and the next thing you know they're just gobbling up whole chunks of India when they start India was 23% of the world's

GDP basically one out of every $4 being made on the planet was being made in India India was industrialized so you all were taught CU I was taught the same thing that the Industrial Revolution started in the 18th century basically in England that's not true the Industrial Revolution started somewhere between 750 and 800 in the Arab world what happened in the 18th century is the English began using steam power for transportation purposes they began applying steam power to boats and then they eventually realized oh wow we can put it on on a vehicle on a

track and they began doing railroads too and then they realized wow we can put steam power in factories and we can automate factories so when we talk about the Industrial Revolution what we really mean is the steampowered phase of the Industrial Revolution that the English did innovate that really is their thing but but by that point we already already had nine centuries of slow industrialization rolling across the planet starting in the Middle East and expanding out so that's also one of the causes of World War II right is the industrialization of of the planet another

one is capitalism another one is nationalism another factor is imperialism so this story has all those pieces and what the British managed to do with India was transfer its GDP to England when England let India go let is a strong word when India got its independence post World War II when the British realized they couldn't hold on to it any longer India was 4% of the world's GDP the English had so successfully plundered India that they had effectively transferred those 19 percentage points to England that's the genius of what the English had pulled off they

had literally de-industrialized India and then industrialized England and instead so for example India was one of the world's largest cotton producers the big cotton producers were were the United States right the the US South Egypt India that was where most of the world's cotton was being generated so the British end up conquering India they've got access to that cotton even even after they'd lost us but they can still buy our cotton it's not like we're not going to sell it to them so they didn't really lose us and they're still making money off of us

because for all intents and purposes we're still hooked into their economy Indians made their own clothing out of that cotton so the English ban India from making its own clothing and then they make factories in England that make that cotton clothing and then they sell traditional Indian clo clothing to India they were making traditional Indian clothing in England and then selling it to the Indians after Banning the Indians from producing their own clothing so this is what the the imperialist genius event that the English pull off that makes them the the greatest Empire the world

had seen until us right we're the greatest Empire I know you think no no we didn't go conquer and Annex everything that's true so the English owned 40% of the world we we don't obviously but but our military is in 75% of the world's countries so I I think 75% means we uh we Punk that so we're now the greatest Empire in any case um the British will just W get win after win after win they'll grab Egypt they grab southern Africa right and they put together this really crazy Empire that stretches into Asia they

have Malaysia and Singapore they have Hong Kong and then of course they still have Canada they make a foray into South America they're defeated but they they grab a piece of Central America bailees and so this Empire sprawls across the planet they run into a problem and the problem is that they realize something amazing is coming there's a new resource on the on the table and that new resource is discovered it's sort of rediscovered in 1861 in oil Creek Pennsylvania so uh a there was a group of investors who came up with this crazy idea

oil Creek was named oil Creek because there was oil floating on the surface of the creek so in other words they didn't discover oil cuz they already knew there was oil there hence the name name of the creek oil floats to the surface so that's why it's on the top of the creek they came up with this crazy idea what if we dug a well next to the creek could we hit the original oil source that the creek is clearly flowing through and then dragging the oil out and it got a group of investors together

and they dug the well and in 1861 they hit oil in oil Creek Pennsylvania and the they realize you could sell it for people and they could like their their houses up using oil lamps from oil dug from the ground instead of using sperm whales for that purpose or using kerosene the way we were making kerosene is we would bake trees and as you bake them we would basically have containers underneath the tree and it would catch the kerosene and so you're you're basically murdering whole forests turning them into kerosene and coal in the process

and then slaughtering whales turning them into whale oil for your home or you can just dig a well on the ground and use that and that and so all of a sudden oil becomes a thing that we're using you can also use it for heating purposes and then it occurs to somebody you could use it as a fuel source to replace steam and a guy named diimler invents the internal combustion engine he puts it on a motorcycle first he puts it on a car next and the English go into panic mode short afterwards and here's

why the English go into panic mode they realize that oil is going to replace coal and they don't have an oil company they did have an oil company it was called shell the Dutch purchased it so it becomes Royal Dutch Shell the English own 49% but the Dutch have the controlling 51% the English and the Dutch have a great relationship and then the other Oil Company on the planet with standard oil and that was John D rockefeller's company and it's also a huge company because the original Saudi Arabia for planet Earth was Ohio Indiana and

Pennsylvania that's where Standard Oil had made its home and it was making crazy money and and the British had a great relationship with us the problem is the British didn't build an Empire by having great relationships with people with resources the British built an Empire by going and getting the resources directly and B basically plundering other countries for those resources so they decide they have to find oil the way you found oil so that they have their own Oil Company the way you found oil at time is as you were walking you looked at the

ground if you got super lucky you'd step right in it there was enough oil on the planet that there was actually places where it had seeped to the surface but if you didn't get that lucky you could step on black Shale or uh black Sandstone Shale and Sandstone are really porous like Limestone for that matter will do the same thing and if there if it's sitting on top of an oil field it'll suck the oil into it and it'll turn black indicating you just got to get through that and you can get to the oil

the planet's too big to have a bunch of people walking around looking at their feet all day so the English decid to take a different approach they decide to read history books to see who used to have oil in the past because odds are wherever it was in the past F it's still there and here's what they found they found that sometime between 750 and 800 ad the same time that the Arabs are inventing industry by the way same time that the Arabs were also inventing modern agriculture they began lighting their streets up at night

using oil that they piped through their cities into lamps and so the English go oh my God if they were doing that then they must have oil there still so they begin looking in the Middle East they carve Kuwait out of the Ottoman Empire with the hope that they'll find oil in the area they find it across the Persian Gulf also known as the Arabian Gulf because a body of water can have two names it's going to be okay just for example the English Channel the French don't call it the English Channel why would they

call it the English Channel they would call it the French Channel if they were going to call it something they don't they call it Lan which means the slave they have a right to not call it the English Channel just like the English have a right to call it the English Channel it's going to the reason I'm doing this is somebody's going to freak out on YouTube and say oh my God it's not the Persian golf it's the Arabian Golf and then they go oh my God no it's not the Arabian golf it's the Persian

Golf and I just triggered a war um it's it's going to be okay it really is I promise you know we could compromise and just call it something random like that the salt body of water or something and just be done with it um so uh I anyway I I I recently had an event where I I said to a person it can have two names and they got really upset and they go no it [Laughter] can't the English find oil in husan which is the southwest corner of Iran they strike an amazing deal with

the rers of Iran where they'll get 84% concession normally if you're foreign business extracting a resource from a country it's a 5050 split because right it's the country's resource but you did the work so you get 50% they get 50% the British got an 84% concession and they were giving the Persians just 16% for their oil and that company was called the Anglo Persian Oil Company it got renamed became the Anglo Iranian oil company and then it got nationalized and the Iranians called the new company the national Iranian Oil Company it still exists the British

then took the remainder of the company which wasn't entirely in Iran and they called that piece British Petroleum that's the birth of BP it turned out there was oil off the coast of Scotland so BP could just exploit Scottish oil and then and that that became the way the British got their o oil supply so the British Empire then is the world's dominant superpower it's found oil in Iran it's calmed itself down but it's run into another problem and the other problem is Germany so Germany was a dream it was a dream because it didn't

exist and it had been a dream for a long time there were a lot of Germans who thought it would be nice to have a German what existed instead was a bunch of little itty bitty States some of them were so small they were they were literally just city states like most of the htic league was just a group of city states um but there were also some some larger States like Bavaria for example which wasn't a city state it was much bigger than that but it was still a relatively small state so Germany was

chopped up into these different pieces one piece of Germany started to Advance itself militarily fast than the rest faster than the rest of Germany and that was Prussia but Prussia was a really strange phenomenon what happened was centuries ago polish Lords found that they could no they couldn't effectively rule Poland so they actually asked the prussians to come to Poland to manage it what eventually happened was those prussians just took over and they carved a chunk of Poland out of Poland and they began running it as a German State because those prussians were Germans so

the joke had been for the longest time Prussia is an army without a country and that Army without a country eventually ends up being unified with Brandenburg Brandenburg was a state that was somewhat sizable it was it occupied a lot of what ended up becoming East Germany after uh the partition of Germany and and and then what it ended up doing is unifying with Prussia so it ended up owning a bunch of what is today Poland in 1700 Brandenburg the kingdom of brunborg changed itself and and turned itself into the Kingdom of Prussia and here's

why it did this there was an entity called the Holy Roman Empire it was neither Holy Roman nor an Empire just to be clear the Holy Roman Empire was created by charlam Mana the French King he was ethnically German so he was the German king who ruled Gaul because he was the guy in charge of the Franks and the Franks are the guys who ended up calling Gaul after themselves and that's why it's called France France is named after a Germanic tribe and and the original kings of France were were Germans and they conquered what

is today Germany Char Mana did he conquered what is today Germany and Austria and he put it together into France he owned a piece in Northern Italy um and he made this little Empire well the pope had a problem the Pope in Rome so there there were originally five Patriarchs I don't want to get into all of it but the Pope in Rome was one of the five Christian Patriarchs his problem was that the Roman Empire had lost its Western territory but not all of it it still had pieces so for example uh it still

had what will eventually become the most Serene Republic of Venice it had southern Italy it had Sicily it had a little pieces of southern Italy it had Naples um and it had the city of Rome the Pope in Rome didn't like this Arrangement because not only were there four other Patriarchs in the in the Christian church but one of those Patriarchs was the patriarch of Constantinople where the whole where the Roman Emperor was so the patriarch of Constantinople had more influence over the Roman Emperor just because he was right there because the emperor is in

Constantinople he's in Constantinople he can talk to the emperor by just walking across the street and saying hey how's it going whereas the Pope in Rome he's got this long sea Voyage to get to Constantinople his influences diminished so the pope decides he doesn't like this Arrangement he goes to charlam mano and he says look I will make a deal with you you help me get Rome out of the Roman Empire isn't that crazy a Roman Empire without the city of Rome in it you help me do that and you make me the Duke of

Rome so I'm not just a holy leader I will also have a military force attack bace and I will actually have the title Duke of Rome and Rome will be a duy and I will give you whatever you want and what charl Alman wanted was he wanted to have the brand of Roman Empire the problem is there was a Roman Empire so what the pope and charl Mania agreed to was they would pretend that the Empire he had created that was France and Austria and Germany and Northern Italy that that was the real Roman Empire

but because it was going to be blessed by the Pope in Rome as opposed to the actual Empire which was in Constantinople they would call it the Holy Roman Empire and the pope crowns Emperor charom mana on December 25th in the year 800 creating the Holy Roman Empire long story short France leaves the Holy Roman Empire so all that's left is Northern Italy at Germany and Austria the Holy Roman Empire had an emperor that was elected by the electors some of the states inside the Holy Roman Empire had the authority to elect so the electors

would elect the the emperor but it so in a way it was kind of like a Confederacy it was almost like a precursor to the EU there are all these fully sovereign states in the Empire so there's the electorate of Zach the kingdom of Brandenburg uh the duy of Milan like there's all these states within this Holy Roman Empire entity they're they're they're Sovereign but they're sort of bound together by the rules of the Empire the the Holy Roman Empire which was not our Empire at all it was a Confederacy and it wasn't Roman it

was German with a little with a few Italians in for good measure and uh you know it wasn't holy obviously and so the problem that the kingdom of Brandenburg had was its capital was B well Berlin was inside the Holy Roman Empire but the capital of Prussia was Kingsburg kingburg was outside of the Holy Roman Empire so if Brandenburg stopped being Brandenburg and became and became Prussia it would put the capital of Prussia outside of the Empire and it would no longer be bound by its rules and so that's why they do this in 1700

the prussians decide they have an amazing military right they've just Brandenburg has just rebranded itself it's now Prussia they want to take that military up a notch so they send their officers to Constantinople which is no longer called Constantinople by its owners it's now Istanbul because it's the capital of the Ottoman Empire because the Turks had the best soldiers man for man on the planet at the time the Janis series and they want to train Prussian officers with this Janis training hoping that they'll learn a little bit more and they'll develop a new style of

combat that will give their small army an advantage the prussians had a small army so they're thinking was if their army fought better it could compensate for its lack of numbers and so that's what they did between the already existing German style of fighting that the prussians had combined now with this ottoman style they created what we think of as the quintessential German style of fighting and it was an extremely effective combat system they what they would do is called beun Creek if you're a smaller Force you attack your enemy not with the goal you

attack you don't wait for them to attack you which is always crazy when the smaller guy attacks you attack not with the goal of defeating the larger Force it's going to be almost impossible to do your goal is to knock them off balance and then while they're trying to get back into position and get back into balance you attack them again to keep them off balance and then you attack them again you attack them again you attack them again the goal is just to wear them out to keep them off balance so they can never

get you and in the Seven Years War Prussia was on Britain's side and that's what they did they fought the the Austrian the the Russian and the French armies the whole goal that they had was just to keep those armies off balance long enough that they wouldn't have a chance to conquer Prussia and they pulled it off they start to think in the aftermath of the Seven Years War because somehow they're on The Winning Side what what is the future going to be like and little by little by little the prussians start building themselves towards

creating the German State and when I say little by little by little I mean it takes them a hundred years they don't get into position to actually create the German State really until the 1860s they they have to they have to fight three powers in the region and put them down first the first is Denmark actually Denmark attacked them in a moment of just Madness uh and the prussians were like all right thanks and they put Denmark down 1864 is the year in my head uh and then shortly afterwards the ger the prussians attack Austria

when they did this bismar the guy who's going the Prussian who's going to make Germany bismar has to ask himself a question so Austria the Austrian Empire Austria is German he's German the prussians are German the Germany they're trying to create is going to be made of Germans but Austria owns what is today czechia Slovakia Slovenia uh it got Bosnia herzo in 1878 so that doesn't have Bosnia yet that's in the future um it has Hungary it has what ruthenia it's now part of Ukraine it had galsia which were which is today part of Poland

and Ukraine it had Transylvania which is today part of Romania it was this big central European EMP Empire made up of a bunch of non-germans because there are Czechs and slovakians and slovenians and croats and hungarians and uh ruthenians and Romanians and so bismar has a problem as he's defeating the austrians he has to defeat the austrians because they have a big swath of Southern Germany if he's going to put Germany together he has to knock them out of the picture does he Annex Austria with all its non Germans or does he Annex Austria but

leave the rest of the Empire and so there'll be a Hungarian Empire instead of an austr Hungarian Empire or does he just beat Austria take Southern Germany and leave Austria alone so that this there will be a German run multiethnic Empire and that's the choice he makes he chooses option C which is to leave the austr Hungarian Empire in attacked he just takes away their Authority in southern Germany and then that way there'll be two German Empires a German Empire because that's what they're going to call Germany when they make it it's going to be

the German Empire a German Empire that will be ethnically mostly German there are non-germans there like for example there's lucans there are still lucans in Germany today there are a Slavic people uh but there were there were also there was also a huge population of poles 6 million poles to be to be exact so there's there is a huge non- geran population in this um but but essentially it's going to be a Germany for Germans and then there'll be a second Germany called Austria the austr Hungarian Empire and that'll be a German Hungarian co-ruled Empire

with a bunch of non-germans and bismar thinking is he's kind of had his cake and eaten it too Germans can rule those non-germans and exploit them or colonize some of that land maybe and germanize it over time but at the same time it they won't culturally mingle in Germany contaminating German culture and German national identity because that's a piece on the table because something is happened in Europe that thing that's happened is nationalism so think about what nationalism is is people didn't used to believe in nationalism nationalism is a a new phenomenon it's it's 230

years old so before 230 years ago there were no nationalists on the planet the guy who Pioneers nationalism I don't know if you can say he invented it but certainly he's the guy who used it at its you know in a way that transformed it and made it something that other people saw was Napoleon bonapart so Napoleon bonapart was made the dictator of the Republic of France for the sole purpose of ending the French Revolution because the French Revolution was this magic event that they couldn't turn off so even after they won they' killed all

the royalty they killed all the nobility even after they had uh changed their art changed the dates of the the names of the months changed over to metric changed their religion cuz they had banned the Catholic Church even after they had done all of this they couldn't turn the revolution off and and the French revolutionary leaders kept walking out into the public squares in Paris and going look You've Won we've done it the revolution's over go back into the factories go back into the farms and start making shoes and growing food so that our economy

doesn't collapse and the French people go Revolution and they go charging around and they Guillotine somebody and set something on fire and the the French revolutionary leaders are like no no no no it's over we won you don't have to do that anymore and the French people are like Revolution they grab that guy gu him and set something on fire and and they're tearing their hair out finally the French came up with a genius idea beautiful the French the French have their moments you know what I mean like there are these moments what if we

guillotined the guy in charge of the guillotining robes spear like I swear I really just wish they had cell phones back there so that we could have recorded the look on robes spe's face as they're loading him into the guillotine because I want to know what that emotion you're feel dude I'm the guy who Guillotines why am I getting guillotined how is this okay and they're loading him in and then he can hear the blade coming down right it just takes a split second but still he can hear it and the next thing you know

his head's in a basket and then the the French Revolutionary leadership goes see the revolution's over we just guillotined RP it's done we're good and the French are like Revolution and they go Guillotine somebody else and set something else on fire so Napoleon is elected dictator temporarily suspending the Republic he'll rule like a king for one year his goal is to end the revolution he fails he comes back to the Revolutionary leadership he goes I need a second year I figured out how to do it they're like okay sure so they give him a second

year by the way that's a big mistake don't ever do that if you're ever in a situation where a dictator is asking for a second one-year term say no be polite about it guillotin them whatever it takes don't let him do it anyway they let him do it here's what Napoleon does he gets up in front of French people and I'm I'm oversimplifying and then summarizing but right this is essentially what it does he says do you know why we just had the most amazing revolution in human history and it was an amazing Revolution there's

no two ways of power they they changed the way they did Art they switched to metric first country on Earth to do it he says that Revolution was possible because you are French because you are a French you are of superior human stock than any anybody else on the planet in other words that Revolution was only possible for the French which is really sad if you're polish or German or Spanish or Egyptian or Turkish or English because you'll never be able to have a revolution like this so it's our duty as Superior French people to

export our Revolution all of a sudden all that revolutionary fervor that they couldn't stamp out forms into armies and the next thing you may know they're invading Italy they're invading Germany they're attacking Austria they're attacking Prussia they're invading and conquering Spain they're invading Egypt they go on a 17year long Rampage and at one point Napoleon 1812 owned every anything from Madrid to Moscow including Madrid and Moscow how the power of nationalism the power of telling somebody they were Superior to everybody else he had awaken this monster that was there all along because Nations had existed

for thousands of years it wasn't like he invented Nations he just framed it in such a way that all of a sudden he filled his soul Soldiers with this fanatical desire to slaughter Up Until then people just wanted to kill because you you worship the the the wrong imaginary friend right now all of a sudden they want to kill you because well you're not French that army that French army went through Germany back and forth and back and forth and it sometimes it was retreating sometimes it was coming back with a glorious Victory but those

Germans felt like they were trampled they felt like they were just run over by the French army over and over and over again and it planted the seed of nationalism the Germans began to think in the same way that the French were thinking which was I am Superior to everybody else because I am German that's the toxicness of nationalism if you believe you're Superior that means then literally everybody else is inferior there is no form of nationalism that doesn't dehumanize the other it doesn't exist like you're like no no I'm a nationalist and I don't

do that that's BS if you're a nationalist you think everybody else on the planet is subhuman and the only group that you think is fully human is your group it's different from patriotism if I say I'm a patriot it means I love my country I can love my country and not hate your country I can love my country and enjoy its culture and its traditions and its Blue Bonnets or whatever national flower it is right and not want to go to your country and murder all of you but if you're a nationalist you should go

to that country and murder them they're subhuman you're making the human species better by killing them see and and like hell you're going to let your daughter or your son mate with those subhuman creatures and what if that happens a how will you ever overcome that having these little Half Breed freaks running around that's the problem with nationalism but it's the seed Napoleon planted I have a LoveHate relationship with Napoleon at some level I really think he's amazing at another level I'm like oh I hate you so much also he was ethnically Italian and so

it tugs at my nationalism my Italian nationalism because I'm like oh look the best French leader ever was actually an Italian anyway so although was charlam Mania better how do you compare I don't know how to compare so we're going to move on uh charlam Mania didn't own Moscow uh uh all right so so in other words by the time bismar is looking at Romanians and slovakians and Czechs and poles that are in the Austrian Empire he's thinking in nationalistic terms and he's already decided they are inferior to Germans and so that's why he makes

the decision to leave it so that there are two germanies at that point his next problem is in fact France it turns out there's another state that's dreaming of becoming a another country that's dreaming of having a single state ruling and that other country is none other than Italy but Italy had a head start on Germany Italy actually came into being in 1860 so it's 11 years older than Germany the problem was the pope the pope had Rome the pope was the Duke of Rome the Italians by the way just out a Twist The Italian

nationalists who created Italy um were the sardinians so Sardinia you know the little island that randomly is the thing that made Italy basically the Sardinian Army went on a rampage it started in Northern Italy even though Sardinia is closer to Sicily than it is to Northern Italy and it just conquered its way down and the last thing it conquered was Sicily it couldn't conquer Rome because because France had been protecting Rome since the since the 700s and France wasn't going to stop that from H wasn't going to stop Rome from existing as an in its

own independent duy with the Pope in charge in other words for Italy to get Rome it would have to take out France that wasn't on the table Italy wasn't strong enough to do that so Italy had to accept that Florence was its capital and it had to accept that it didn't own Italy uh it didn't own Rome how weird would that be if that had continued bismar is going to attack France in 1871 because that's the third piece he needs to knock out he attacks France he goes all the way to the outskirts of Paris

the French go we're done we surrender he carves off alas lauron from from the from the from the French adds it to Germany and makes Germany the German Empire is Bor B but because the French are reeling from this war with the prussians the Italians realize this is their chance and they invade and Conquer Rome so in 1871 Italy annexes Rome makes it its capital uh the pope is furious the pope will drive the Italians absolutely nuts for the next 51 years I'm trying to remember when the Vatican City was created in 50s something years

uh what happens is finally Bonito musolini sick of hearing the pope insist that he get a stay carved the Vatican City out and went here it's yours we're keeping the rest of Rome please be quiet now and so that's how the the pope got his own little State back for the record if you've ever asked the question how is it that Italy didn't end up with San Marino right it's that little peace that little independent state the Italian nationalist armies whenever they got in trouble or Italian individual nationalists whenever they got in trouble would escape

to San Marino and San Marino gave them Refuge so when Italy formed Italy said since you were so good to us we won't invade you and Conquer you and Annex you as compensation for having helped us create Italy so some oh thank you I'm I'm so confused by this wait so you wanted the Italians to form Italy but you didn't want to be a part of it why did you help them did you know they weren't going to backstab you how did you know and besides you're ethnically Italian like you speak Italian you're Italians I

don't understand but anyway that's what happened so that's why San Marino is independent it was a it was just to say thank you um there's another thing that we need to put on the table here that thing was the revolution that took place actually before there was in Italy and in Germany the revolution of 1848 so the revolution 1848 took place in every country on the planet I'm sorry every country delete that completely took place in every country in Europe that was my eurocentrism coming through probably um it took place in every country in Europe

except the British Empire the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire it's easier to just do the exceptions because it's literally everything else and Brazil and Sri Lanka if it feels weird it is like I at one point Sri Lanka was a Portuguese Colony but then it ended up a Dutch colony and then the British took it from the Dutch so it's a Dutch it's a British colony at that moment nowhere else in the British Empire is the 1848 revolution taking place except Sri Lanka but then there's Brazil I don't understand anyway that's what happened the

1848 Pang Global Revolution that took place in South America Asia and Europe only barely Asia but still it did take place in Asia had two different forces pushing it one was a nationalist force and one of the goals of that nationalist force was to create Germany and to create Italy and they failed and then a few years later Italy does succeed and then a few years after that Germany does succeed but not in 1848 another Force though that was driving the 1848 revolutions across Europe was a force was the working class it was a socialist

movement and the Socialists would go into the cities they'd capture the factories they'd barricade them and they'd try to hold on to them in an effort to force some of the states that they were fighting in to go socialist in every single case Nationalist and socialist by the way it's the year Carl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto because he thought that was the direction the winds were blowing and so he D he he drafted The Communist Manifesto to inspire the Socialist parts of this revolution everywhere everybody lost except Sweden well the kingdom of Norway King

the kingdom of Sweden Norway because there was it was it was unified at the time in Sweden Norway the king went to the working class and said you're my people I serve you you're clearly mad you captured this Factory what's the compromise the compromise they came up with was to create to was to hand Parliament basically over to the people through a democratic election process and to pull the rug out from the rich so that the rich didn't have too much power with the goal that Sweden and also Norway because they'll break away but they

were part of the original deal and they kept they've kept doing it anyway that Sweden would slowly evolve through the electoral process into a socialist State and by slowly like it's a 300 year long project that they're 175 years into and another words they're thinking in a large scale and then you ask yourself well let's see Sweden's a tiny country of 11 million people but it has one of the largest economies on the planet it was the first industrialized state to get out of the the depression that we triggered in 2008 it has some of

the highest happiness levels of any country on the planet and they've been slowly working on a socialist project could Bernie be right and then and then you go no no of course not and then you move on the reason that mattered well since we're in Texas the 1848 revolution a bunch of Germans moved here in the aftermath because they were after being defeated they decided I'm going to Texas of all places and so Central Texas ended up with this huge German set population by the way a bunch of Czechs also came so Central Texas ended

up with this large Czech population as well most of those German and checks they some of them had started to think in nationalist lines but most of them were socialists ironically enough since a lot of Texans today are actually you know at least partly related to those Germans I want you to know that those Germans who were socialists would hate your guts today I just your ancestors who moved here in the middle of the 19th century would not like the Texas they see today just to be clear because Texas has gone far right and they

were far left just to be clear so in other words the 1848 revolution is telegraphing these two forces that are starting to actually shape Europe in a way that is pushing Us in the direction of a World War I there are these nationalist forces socialist forces capitalism is in play industrialization is in play like there's all these pieces moving together in 1871 when the German Empire is created it's already a super industrialized very welldeveloped power bismar takes the money that the German state has and then pumps it into the economy and starts developing Germany even

more so that Germany is born as a superpower which when you think about is probably really jarring because normally a state has to work its way into superpower status but the Germans don't have to do that because they were already on this path of super industrialization so by the time we get into the 1880s Germany's a decade old it's already starting to look towards playing a role in global colonization by 18 1980 France and Britain had carved up most of Africa and Asia their Empires were so successful that the French were trying to get from

West Africa to East Africa and have a connected thing and the British were trying to get from North Africa to South Africa and have a connected thing like they they were competing with each other to see which guy would cross Africa first and the French had conquered most of West Africa the British had southern Africa and then in 1882 they grab Egypt and when they grabbed Egypt Egypt had colonized the Sudan so they they they ended up with the Sudan also in the process and so um the Germans in 1882 the same year are like

hey what about us we're late to the show we want a piece we'd like a piece of the pie Queen Victoria being the person that she was was really eager to to not just keep the British Empire in place but to always play a role influential role her her thinking was through familial ties through diplomatic connections she could make Germany into an ally when the Germans defeated the French in 1871 they isolated France from the rest of the world they turned France into kind of like a pariah State and in that moment the British saw

France as their ancient bitter rival that they hated so much so they saw the new Germany as a potential ally to give you an idea how successful Victoria was when World War I does happen the king of England the German Kaiser and the Zar in Russia all three were her grandsons she had successfully married into the royal families of these European states she herself was 100% German the the Roman officer were Germans with a little bit of Swedish mixed in them uh so it wasn't weird right that they were they were marrying into the like

the Kaiser's family but that was what her idea was so she made deals with the Germans to gift them territory in Africa that the English had been working on so Germany got tanganga the British got Zanzibar and Kenya and then the Germans got togoland they got Southwest svest Africa Southwest W Africa it's today Namibia and then the Germans got uh so they split the island of New Guinea three ways uh the British got the southern uh Eastern quarter and they added it to Australia the Germans got the northern eastern quarter that became part of they

also got the Solomon archipelago they put that together the bismar archipelago Solomon Islands um and then and the the other half of New Guinea went to the Dutch so they were doing things like that where they were putting Germany into the system uh the Germans also got a group of islands in the Pacific including uh Samoa and then uh we got American Samoa so we split Samoa with Germany by the 1890s the German Empire was no longer this potential ally as much as the English had hoped the English is starting to get nervous Germany's growing

too quickly its economy is too big and it's starting to build a Navy the British are nervous about Germany having a Navy because the Germans could then rival the British Navy so they're they're starting to get really worried because there's a group of islands in the dead center of the Pacific that the British had been working on taking over Hawaii the British had been working working on taking it over the Japanese had been working on getting it too and the Germans now have their eyes on it the Japanese are also a new player in the

story so they have the Magi Restoration in 1867 prior to that it was the tokogawa Shogun nut that ruled Japan so if you roll the clock back to uh before 1500 so let's make it uh 600 years ago we'll make it 1423 there was no Japanese State there were all these tiny little Dao these these Warlords who own random chunks of Japan there was an official Emperor he was in Kyoto and these Warlords these Dao would go to war with each other periodically to try to create Japan and then they would be defeated it wouldn't

work finally in the 1500s there's this crazy dimeo I won't go into all the details but it's an amazing epic story he's just just bloodthirsty bastard he starts conquering Japan he gets assassinated the guy who assassinates him takes over Japan briefly but then in an act of Vengeance the number two for the crazy Dao kills him he takes over Japan and a big chunk of Japan not the whole thing but they've almost completely finished conquering it his number number two is a toaga yasu toaga yasu then takes over with the death of this guy and

he completes the conquest of Japan and unifies it his Capital was Ido they rame Ido after toaga yasu and it becomes Tokyo so in a way he creates the modern state of Japan having said that though the Shogun is the military dictator of Japan he's not the emperor there's still an emperor and so in other words the samurai ruled Japan the samurai being the warrior class so it wasn't ruled by a political class and that will continue to be the case all the way until 350 years later with the Magi res less than 350 years

later with the Magi restoration when that happens the emperor takes Japan over and the to tokogawa shokut is terminated it's stopped at that point then Japan decides to modernize so remember the Commodore Perry story where commodor Perry pulls up and he says you have two options you can trade with us or see these guns on the ship the Japanese are traumatized by that moment what they've what they've realized is that they're they two and a half centuries not three and a half centuries two and a half centuries of isolation have messed them up the reason

they did the two and a half centuries of isolation is first the Portuguese arrived and when the Portuguese arrived they they went to uh hoshima there's an island off the coast of hoshima and they set up a base in Japan yeah we nuked it in case you were like wait hoshima that sounds very familiar that's we nuked it um the Dutch end up taking over the base well the thing that the Dutch and the Portuguese like to trade to the Japanese more than anything else Firearms so the Japanese end up going from killing each other

with with swords and those those really cool glaves I don't know what they're called they're their pole arm with a like a sword on the end I love that I just want to like he just stab somebody long distance it's just anyway very exciting um and then right the katana and they're they're butchering each other in a very intimate kind of face-to-face way well not the archery that's obviously not so intimate but anyway all of a sudden they're using firearms and they're massacring each other they freak out about this and they decide two things one

Christianity is evil so they murder all the Japanese converts to Christianity they just Massacre them they throw the Dutch and the Portuguese out completely and then the other thing they decid is they don't want to modernize because modernization clearly means shooting each other and they don't want to do that so they go into this period of isolation Commodore Perry shows up the US Navy shows up points its guns at Japan and says no no more isolation the Japanese decide never again will they allow somebody to bully them like that and so they be they go

into hyper industrialization mode their goal is to industrialize as fast as they can so that they can become a global superpower to compete with the European powers to compete with the United States they're thinking they get they can colonize locally one of the dreams that they had was to take Korea in fact before Tokugawa yasu took o over the previous Shogun had actually invaded Korea with the intention of conquering it and was defeated it was a disaster so the Japanese invade Korea and they conquer it they invade Taiwan and they conquer that too they're now

in the process of building themselves a little bit of an Empire in East Asia if they can get Hawaii it'll be a huge victory for them the British are allied with them so the British aren't completely against the idea of the Japanese grabbing Hawaii but they're really worried about the Germans getting it they're happy to let anybody have it but the Germans Because by the PO by that point by 1895 when it looked looks like Germany is going to make a play for Hawaii the British are nervous in the end we make the play um

there's a guy Samuel B Dole Dole as in dull pineapple that's not a coincidence that's his company he really is that guy that's that's that guy he he's in California he hires a group of mercenaries they're Marines he hires a group of Marines to be mercenaries for him he loads them up on a ship he goes to Hawaii he overthrows the queen he takes over the islands the next year the United States annexes it because the British are basically like yeah go for it at least the Germans aren't getting it if you've ever looked at

Hawaii's flag it's red white and blue stripes which I've always thought were weird and in the leftand corner is the Union Jack the British flag it's because the British almost got it like it was that close so now we have it so the British Now find themselves in this really strange situation because they're now in an increasingly multi-polar World up until the J the rise of the Japanese economy up until the explosion of the US economy up until German unification it was a bipolar world it was the British Empire and the French Empire I mean

there was the Russian Empire and it played a really important role in the Napoleonic Wars but it was so isolated and so economically backwards nobody took it very seriously so it really just had sort of been the British and the French carving up the world because the Spanish had already fallen apart the Portuguese were a British Ally they were for all intents and purposes a British vassel State actually at this point so for for the British mind they didn't have a lot of powers to to look to the prussians put the French down in 1871

the British like you did our work for us thanks and now all of a sudden they realize it's a multi-polar world there's a Japanese empire a United States Empire a German Empire there's this new Kingdom of Italy on the scene it's not especially powerful but it's it's it's start starting to look towards doing something for example that invades Ethiopia and uh the 18 Sor 198 sorry it is the 1880s the 1880s uh it's a disaster the Italians are humiliated and defeated but um the Italians will grab a piece of Somalia and they do grab Eritrea

and then they'll invade Ethiopia again later and they'll defeat Ethiopia the second time but the first time it's this humiliating route and in the process now the British are trying to figure out how to navigate because they're not used to this like we are now because now it is a multi-polar world right the Russians aren't the big player they used to be but now the Chinese are the big player and then the Indians have become a big player Brazil is an important player even if it's not a big player it's now become This Strange multi-polar

World Germany is REM militarizing Japan is REM militarizing so officially Japan is not REM Rising they had a constitutional amendment they voted on a few years ago four years ago uh to allow them to officially remilitarize Japan has never amended its Constitution that that Amendment failed it went down and uh so officially they haven't remilitarized but they built a destroyer the Destroyer has a flat surface on it planes can land on that flat surface and they named it after a World War II aircraft carrier if I call an aircraft carrier Destroyer does it make it

not an aircraft [Music] carrier I don't I don't know seems fuzzy to me in other words the Japanese are ignoring their constitution now and building offensive weapons like aircraft carries right cuz think about it an aircraft car is totally offensive weapon I want to be able to use my airplanes near you how do I get them to you I'm going to have a mobile airport on the sea there's no reason to do that if you're defensive Japan is already an aircraft carrier so if they were just defending themselves they don't need to build aircraft carriers

I think they have two now isumo was the first one I don't I could be wrong about the second one Germany of course is remilitarized mostly after Russia invaded Ukraine they decided okay but it wasn't just that it was also president Trump Germany decided United States is an unreliable Ally and then Germany decided Russia is too dangerous not to remilitarize somebody has to protect Europe it's not clear the United States will be that guy so it has to be Germany so that so we're back into this multi-polar world which is sort of where my alarm

bells are starting to go off because multi-polar worlds then it means one big actor makes a mistake and the next thing you know we're we're in a Pang global conflagration so by the time we cross the threshold into the into the 20th century by the time it's the 1900s Britain is no longer seeing Germany as this benign thing and they get into an arms race against each other Germany will build a dreadnut basically the battleship of the time when they build it Britain will build too well that panics the Germans because now they've they're behind

so they immediately respond by building another one and when they build another one the British build two so the Germans go oh crap and they build another one and then the British build two the reasons and British are building to is they want to First make sure they can maintain superiority so they want the numerical superiority but also they're nervous about quality they're just assuming that the Germans are going to have better quality Equipment so they have they feel like they have to have superiority to defeat the Germans and they as they're doing this both

economies are starting to get harmed you can't keep spending money like that and expect your economy not to start to get damaged and it and it starts to hurt both Germany and Britain so the British are starting to wonder how this arms race ends it's starting to get too complicated on top of that there's this weird Alliance system that goes into place so Italy signs a a treaty with Germany Austria Hungary and the Ottoman Empire and then Italy turns around and signs a treaty with France Russia and Great Britain so Italy's in both alliances which

which is right and the reason why this matters is it didn't start that way initially the French War ated they couldn't get into any Alliance block the reason why they get into an alliance block is the British go okay Germany's the real threat not France okay let's make an alliance block with the French the French were really insistent that the Russians be part of it so before you know it that's that Alliance block that becomes extremely dangerous because the individual states also have alliances with other states for example Russia has an alliance with Serbia and

then Germany has an alliance with Bulgaria and Britain has an alliance with Japan and the United States and and the Netherlands for that matter and other words it's not just that there's this Alliance block with these Powers it's an alliance block with all these little pieces on it so if one thing goes wrong anywhere it could trigger the big stuff to go wrong as well to make things more complicated the Ottoman Empire is coming apart so the Ottoman Empire um had been a global superpower to the point where it had the best military on the

planet man for man um it it had a huge military it owned a huge chunk of Europe it owned all of North Africa it vassal State Morocco was a vassel state it didn't Annex Morocco but it but still it was a vassel state so it it took all of North Africa it had the the Middle East minus Iran um and this superpower was crumbling it was coming apart piece by piece piece by piece and it it got into real trouble after Napoleon and invaded Egypt Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 in the aftermath of that an

Albanian General named Muhammad Ali mahmed Ali uh took an ottoman Army he invaded CIT cre was part of the Ottoman Empire he captured it for himself to rule it as his own he's a general in the ottoman Army but and he has an ottoman unit and he captures CR it would be like if the governor of Arkansas invaded Rhode Island and took it you're like wait what you can't do that uh and then he decides I can do better he invades and captures Egypt and he's ruling Egypt the Ottoman Empire is like what are you

doing and then next thing he didn't speak any Arabic right and his troops are all albanians so they don't they they barely know Turkish and they're trying to rule Egypt and then he's like you know what I'm going to keep going he invades Palestine he goes into Syria he goes into Anatolia what is today turkey and he's conquering his way towards towards Constantinople towards Instanbul and the Turks Kuwait stop and they make a deal and they allow him basically to own most of what he conquered and then they they they settle out at that but

now it means that effectively Egypt is a semi-independent state within the Ottoman Empire eventually it decides to create its own Empire it'll attacks and conquers Sudan it actually sent an army into Uganda they W they withdraw they send an army to Somalia they're defeated but like there's like an Empire with an Empire within an Empire trying to create itself while the bigger Empire is starting to crumble and come apart at the scams uh the french capture Algeria in 1830 and and so the the Empire is just disintegrating Greece gets its independence in the 1850s and

as pieces are coming off one of the pieces in the middle of all of this was a chunk of Muslim Europe Bosnia and herova the there's a war between a a group of Balan States and European states in the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of this in 1878 Austria Hungary will will take control of Bosnia htz the governor it's it's officially still part of the Ottoman Empire so on paper it says Ottoman Empire but in reality now it belongs to the austr Hungarian Empire they will rule uh Bosnia and herova until they Annex it 30

years later when they Annex it it pisses everybody off because the the idea was that it would be a protectorate that they ruled but they didn't own it still belonged to the Ottoman Empire and they annexed it unilaterally they didn't negotiate with other powers to see if it was okay and the reason why this matters of course is because in the meantime there's Serbia so Serbia is independent it breaks away from the Ottoman Empire Serbia is mostly Serbian Orthodox Bosnia is mostly Muslim although it had a huge Catholic and a huge Serbian Orthodox population and

then Croatia which the ottoman which the austr Hungarian Empire had already annexed was Catholic the reason I'm spelling it out like this is because the bosnians the croats and the serbs are exactly identically the same people they speak the exact same language there are some Regional dialectical differences but it is the exact same language uh German has more variation than those three languages have from each other they they look the same they're genetically the same you can't tell them apart 23 and me can't differentiate them um they're culturally the same they lived even though Bosnia

had more Muslims there were Muslims living in Serbia and there were serbians living in Bosnia they were intermingled they they were literally neighbors it wasn't that there was a b you know there was a Serbian neighborhood and a Bosnian neighborhood they were just completely intermingled this kids went to school together they they they shopped at the same stores together the only difference was their religion and in a way this sort of foretells the split in Europe because the serbs the Serbian Orthodox were Orthodox Christians the croatians as Roman Catholics were Ro had Roman Catholic names

serbs had Slavic names the serbs saw themselves as an extension of a panss Slavic State they they thought of Russia as their friend Russia as the Big Brother whereas the croatians because they were catholic were looking more towards Germany or Austria or Hungary which was also Catholic or Italy their their influence was a little bit different and then of course the bosnians were looking towards turkey because they were a Muslim so when Austria annexes Bosnia it takes that conversation to a different level because another thing that the serbians are thinking is Serbian nationalism they don't

want Austria to own Croatia and Bosnia heroa because in the Serbian mind even though they're a different religion they're still the same people they want to see there be a pan Serbian state that includes croatians and bosnians and so for them this is the ultimate violation for Russia it is too because Russia is thinking what if we could get Poland because part of Poland is in in Germany and part of Poland is in Austria what if we can get all of Poland they're Slavs we're Slavs we and then what if we could get Serbia and

Croatia and Bosnia and Slovenia and Macedonia and Bulgaria and create and and czechia and Slovakia and create a mega Slavic superstate and so long story short the arch duuke Francis Ferdinand goes to Saro in 1914 and he's shot and then of course that the the person who shoots them is a Serbian assassin so Austria Hungary declares war on Serbia Serbia had that alliance with Russia so Russia immediately declares war on Austria Hungary Germany had that alliance with Austria Hungary so Germany declares war on Russia France and Britain had an alliance with Russia France and Britain

declare war on Germany we just triggered World War I for the assassination of a a guy and his wife in a car in Saro in Bosnia herzo this city that the average person United States has never heard of by the way I just was there I'm madly in love with sgo you should totally go it's it's it's beautiful there's lots of cultural stuff I I wish I had another like three weeks to explore um and by the way it's still multi-ethnic for those of you who know this there was a nasty Civil War from '92

to 96 where Bosnian serbs and croats murdered each other wholesale um but it they didn't successfully completely ethnically cleansed so that was one of the things that I really liked about the city like we went to a synagogue we went to a mosque we went to a Catholic church we went to an orthodox church because it's all right there and it one of the nicknames Saro has is it's the Jerusalem of Europe because it's got all these religions mingled together in the same place um so here's the thing there's no doubt that the assassination of

France fer France Ferdinand caused the World War I because it's the trigger that causes the Cascade of the alliances but it's not the real cause you know what I'm saying like it doesn't make sense people are assassinated all the time it doesn't trigger world wars this is going to be a global configration this is going to be an epic war on a grand scale an industrial super scale there must have been something else driving it and the something else was this the British realized they couldn't keep doing the arms race with the Germans something had

to give Germany had made a calculation they thought they were strong enough they might be able to take the British and the French and the Russians but right as the whole thing is starting to break apart the German Kaiser goes I think we just made a mistake he starts putting feelers out to see if he can get the British and the French to back down and the British go no no we're doing this and the reason is is because the British need to sink the German Navy they've got to get it off the table because

having to supersize their Navy is wrecking their economy they know that they can't sustain this so they need to do World War I to get that Navy out of out of there in other words yeah it was kind of a random event that triggered it but the reality was that the British were gunning for this war they wanted this war they were happy that it happened finally because now they had the opportunity to put down the German Navy for Germany their thinking was if they could defeat the British Empire or the French Empire or the

Russian Empire or all three bet which would be better they could become the global superpower to replace the British Empire and then instead of it being the British exploiting Egypt and India and Canada it might be the Germans doing it so in other words what's at stake is there's the evil British Empire and the evil French Empire and the evil Russian Empire and the evil austr Hungarian Empire and then the upstart wnab be evil German Empire because they have evil goals too in other words everybody's the bad guy in World War I that's the fun

thing about World War I there's really no villain there's just villains there's there's just no good guy whereas World War II right it gets I mean don't get me wrong the Allies were also evil it's just the Germans are so much more evil the Japanese are so much more evil that it becomes like wow you actually almost look like good guys now it's weird it's weird how could there have been somebody nastier than you anyway so so the Germans don't convince the British to back down and the French to back down so they're going to

do this and the Russians had actually invaded Prussia so the Russians are the first of the superpowers to invade another superpower they invaded Prussia the they got a little ways in the Germans SWAT them out of the way the next thing you know the Germans are pushing into the Russian Empire the on the other side the Germans invade Belgium and they swing through Belgium and their goal is to grab Paris right off the bat and as they're heading to Paris it looks like they're going to do it it looks like they're going to pull this

thing off the the the British are sending soldiers as fast as they can to try to help the British hold on to Paris the French are running out of soldiers so fast that the French actually ask every taxi cab driver in the country to pick up as many male passengers as they can and rush them to Paris so that they can put them in uniforms and stick a rifle in their hand and send them to the front line so there's just taxi cap drivers driving from all parts of France trying to get soldiers to the

front line in this desperate bed finally as winter is starting to kick in as fall is winding down the German Army has to stop and the reason the German Army had to stop wasn't just because the French and the British had finally reinforced that it was partly because of that it was also because the German Army had gotten so far in front of its supply lines it had moved so quickly that it was literally running out of food and ammunition they just simply couldn't push further they had to wait for the supply trains to catch

up with them once that happened it was a disaster because at that point the war stopped being a fluid moving War because while the Germans are waiting for supplies to shop they start digging trenches to hold their position now that they've stopped advancing the British and the French start digging trenches to protect their position and that becomes the way the war is going to be fought it's going to become trench warfare up until the spring offensive of 1918 so this is you know the war starts in August by by November they're building the trenches um

so you know we're talking about three and a half years of trench warfare brutal trench warfare the the thing that's crazy about World War I is it's these old imperialist European superpowers mixed with Hyper industry we had had sort of glimpses of that in the American Civil War but just faint glimpses we didn't get the full picture once the two armies have dug these trenches what both sides do is they bring up artillery pieces and begin to Shell the fixed positions because think about it once you're in a trench if you dig a 10ft deep

trench there's no way that I can shoot you right if I come up to the if I put a ladder on the trench and I come up to the top and I aim and you're in the trench and you're on the other side I can't get a bullet into that trench there's just no way it's going to go in the only way I could shoot you is if you popped your head up why would you pop your head up you just stay in the trench and so at that point then the only way to dig

the guys out of the trench is to bring in artillery so they bring in these giant artillery pieces their the artillery pieces are miles away they take a shot see where the thing lands there's a guy in a forward position with a radio he calls back to the artillery piece and adjusts the range and then they take another shot and they adjust the range until they got the trench and then they just they can do a bombardment I I sent there where a radio so googly Elmo Marone invented Ed the antenna so Nicola Tesla invented

the radio goog Elmo Marone the Italian inventor invented the antenna in like 1920 well World War I is 1914 to 1918 when nickola Tesla invented the radio it was each radio was connected by a wire there's no antennas putting this together when I was a kid I was taught that Googly Elmo Marone invented the radio and then later on as an adult I realized no no no Tesla invented the radio Marone invented the antenna was that on purpose pretty sure I was intentionally mistaught our our need to delete Nicola Tesla from history is really really

kind of astounds me for the record he was a Serb born in Croatia who traveled through Bosnia to go to Serbia and then ended up moving in the United States and spent the majority of his life in the United States inventing stuff um and he was definitely a much more brilliant inventor than Thomas Edison ever was but Edison won the business war and at the end of the day in capitalism the guy who wins the business war is the winner regardless of who had the truth regardless who had the better inventions uh in other words

capitalism screws everything up so there's a wired radio helping call in the artillery and this is the situation it creates so let's say I'm in the trench so I'm in the the trench isn't very wide maybe it's you know 2 m wide 3 m deep so it's very hard for our artillery piece to hit that it's too narrow of a Target so what I'm doing with my artillery is I want to get in proximity and then create a bomb that when it explodes it'll get you some other way so the obvious thing is shrapnel when

I detonate my bomb pieces of metal go flying in every direction and the metal of course is Twisted so don't it's not like bullets where it's going to be clean it's like Twisted so it's flying through the air and the the hope is that some of it'll catch you and and incapacitate you if not I'll right kill you the problem is in that trench especially if I put a legal in the trench so that it's not a straight line even if I got the shell to hit directly odds of the shrapnel catching you still minimal

so what ended up happening was the Germans invented concussion bombs the idea behind it was the artillery piece would hit and it would create a catastrophic vacuum in the immediate area and that would cause air to violently rush back in and then that would be what would kill you at that point then I just need to get the shell to land near you I don't even need to have the shrapnel hit you I just got to get it in the proximity so then the way to solve that was to dig deeper trenches with tunnels underneath

I'm a soldier I'm in the trench I can't shoot back because as long as the other guys aren't Crossing through no man's land and trying to get to me through no man's land there's nothing to shoot at cuz they're in a trench so my goal as a soldier in the trench since I can't fight is to just not die and then what the enemy is going to do is they're going to hit our trench with artillery not for a few minutes not even for a few hours sometimes it'll go on for days maybe two three

days just the human nervous system isn't designed for this the human nervous system is designed for a quick problem right so we're Australopithecus you know where like a a scrawny 4 foot6 creature on the v in Africa somewhere completely covered in hair upright walking possibly using tools but we're not apex predators we're pretty well down on the pecking order in other words a lot of Australopithecus skeletons have been found inside caves that cougars were using to eat us when they would catch us so I'm I'm Australopithecus my problem is that that leopard that cat when

it sees me I've I don't I don't have a lot of time to solve this problem it's way faster than I am because I'm a bipad which sucks if I had four legs I could be a lot faster why am I a bipad so I can carry stuff in my hands so I've got a stupid tool but this thing has teeth and Claws and it's giant setle lungs and it's coming at me no matter what happens this is probably going to get resolved within like a minute one way or the other I'm being dragged into

the cave to be eaten and maybe fed to some kittens or I like climbed a tree and and uh as the the cats climbing the tree to get to me I'm using my club to smack at it and I heard it enough times that it finally goes ah fine I'll go find something else to eat and it leaves me alone but regardless maybe the whole trauma is 5 minutes long that's what our nervous system is designed to handle something that's a relatively quick event so when the shells start to fall you're in the trench you

might even be in the bunker underneath the ground is shaking boom boom right there's these boom these explosions going off and there're and the closer they are to you the louder they are and you can feel the Thunder Force you know if there's a direct hit you're dead even if you're in the bunker you're dead so you what you're doing in the beginning is you're trying to figure out how you can negotiate with the universe to not have a direct hit so the saying is there are no atheists in trenches and that's the situation where

that's the case right because as the shells are going off and you're trying to negotiate you'll start to pray you could have been an Atheist 10 seconds earlier but right now you're in full-fledged panic mode and our response in panic is fight or flight fear makes us either want to attack or run away those are our two options I don't have either one on the table there's nobody to attack and there's no place to run to if I decide to run I'm coming out of the trench in artillery barrage I'm dead that's not an option

if I'm running down the trench it's entirely probable I'm going to get hit by something like a piece of shrapnel I'm probably finished by the way just to add a little detail those pieces of shrapnel that are flying around are doing things like cutting the radio wires so one of the problems now is as the artillery barage is happening the general the little gutless coward General who's hiding 5 Miles Away From The Trenches can't communicate with the front line he doesn't know what's happening anymore so they had Runners and the general would write a note

and he they'd make duplicates like maybe four different notes they give it to four runners and those four runners would have to run through the trenches in the middle of an artillery barrage and your hope is one would get through to deliver the note to the commanding officer in the front line then he could write a response and he'd send four or five Runners back hoping one gets back to the general right this is what we're doing and you're just grinding grinding grinding and then the the artillery stops well if it's 24 hours later you've

gone through all this fear and panic probably a couple of hours in you're now in trauma land right you're you're you've got permanent psychological damage because we can't endure something like this for that long our minds can't do it and then you go into shock at some point you go into shock and in fact at some point you might even get into place where you're like God I kind of hope that AR shell does kill me but then the artillery stops you know what's coming next it means that the other side is going to climb

out of their trenches and run across no man's land and try to get into your trench so your job now is to get to the top of your trench and fix machine gun positions at the top of your trench to shoot them as they're coming through no man's land you had already set up concertina wire the roll in razor blade wire that the governor is using on the border with New Mexico anyway the governor of Texas has put concertino wire on the border with New Mexico which creeps me out and so uh that's already in

no man's land so the first few soldiers who are running across no man's land that we shooting with a machine gun by the way we've probably set it so it's roughly knee level don't worry we'll we'll kill them it's but but when you think about it's kind of a good a good height to have it at you might put a little higher maybe waist level so it just right that there were trees this is this is just open ground so there are trees they would put so many rounds from the machine guns they would literally

cut the trees down there are no trees no man's land becomes like the surface of the Moon it's covered in craters the soldiers are jumping in and out of the craters machine gun uh such a high level it'll cut down the trees are literally cutting down the soldiers the first way of soldiers their real goal is to die on The concertino Wire so that the next wave of soldiers doesn't have to deal with the concertino wire they can just run over the top of it and so the next wave comes over and they're probably going

to get gunned down and then a third wave a fourth wave eventually though a wave will get to the trenches and you're going to be fighting with bayonets you're going to be fighting with handguns what the Germans realized really quickly cuz it was usually the Allies that did the attacks what the Germans realized really quickly was it just wasn't worth trying to hold on to the trench so they would build these Reserve trenches in the back and then they would they would murder the Allies running across No Man's Land by the time wave after wave

after wave some they had gotten to that trench they would just abandon the trench and drop back to a reserve trench and set up for the next wave and they would just do this for three and a half years is they were grind ing human beings like you grind hamburger just massacre massacre and the the Allies kept doing these human waves eventually the Germans decide they're they don't have the numbers they're they're fighting the Russians in the East they're F the Italians declare war on 1915 so they're fighting the Italians in the South they're fighting

the Romanians in the South they're fighting the Greeks in the South uh and then they're fighting the British and the French and then the Germans all right we need we need help concussion bombs isn't enough and they switch over to starting to use chemical warfare and they start doing things like chlorine gas mustard gas for the record those are fantastic Terror weapons because they're really scary death but they were very ineffective they they they killed tens of thousands of soldiers 13 and a half million soldiers will die by the time this war is over tens

of thousands of soldiers is a tiny tiny fraction of that so even though like uh at Veron they use gas the Germans hesitated after they gassed Verdon well the French then quickly reinforced Verdon so by the time the Germans attacked the French were back in their positions so the Germans end up getting massacred trying to get into Verdan and in other words they had they attacked immediately after they gassed it they would have had a chance to capture it before or the French could reinforce it so in other words it was just needless murder at

that point um the chlorine gas would you could see it it was like a blue cloud coming towards you so the French troops would just see the choran coming at them they jump out of the trenches and just run eventually uh the Allies start to issue gas masks gas masks were invented by an African-American I I forget his name and then uh we started issuing them to the soldiers and we made sure not to tell them about the inventor's skin color um and but even then even with the gas mask it's still a scary proposition

in the beginning the way you would deal with mustard gas was you had to pee on a cloth which no problem like you know mustard gas is coming you probably peed yourself anyway so you just rip your underwear off and you put it over your mouth because the ammonia in your urine would interact with the gas and it would help neutralize the the the gas when when the artillery barges are happening there's no food being delivered or if there is food it's sporadic and so one of the problems that the men in the trenches had

to deal with even when there wasn't an artillery barrage this might still be a problem spaic food delivery was that the food that they often had was rotten so what you would do is you would eat at night because you didn't want to see what you were eating um they lived with the rats they lived with the rats and the corpses of their friends the the the concussion bombs would hurl Corpses into the trees behind them so it was like it was like Christmas but the ornaments were rotting corpses um and then right a guy

dies next to you what are you going to do you're going to pick him up and carry him out there's no there's no way to do that and so you're just sort of stuck with your friend your dead friend in the trench with you the Rats of course are nibbling on them like this is a traumatic horrific nightmarish hell that we put these soldiers through the war ends in a really really really strange way so first Russia surrenders you know how we're always talk about you can't defeat Russia well Germany did Russia surrendered in World

War I when Russia surrendered Germany carved off Poland belus Ukraine lvia and Lithuania and made them into independent states and they actually Germany actually set up a a Polish language University in Poland and trying to befriend the ukrainians the poles because they were thinking and the B Russians because they were thinking if they could sort of utilize them maybe they could help feed the German Army and they would help the economy even though they were kinder to the the Eastern Russians uh than you would expect uh it it didn't really work out the way they

wanted to Austria Hungary began to apart at the seams and the Allies were defeating the Ottoman Empire Bulgaria was their only remaining Ally who cares Bulgaria is always on the losing side anyway you automatically know if Bulgaria is your ally you're finished right like I can think of one war Bulgaria was on The Winning Side the Balan war in 1912 then in 1913 everybody ganged up on Bulgaria and defeated it so that that even the one time they won that that caused them to lose the next War um so the Germans are starting to run

out of food it's starting to get really Grim as they're starting to approach that they decide they're going to change tactics completely their goal is to abandon the type of tactics that they that everybody had used in Warfare up until that moment where you have a unit basically March forward to do that in trench warfare you have to jump out of the trench and run across what the Germans decide to do is give Squad level so 10 men roughly give or take two men so 8 to 12 men give them autonomy as a squad to

operate individually from the union and then operate under the premise and then have lieutenants have full field command and they do this and they launched the spring offensive in 1918 their whole goal is to just swing around the backside of Paris and take Paris out and they would have the German spring offensive was wildly successful except two things stopped them one the Brits had invented the tank and deployed it now the Brits had actually deployed the tank two years earlier but the tank played an important role in slowing the Germans down in the spring offensive

the Germans made like two 20 tanks I think they made 20 tanks in World War I the Allies made like 5,000 so you know we always think about the the Germans in their tanks not in World War I not one uh the Germans did capture some Allied tanks and use them but it was still insignificant the other reason why the German offensive failed was there was a black an African-American unit that held on to a critical spot in the front line that the Germans had to break and after that unit ran out of ammo and

the Germans were jumping into the trenches that black unit was using its bayonets it literally broke the bayonets off in in Germans like they just they had no Bandits so they started using their rifles as clubs they broke their rifles they switched over to fists and they fought the Germans with their fists in the trenches and drove them out and the Germans never captured that one critical spot of line and between the tanks and that the Germans couldn't capture Paris then Austria secedes from the austr Hungarian Empire and like wait what and Hungary suceeds and

then at that point Germany goes into a revolution uh Communists capture Berlin and Bavaria and of course one of the reasons why the Russians surrendered is they had a Communist Revolution and the communist government surrenders to end the war and now all of a sudden Germany has lost its largest state so its equivalent of Texas and its capital but also its cultural and economic Center so it' be the equivalent of losing DC and and New York and La at the same time losing Berlin was catastrophic and so the Germans starving to death because they've completely

run out of food by this point they're missing their Capital they're missing their largest state second largest state they go to the allies and they go look you haven't beaten us militarily we're still in France fighting we're in Italy fighting we're in Romania fighting we're in your countryes fighting we conquered the Russ we defeated the Russians didn't conquer but defeated the Russians they surrendered so militarily we've won this thing but we need to surrender we need to surrender to put down these Communists we need to surrender because we've run out of food so give us

give us some mercy since we we're kicking your butt and the Allies went we are going to hurt you we are going to extract cruel sadistic Vengeance on you and we're going to make you so filled with anger and rage age you're going to do World War II the peace deal that happens in the aftermath of World War I is going to set us up for World War II so and that's that's where we'll start part two will be uh the inner War period so the peace deal on thanks thanks for attending I hope I

wasn't too Grim when the The Trenches I didn't I definitely didn't want to end it there I needed to end it differently cuz I was thinking do I end it here that's too horrible ah anyway for standard of living I think it's safe to say World War I was the worst war in human history for what we put soldiers through it was absolutely brutal World War II might be the worst war in human history for what we put civilians through uh just for the record that was in part because the soldiers who either remembered world

War I are knew what happened we're like no this time the civilians are getting it so that wasn't an accident to be clear all right uh thanks again and uh enjoy the [Music] cold