Episodes - 15-Minute History Podcast (2024)

This is part two of our series wrapping up this season on villains. If you haven’t heard part one yet, please go back and listen because I’ll be referring back to it a lot today. Joe and I will close the season out next week discussing the topic. Also, I want to give credit to a YouTuber called “the Critical Drinker” for the title of this episode. This inebriated Scotsman is a very wise observer of cultural trends, and his commentary on “the message” is both insightful and entertaining.

Last week, we discussed the political and legal framework of McCarthyism, but far more important is how it impacted ordinary citizens who were not Soviet agents. McCarthy and HUAC regularly labeled Americans as threats simply for their political beliefs, which were often countercultural at the time. Whether or not their views were correct, they did not deserve the loss of reputation, income, and even personal safety that accompanied a subversive accusation. Hundreds of people lost their jobs, had to move, and even faced legal sanctions for dissenting viewpoints. Some later repaired their reputations as the “Red Scare” faded and its moral panic subsided, but many felt McCarthyism’s lingering effects for the rest of their lives.

America, and in fact much of the developed world, seems to be in a McCarthy-esque moment right now. The evidence is pretty widespread no matter your political or cultural opinions. We’ve talked regularly about the widening social gulf in the United States, and polarization is part of living in a free and open society. The Constitution allows us to hold any opinion we wish and only get information from outlets that confirm our biases. It lets news organizations and social media entities control what information or opinions they allow on their platforms. Of course, changes in laws or regulations after the next could alter these situations, but this is where we stand right now.

More concerning is a growing belief on both sides of the aisle that words themselves are sometimes violent. Objectively, this is more prevalent on the left, but even some right-wingers are starting down this dangerous path. Colleges now ban controversial figures from speaking on their campuses to protect students from triggering speeches. Social media de-platforms those label as “haters.” The lawful opinion that words are violent can, but does not always, lead to actions that are absolutely illegal—mobs bashing opponents with bike locks and pepper-spraying people for the crime of thinking differently. Scholarly essays, interviews with protesters, and social media posts describe the rationale for attacking fellow citizens because of hateful, offensive, but free speech usually make the following claims. People have the right to defend themselves with force against someone trying to assault them; violence can be met with violence. And since some words cause physical harm by creating stress or fear, people are justified in using force against those whose words are an attack.

Without getting into the legal or ethical merits of the “words are violence” argument, it begs a couple of questions. First, where does this stop? Evidence from campus unrest and efforts at legal censorship point to a desire to punish free speech with force. This, historically, does not augur well for social cohesion. Second, which words are violent? That, naturally, depends on people’s opinions and the context through which they see the world. And here we return to last week’s episode and the idea of stories.

What’s In a Word?

To recap briefly, our way of looking at the world depends in part on the stories we know and the lessons we learn from them. A listener reminded me that this is why most great religious teachers from Jesus to Buddha taught in parables, short tales conveying moral truths. Great stories that resonate with people despite preconceived notions or beliefs start with a common frame of reference: a world we understand or truths we know from our youth. Authors then use their work to offer commentary to get an audience to think differently about something important, whether an injustice in society or a path to heaven and enlightenment. But it starts with a good story; not in the sense of “I like it” but “I understand it and see where it’s leading me.” It might offer a glimpse of a better world like a Renaissance or Romantic painting. It could lift our spirits in a symphony or classic rock ballad. And it might even challenge how we live our lives or offer hope in dark times. But the story comes first, and the author lets the audience decide what it means and why it matters.

Other stories out there start from a different place, a message the author wants to convey. These are usually simpler in scope because they often sacrifice narrative to get their points across. A modern example might help illustrate the difference, comparing CS Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia to JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Lewis began with an allegory of biblical tales set in a world he created, while Tolkien started with his fantasy world alone. Readers have differing opinions on each work, but the contrast between them is clear. Works that flow from allegory usually have only one interpretation and application, while those that simply tell a good story have far more depth and breadth. One storytelling approach isn’t neces-sarily better, but they produce different context and understanding in audiences.

Let’s look at how these two types of narratives affect the entire storytelling process. We return to the idea of heroism from last week, and I get to talk about one of my favorite modern stories: Star Wars. A key aspect of heroism is working hard to overcome obstacles and improve one’s abilities; this is a universal idea from Beowulf to Batman. To become a Jedi Knight and save the galaxy from evil, Luke Skywalker had to battle his enemies. He lost friends and suffered defeats until he mastered his own anger and became strong enough to defeat the story’s villains. This is the classic “hero’s journey.” In contrast, Rey from the Disney sequel trilogy never lost a battle, never struggled to overcome weakness in herself, never even trained in the Jedi arts until the last movie. She was a hero because of who she was, not what she did. George Lucas told one sort of story and JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson told another. One began with a universal idea and has appealed to audiences for nearly fifty years; the other took current-day ideas of gender politics—those are Rian Johnson’s words, not mine—and grafted them onto the story. Some people like each trilogy, but every objective standard shows that the original Star Wars movies are parsecs away more popular than their Disney cousins because audiences around the world saw themselves in Luke Skywalker and other heroes in a galaxy far, far away.

So we have different paths to storytelling with their own goals. One is popular with audiences, and the other speaks to issues that authors think are important. Why does this matter? Because they both take root in the reader or viewer’s mind and shape their outlook on life. Someone who understands bravery or sacrifice from heroic tales will behave quite differently from another whose framework for heroism is identity. The former receives praise by doing praiseworthy things; the latter searches for it simply by existing. One takes risks, stands up against injustice, and helps those without a voice by speaking truth to power. The other simply talks about themselves, makes them the story, and demands validation for their heroic life. To put it bluntly, one is George Washington or Martin Luther King, Jr. The other is a TikTok influencer.

The Message: A New McCarthyism

Having established that some people today view words as violence and asking the obvious question, “which words?” we can now take a dispassionate look at some an-swers and see that the current-day culture war has a great potential for evil in society. Universal ideas like right and wrong or heroism and cowardice depend on the context we get from stories. In a free society, we can praise the right and laud the heroes while also condemning the wrong and shaming the cowards. Which of these words might be seen as violent? In many cases, it’s those that offer criticism of stories, their messages, and—in modern times—the identities they praise. This is part of an idea called “intersectionalism,” where one’s ideas on everything from politics and culture to sports and music depend on your identity, whether race, gender, or any other category. Offering criticism of any identity becomes an attack on people, not ideas, and this “violence” must be stopped by any means necessary.

It’s a bit bizarre to me that as societies become more diverse and tolerant, they also become less open to countercultural viewpoints. We saw this in the United States during the McCarthy era, which was also the early years of the civil rights movement. The cultural left, the progressives in those days, saw the evil of segrega-tion and worked to change it. Those in power reacted violently with police dogs and fire hoses, and the halls of Congress echoed with McCarthyite rage labeling opponents as subversive traitors. Both sides within the general population got their con-text on that culture war from stories about how the world should look, different views of culture and society based on the narratives people told themselves. Now, before anyone gets upset, let me be clear in that I am not comparing the importance of racial equality to a desire for better stories on our screens today. I’m saying that our stories as a society mold both our desires for how culture changes and our actions we take to bring that change about. The causes are different, but their roots are the same.

Free speech produces criticism. This is natural and healthy, when done constructively because it often produces better ideas and context. But intersectionalism and the quest for validation of identities makes improvement far more difficult. If a politician criticizes the actions of a country, say for a war it is waging, the immediate response is “you hate everyone with that identity.” If a movie critic says they dislike a film’s message, everyone with the identity it praised piles on that person with accu-sations of hating an entire group. Are there racists and bigots out there spreading hate online? Of course. But one can offer criticism of an idea without attacking people. This was Joseph McCarthy’s great crime, seeing the Soviet Union as a real threat to America’s security and then pursuing anyone who believed in communism as a traitor. The new McCarthyites do the same thing, whether they are on campus when a controversial speaker is booked or they see a film’s audience score drop into the single digits. They feel attacked by words, and since those words are violent in their eyes, they lash out. Maybe it’s with words, which only fuels polarization and turns social media into kindergarten screaming matches. Maybe they try to dox people; I saw this in real time recently when a game developer tweeted asking her followers to find out where a critic lived and worked. That’s not free speech—that is dangerous. And maybe they assault fellow students on campus or storm a building chanting slogans and demanding passing grades. The pages of history offer a warning: societies that cannot debate the merits of ideas often face violent storms in their futures.

All of this leads to degraded storytelling, not based on who likes it but on objective quality. Sacrificing a good story for current-day messages about politics and identity splits the audience, but it also makes the stories themselves shallow and uninteresting. We are creatures who love stories that speak to us where we are, not ones that shout at us for not supporting this or that cause. If people want to be lec-tured on controversial matters, they can watch YouTube and cable news. Modern stories offer simple messages that force audiences to take sides instead of getting us to really think about our beliefs. Only closed-minded ideologues, no matter their side, really enjoy that. The rest of us want to be entertained and like having our beliefs challenged, but we want to be free to make up our own minds.

But in the end, this is not about me. And it may not be about you. It is about the next generation. As we discussed last week, stories shape context and perspective, especially when people are young. Tell old Trekkies like Joe and I that Captain Picard is not a wise diplomat but a broken old man with mommy issues, and we’ll shake our heads and watch the old shows (and season three of Star Trek: Picard). But tell a young person, whose mind is yet unformed and their perspectives on life still evolving, that their value as a person depends on their race or gender and that they should base their entire identity on life choices, and you create a generation that lashes out at even the merest hint of criticism, legitimate or otherwise. As they ma-ture, these stories will frame how they deal with words and deeds alike, and they will become the new McCarthy-ites who insist on censorship or encourage violence.

Who is inserting “the message” into children’s content, what that message is, and how it spreads throughout culture is beyond the time and scope of this podcast. I do not intend to comment on why state governments are banning books in public libraries or billion-dollar companies are funding efforts to get kids to make irreversible changes to their bodies before they’re old enough to get a tattoo. This is not a call for censorship or legal action against artists or their corporate overlords in any way. In most cases, evil cannot be wished away by governments, no matter how well-intentioned. It must be recognized and then opposed by you and I every single day, lest we wake up one morning in a world we do not recognize.

This episode is the first in a two-part series that will wrap up our season on villains. Part two will air on Monday, May 27th, and a long discussion of both episodes will follow on Monday, June 3rd, 2024

“It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision…Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.”

- Whittaker Chambers, “Letter to My Children” -

A sense of moral panic had gripped the country that everyone in the room at the Republican Women’s Club could feel. The audience fell silent as the senator walked to his podium and organized his notes. He had been in the upper house for only three years, and few outside his home state of Wisconsin knew of his service as a tail gunner on bombers in the Second World War. His fingers brushed across his main prop, a long list of names, while he took a breath and raised his hands for silence. As he prepared to deliver what became a career-defining address, Joseph McCarthy could not have known that his name would soon be among the most reviled in modern American history.

The List

The term “McCarthyism” has evolved over time but began as an attack on the senator’s claim that Soviet agents had infiltrated the US government. McCarthy’s work paralleled other investigations at the Central Intelligence Agency and in the House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee. Fear of communist influence throughout the United States was rampant in the early years of the Cold War, and these investigations were immensely popular with the American people—at least in the beginning. But both HUAC and Senator McCarthy soon came under fire for their claims that members of America’s governing and cultural elites were agents of the Soviet Union. So did those men and women who testified to so-called “un-American activities.” Whittaker Chambers, a former member of the Communist Party USA, was denounced as a liar, accused of hom*osexuality and perversion, and called “criminally insane” in newspapers and radio broadcasts for alleging that Alger Hiss was a communist spy. Hiss was a high-ranking State Department civil servant and very popular in East Coast high society. Most press accounts during the hearings ignored the evidence being presented and instead praised Hiss for his composure, good looks, and confident tone on the stand and contrasted these with Chambers’ dumpy appearance and squinting, shifty eyes.

Senator McCarthy’s announcement of a list of Red subversives in the speech that made him famous turned him instantly into a pariah, a right-wing extremist, and a dangerous ideologue. Senators from both parties regularly criticized his efforts in Congress, and the press turned a patriotic American into a threat to the nation’s freedom. Outrage grew even louder in 1951 when McCarthy accused George Marshall of being both a communist and a traitor for his inaction when Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists won their civil war. The senator accused the respected former secretary of state, architect of Europe’s postwar recovery, and victorious wartime general of being part of a “conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous adventure in the history of man.” Marshall emerged with his reputation intact—correctly, since he was without question not a Soviet agent. McCarthy continued to clash with both Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, accusing members of their administrations of pro-communist attitudes until he was censured by the Senate in 1954.

Members of HUAC and those who testified about communist activities in Hollywood and other cultural institutions also felt the media’s scorn. The committee’s most energetic member, freshman Congressman Richard Nixon of California, was a favorite target of press outrage, and he seemed to feed on their indignation. When The New York Times labeled him the “dark prince of American politics,” he adopted the nickname for himself and used it in speeches (and the tapes he later made while in the White House). Washington’s elite never forgave Nixon for his pursuit of left-wingers in Hollywood—many of whose associations with communism were never proven—and their rage followed him into the presidency. HUAC’s witnesses were often denounced as near-traitors to the cause of free association even when they refused to “name names.” Ronald Reagan experienced this in 1949 when he appeared before the committee; despite his insistence that membership in the Communist Party was protected by the Constitution and not a crime, his opponents in Hollywood howled to friendly press outlets that he was “collaborating with the enemy.”

The Truth

Despite Senator McCarthy’s efforts, few US government officials were convicted of espionage or treason, though Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were an exception for their role in helping the Soviets obtain nuclear technology. But in the 1970s, a CIA-funded counterintelligence program called the Venona Project revealed the true scope of Red infiltration in the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations. Executive Branch employees, atomic scientists at the Los Alamos laboratory, and even the two-term Vice President of the United States, Henry Wallace, were paid spies or informers employed by the Soviet Union. (For context, imagine senior officials in the State and Treasury departments, White House staffers, Silicon Valley tech executives working on artificial intelligence, and Vice President Kamala Harris all receiving money for passing secrets to the Chinese or Russians.) The revelations seemed to prove McCarthy right in certain cases. But the senator had died in 1957, four years after his Senate censure.

The spread of communism in Hollywood is far murkier to historians because there is no Venona Project to either clear or condemn blacklisted individuals. However, Soviet archives opened after the Cold War provide some clarity on the extent of Red espionage in Tinsel-Town. Since their founding before the Great Depression, the major Hollywood studios had been owned by American media moguls whose patriotic values were usually mirrored in the films they produced and distributed. But in the late 1940s, a series of strikes by labor unions paralyzed the industry. Soviet documents now prove that American communists paid by Russian intelligence services were behind some of these efforts to wrest control of the studios from their owners. In fact, actor and SAG president Ronald Reagan got his first up-close look at communist brutality when protesters threatened to throw acid in his face and murder his family. Soon after he returned from Washington for his HUAC testimony, agitators tried to overturn his car during a rally-turned-riot as he departed a strike meeting. Like the case of Senator McCarthy, the HUAC investigators accused left-wingers on political views alone, and few convictions resulted. Eventually, the House Un-American Activities Committee fell under increasing scrutiny, especially after former president Harry Truman described it as “the most un-American thing in the country today” in 1959. But later documents proved that America’s enemies viewed Hollywood and its ability to shape popular culture as a target ripe for infiltration.

The “Red Scare” and moral panic created by fear of communist activity in the United States is a difficult page in American history. The Constitution is crystal clear on the point that Reagan made before HUAC: freedom of association, including in organizations that might pose a threat to national security or public safety is protected under the First Amendment. Those who argued for increased scrutiny and surveillance, to say nothing of blacklisting and removal from jobs, tried to make the case that individuals in positions of political and cultural influence are a danger to America’s continuation as a free nation. But the Supreme Court has continually upheld the principle written into our founding that Americans have the right to believe whatever they wish and can be prosecuted only for actions against their fellow man. Though proper from a legal standpoint, it is important to remember that these constitutional rights may not always protect us from villains in our midst.

The Danger

Without stories, there is no humanity. Everything we learn and believe comes to us from stories except mathematics—and even its history is a fascinating tale that deserves its own episode one day. From the earliest epics told around campfires in ages past to modern news and social media posts, we understand events and ideas from the context of stories. Allow me to explain. If you read a news story about a person risking their life to save a child from a burning building, you’d likely think, “Wow, what a hero.” Why? Because you’ve read stories in your past, real or fictional, about people facing danger to rescue the helpless. These tales showed those characters to be heroes, and your brain associates their actions with those of the person who ran into a fire. Here’s another example. You are sitting in science class as a young student, and your teacher is telling you about the theory of gravity. They describe the scientific principle of “what goes up must come down.” You understand this in part because you remember throwing a ball with your friends, or tossing a pencil across a room, or recalling when you jumped off a chair at your father’s house and broke your right arm (which is still in a cast). The stories in your past illuminate new ideas and help you to understand them.

Visual arts like film and television make these stories even more powerful. For example, I’d read the story of Christ’s crucifixion more times than I can count. But seeing it on screen in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ left me in tear-filled shock at witnessing an admittedly extra-biblical adaptation of history’s darkest hour. Joe gave me a less dramatic example, him seeing the immense painting by Jacques-Louis David of Napoleon’s coronation at the Louvre versus watching a History Channel documentary. The art was static and conveyed grandeur but not context, while the show explained the event in relation to what had happened before and why it was such a historic moment. (And there weren’t even any aliens!) I’ve mentioned in several of our very popular “History on Film” episodes that students often ask me about whether movies, TV shows, and even video games get their history right. Some kids will give me a skeptical look when I answer because, to them, what they saw on screen is history.

This is why communist infiltration and control of Hollywood was at least as dangerous as their government espionage efforts. Had they succeeded, America’s enemy would have possessed their greatest propaganda tool to shape American popular culture. Like Hitler and Mao from two weeks ago, Vladimir Lenin knew that the young were keys to his success; he once commented, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” No one can know how history might have changed with a Red Hollywood, but there might just be a parallel phenomenon happening right now. And that, dear audience, is where we will pick up next week!

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.”

- CS Lewis, A Mind Awake -

I had a bit of an existential crisis at the age of nineteen while sitting in classes at Hillsdale College in Michigan. Like so many young people today, I had followed the standard formula of finishing high school and then indebting myself by going to college, but I had no real sense of what I would do in life. After weeks of pouring through course catalogues and descriptions of majors, I met with my advisor, Dr. John Wilson, one of the wisest men I have ever known. He cut through all the platitudes most people tell students about their careers and asked me one simple question: “Why are you here?”

I have spent my entire professional life in the classroom. Though I have taught history to thousands of young men and women, my why is not to fill their minds with facts and dates. The classical Greek historian Plutarch wrote that “A mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” If I have done any good in my career, if I have contributed anything to the lives of my students, it is to light a fire of understanding of our world today and to remind them to always ask questions. History is the key to the past and education the door through which students walk into a world of endless possibilities filled with heroes and villains alike. Teachers—like parents—instill values that their charges will take with them through that door. Or, at least, that’s how it should be.

Some of the greatest crimes in history began not on battlefields or politicians’ offices but in classrooms. Demagogues often seize control of educational institutions as a means of indoctrinating the young, filling their minds with false narratives meant to guide them towards evil. As a teacher, this both terrifies and enrages me in equal measure. As we approach the end of this season on villains, let us look back at some examples of this hateful practice from an objective, historical viewpoint. Listeners on every side of the widening political and cultural divide may notice some familiar trends, and these are signposts on the road to evil.

“What are you?”

No discussion of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich is complete without exploring the dramatic changes that occurred in Germany’s education system under national socialism. Both the journalist William Shirer, who witnessed these events firsthand in the 1930s, began his monograph on Hitlerite education with the words of Bernhard Rust, the Reich Minister of Science, Education, and Popular Culture from 1934 to 1945. Described as an “unemployed provincial schoolmaster [who had] been dismissed…for certain manifestations of instability of mind,” Rust outlined his vision of education in the Third Reich as “liquidating the school as an institution of intellectual acrobatics.” Like his Führer, Rust believed that schools spent too much time teaching students how to think about complex issues or examining problems from an objective viewpoint. He believed that teachers should instill the Nazi Weltanschauung, or “worldview,” and train youngsters to become fanatical national socialists. And he certainly did a good job of that during his time in power.

In 1937, four years into the Nazi terror, the government passed a revised Civil Service Act that made Hitler’s Mein Kampf the foundation of all education in Germany. Teachers from kindergarten to the universities had to join the National Socialist Teachers’ League, where they would be trained as indoctrinators rather than educators. Old systems of pedagogy fell by the wayside as students learned racial theories of Aryan supremacy and teachers filled their students’ minds with the Führer’s screeds about countering Jewish world dominion. The civil service law stated that teachers must become “the executors of the will of the party-supported State” and be “ready at any time to defend without reservation the National Socialist State.” The classroom became a center of Nazified learning in which questioning those in power was no longer encouraged but punished.

Hitler’s own views of education reflected his poor academic performance as a young man. But despite his hatred of teachers and professors, he understood the power of those who trained young minds. Soon after becoming chancellor in 1933, he spoke publicly about his own Weltanschauung for Germany’s youth. “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I will calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already…What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

The Führer sought out men and women from across Germany who would create this new classroom community, but he also established new institutions outside the school to ensure that the next generation of Germans would belong to him. In June 1933, Hitler appointed a failed young poet named Baldur von Schirach to be the Reich Leader for Youth Education. Schirach was already head of the paramilitary Hitler Youth, to which the children of party members belonged, but the Führer now extended that organization across German society. Schirach took on this task with the fervor of a convert, seizing control of all German youth organizations and dismissing or arresting their non-Nazi officials. Three years later, he disbanded the Catholic Youth Organization, the largest independent educational institution left in the Reich. The old youth leagues had taught young Germans values like hard work and intellectual curiosity while also providing them a place to make friends and play. Now, children in the Third Reich would serve the state and learn only what its government wished. German boys joined the Jungvolk at the age of ten, where they attended classes on racial ideology, spent time outdoors learning how to camp and march, and trained their bodies for harsh conditions in the military. Girls spent their afternoons in the Jungmädel, where angry Nazi matrons told them their purpose was to care for the home and produce lots of pure Aryan children with their future husbands. At the age of fourteen, children graduated into larger organizations, the boys into the Hitlerjugend and the girls into the Bund Deutscher Mädel. From fourteen to eighteen, their indoctrination in Nazi principles was completed, and the men and women who left these groups for the Labor Service, the Army, or the home were among the most fanatical Nazis in Germany. Some were even so devoted to their Führer that they informed on their own parents and loved ones for “antisocial” speech or behavior—only to then watch with glee as their relatives, victims of the “new community,” were hauled away to concentration camps.

“The Right to Rebel”

For much of its history, a series of demographic and geographic challenges made it nearly impossible to govern the people of China. The first truly united Chinese state emerged in the early 20th century under Sun Yat-Sen, a nationalist who overthrew the last emperor and established the Republic of China. This regime, especially under Sun’s successor Chiang Kai-Shek, was so unpopular thanks to its corruption and mismanagement of the country, that a growing Marxist-Leninist movement led by Mao Zedong soon emerged to challenge it. In 1949, with support from the Soviet Union, Mao’s forces won the Chinese Civil War and established the People’s Republic of China. The great revolutionary, now ruling a nation of over half a billion people, then set about his task to mold his subjects into a modern communist society. One of his first acts was to reorganize China’s schools to teach the gospel of Marx and Lenin to the young, indoctrinating them in state service in the manner of tyrants, past and future.

Nearly two decades later, China found itself reeling from two disasters. Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” had restructured the country’s agriculture sector along collective lines. The results were simply catastrophic. Depending on the source, between fifteen and fifty million people starved to death between 1959 and 1961. Nature contributed to the Great Chinese Famine, especially flooding along the Yellow River basin that destroyed crops and drowned workers. The Chinese Communist Party placed blame for these calamities squarely on Mao’s shoulders, though there is some debate as to how much he knew, and forced him to resign as president in 1959. He was replaced by reformers like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, though he retained other offices and remained a power in Beijing.

In 1968, as the new leaders tried to restore order in the country, Mao began working behind the scenes to reclaim his authority. In May, he gave a speech in the capital to thousands of young and enthusiastic communists announcing that men he called “revisionists” had infiltrated the Party and were working to create a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” This term, perhaps unfamiliar to modern audiences, horrified the devotees of Karl Marx because it meant that their collectivist revolution was threatened by greedy rich men. (The claim was false, as Liu, Deng, and the other reformers were devoted communists but simply believed that Mao had gone too far down the road to socialist utopia.) But the young men and women trained in the communist manner did not think about such trivialities as right and wrong—these ideas were beneath them. They heard their paramount leader’s words and were inflamed with Marxist rage, made stronger two weeks later when he called on the people nationwide to “clear away the evil habits of the old society.”

What Chairman Mao called the “Four Olds” were old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs. His army of students, known as the “Red Guards,” swept across the People’s Republic in the “Cultural Revolution” determined to root out these threats to the modern Chinese state. They seized control of schools and universities, persecuted teachers and administrators mercilessly, and subjected their victims to what were called “struggle sessions.” This form of public humiliation and degradation involved a person sitting before a large audience and confessing their “sins” against the scientific-socialist god Karl Marx as the Red Guards screamed insults at them. Surviving accounts of these struggle sessions reel the mind as men and women begged for forgiveness while young radicals hurled abuse at them and sometimes beat them senseless. Many who were “struggled against” in these sessions ended up taking their own lives to undo the shame brought upon them and their families.

The Red Guards also burned or ransacked churches and shrines, whipping priests and pastors in the streets and demanding they submit to the new communist faith. They destroyed libraries filled with priceless treasures of Chinese literature, and even attacked shops and private homes or, as they put it, “bastions of feudal traditions.” Book burnings became common as the Red Guards cleansed the country of ideas contrary to Marxist doctrine. They destroyed historic landmarks and monuments to heroes of China’s past, renamed streets and cities to elevate Chairman Mao above all else in Chinese society, and even altered the Chinese language by banning words that offended their faith in their socialist red god. (They even tried to destroy the cemetery of Confucius, perhaps the greatest figure in all of Chinese history.) Older revolutionaries, veterans of the civil war who had worked to create the Marxist paradise, found themselves beaten in the streets or struggled against by younger men and women who believed they were insufficiently radical for the new China.

The Cultural Revolution accelerated in the fall of 1968 as factory workers joined the Red Guards and set upon their managers, again forcing them into struggle sessions for abusing their employees. The revolution reached China’s many farms as winter approached, and the government bureaucrats loyal to Liu and Deng who managed the collectives felt the wrath of fervent young radicals. The country soon tipped toward civil war as rival factions seized control of entire city blocks and fought each other in the streets. The bloodshed horrified the Party leaders in Beijing’s Forbidden City, who knew that something had to be done.

Chairman Mao saw that the revolution he had unleashed was now out of control, and he did what authoritarians always do when their power is challenged: he sent in the military. Soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army swept through one Chinese city after another, arrested tens of thousands of Red Guards or shot entire bands of radicals in the streets. The government deported at least a million high school- and college-aged students to the provinces, where they would be “reeducated” on farms and taught the error of their ways. The government crackdown was so severe that China effectively became a military dictatorship for the next three years.

A decade before his victory in the Chinese Civil War, Mao had said to his followers that “Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: the right to rebel.” The Red Guards often chanted these words in struggle sessions, bringing their meaning home to those who had heard them during the great conflict to bring communism to China. Among their victims in the Cultural Revolution were heroes of the civil war. Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s successor as President of China, was deposed by the Party and turned over to the Red Guards. He was arrested, beaten repeatedly, struggled against in several public demonstrations of rage in Beijing, and eventually disappeared from public view; his death was announced in November 1969. The Red Guards also seized Deng Xiaoping and struggled against the popular reformer. He survived their brutal treatment and was rehabilitated publicly in the 1970s. He then succeeded Mao as China’s paramount leader in 1977 and brought the country out of its revolutionary fervor, likely with memories of his treatment by the Red Guards at the forefront of his mind. Another loyal party official whose name deserves mention is Xi Zhongxun, a veteran of the war with Japan in the 1930s and the civil war of the 1940s. The Red Guards denounced him as bourgeois and struggled against him. He and his family survived—an anomaly in those bloody days—and he returned to public life. Today, his second son, Xi Jinping, serves as China’s president and paramount leader.

Other victims were less fortunate than Deng and Xi, and official figures put the Cultural Revolution’s death toll at two million. (It is likely closer to five million according to unbiased historians.) About a third of those died at the Red Guards’ hands, while the rest were murdered in the government’s counter-revolutionary crackdown. Far more staggering are the figures of those who were denounced and struggled against. It is estimated that the Red Guards dragged 125 million people into struggle sessions, and that perhaps one in twenty—a terrifying six million people—took their own lives in fear that they would never recover their reputations.

Evil in the Classroom

Men and women are not born into evil. Yes, they are sinners—we all are. But evil, whether Nazism or Marxism, racism or bigotry, is taught. In authoritarian states, the teaching comes from those in power. They train youngsters whose brains are not yet fully-formed to become agents of their evil plans. In many ways, the horrors of Auschwitz and the Cultural Revolution began in classrooms. Hitler and Mao could not have murdered so many millions without armies of radical followers with minds filled with evil ideas and bodies prepared to sacrifice their humanity to their secular gods. CS Lewis’ words from A Mind Filled quoted at the start of this podcast ring true to this educator and any who learn of the evil in totalitarian classrooms. False sentiments, political or economic or cultural, must be countered with just ones. These are not factual but ethical, and teachers must offer their students a vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Even more prescient is Lewis’ warning in another book, The Abolition of Man. Today, the educational landscape is a barren desert filled with coarse sand of ideologies but lacking any vegetation of truth. Lewis saw this more than a half-century ago and understood that a classroom that teaches worldviews but not truth create what he called “men without chests.” Young people can be trained to recite facts, but truth is much harder to instill in young minds. And not truths like mathematics or science; the Truth that we are all unique creations made in the image of God. Which God is a matter for philosophers and theologians, but a recognition of the divine, something outside ourselves and our world that offers each of us meaning, is what gives men and women a chest. It gives us purpose and dreams. It reminds us that we are all equal as human beings. And it teaches us what tyrants and villains fear: that we have no right to oppress each other and must stand against those who would use their power to set us against our fellow man.

Lest one think that every son and daughter of authoritarianism was a mindless drone, I’d like to close with a reminder that young people are sometimes the most courageous of us all. Regular listeners know the story of the White Rose, a student resistance movement in Nazi Germany that flooded mailboxes and street corners with leaflets denouncing Hitler’s regime and the war he had unleashed across Europe. They understood that their efforts were likely doomed to failure and that the Third Reich would perish in fire, but they took a stand and hoped to inspire their countrymen to do likewise. Their desire for a free Germany drove them to risk everything. Their fourth leaflet boldly proclaimed, “We will not be silent,” but silence fell with the guillotine’s blade in 1943. But their bravery reminds us, like the stories shared today about the horrors of youthful zeal and deadly ideas, that we too must not be silent in the face of evil.

“The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal … we do not want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

-Margaret Sanger

I want to start by saying that this episode is NOT about reproductive rights. Today, we will be talking about Margaret Sanger.

Put her name into a search engine and you will be provided with a variety of titles such as “political activist”, “feminist”, “American social reformer”, and “sex educator”. You will be treated to the history of a person who fought hard for women’s reproductive rights. To be clear, all of this is true.

Her time as a nurse exposed her to countless situations where mothers were unable to take care of their children, and as a result, she deduced what she defined as a solution to the issue. This solution, and the motivations behind it, has been discussed, spun, and buried over the last 100 years. To this day, her intentions to eradicate African American populations and those she defined as “weak”, are shrouded in high praise for her contributions. Today, we take a deep dive into the motivations of Margaret Sanger, what – according to history – drove her “solutions”, and why even Planned Parenthood is beginning to disavow her.

One more thing. In the last few episodes, Jon and I have been fairly direct in our opinions regarding the people and events. We will not be doing that with this episode. We will be covering facts. In today’s world, viewpoints are plentiful, and everyone has an opinion. While Jon and I absolutely stand by our summations and views regarding the likes of Vlad the Impaler and Khmer Rouge, we don’t want to make a habit of voicing our viewpoints over the facts we present to you in these episodes. We will save that for the discussion. In presenting the facts to you, we trust you, as always, to come to your own conclusions.

Early Life and Nursing

Margaret Higgins Sanger was born on September 14th, 1879. Her father served in the Civil War and became a stone cutter, while her mother, an Irish immigrant, stayed home to raise the growing family. Margaret was one of the only siblings to receive a higher education. She attended Claverack College and the Hudson River Institute, before working as a nurse practitioner at White Plains Hospital and the Manhattan Eye and Ear Clinic. She first married in 1900, and after a house fire, the couple went to start a new life in New York City, joining various socialist clubs which marked the beginning of her local and national activism.

During her time as a nurse, Sanger worked with numerous immigrant mothers who experienced many childbirths. Most of these women and families were in poverty, and simply could not afford to have more children. As a result, they sought what was defined as “back alley” abortions and other means to end their pregnancy. After witnessing several of these botched attempts and the effects they had on patients, she pushed for change within her workplace to explore birth control or prevention, all of which were ignored. Many historians cite this time as a defining moment in Sanger’s life, with some saying that her drive to promote birth control showed her dislike of abortion. This manifested itself in other ways in her life, such as when she helped deliver her niece, only to see her sister’s drunk husband come home and throw the newborn into a snowbank outside. Sanger recused the infant and secured a safe place for her sister away from the abusive, murderous man.

Her exposure to poverty-stricken families continued, as did her involvement with socialist circles in New York. These two worlds, combined with her growing attraction to Eugenics, sparked an interest and drive toward her cause, which according to some historians, was to empower women to avoid unwanted pregnancies and remove legal barriers to contraception.

Activism

In 1912, Sanger fully devoted herself to this cause. She published articles on the topics of birth control and sex, created a magazine, and distributed pamphlets advocating her views and providing insights on how to avoid pregnancy. These caused her legal issues, as they violated Comstock Laws – which prohibited obscenity – , and she was indicted as a result. Instead of standing trial, she fled to England, where she embraced the neo-Malthusians – a group known for the belief that population growth was exponential, and would eventually destroy the world through famine, poverty, and war. This fell in line with her socialist views, and as some historians have noted, caused a more radical shift in her justification for birth control. She would employ this new philosophy through conferences and other speaking engagements, highlighting the need to control populations, especially certain types.

Her travels to Europe also exposed her to new forms of contraception, which were allowed in many countries. During her time there, she set up relationships with those who could smuggle in said contraceptives through Canada, and upon returning to New York in 1916, she opened a family planning and birth control clinic. Within a few days of opening, she was arrested and sent home with a fine. Once home, she reopened the clinic and was arrested again. This time she – and her sister – were given more severe sentences due to breaking a law that prohibited contraceptives from being handed out. The judge in this case tried to offer an easier sentence if Sanger promised not to commit the crime again. She refused, and a sentence of 30 days in a labor house was issued. Sanger appealed, and as a result, the sentence was overturned. In addition, the appellate court issued the right for doctors to prescribe contraception if needed. This was a major win for the birth control movement and an advancement for Sanger’s cause.

In 1921, she founded the American Birth Control League, which was intended to grow support for birth control in the middle class. Though she eventually split with the organization, she continued to champion its causes. In addition, she traveled throughout the world, understanding how different cultures control populations and working to limit abortions and infanticide through contraception awareness and availability.

Upon returning again to the United States in 1925, she continued speaking and lecturing about birth control to any and all groups, including the Klu Klux Klan. In 1929, she formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control which was intended to overturn laws against contraception. Even with momentum, the committee did not achieve the intended goals. To accelerate progress, Sanger ordered a contraceptive from Canada which on its entry into the United States, was confiscated. This promoted a legal challenge that overturned large portions of the Comstock laws and in 1937, caused the American Medical Association to prescribe contraceptives as a regular medical service.

In 1952, Sanger created the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which she would lead as the first president until the age of 80. She passed away in 1966 at the age of 86, one year after the U.S. Supreme Court decided to legalize birth control in the United States.

Motivations, Eugenics, and Race

On April 17, 2021, Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and chief executive of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America published an op-ed in the New York Times. In it, she wrote,

“Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder’s actions. We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate “product of her time.” Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her beliefs were the norm for people of her class and era, always being sure to name her work alongside that of W.E.B. Dubois and other Black freedom fighters. Reassessing Sanger’s history doesn’t negate her feminist fight, but it does tarnish it. In the name of political expedience, she chose to engage white supremacists to further her cause. In doing that, she devalued and dehumanized people of color. We will no longer make excuses or apologize for Margaret Sanger’s actions.”

While this statement may seem surprising, it shouldn’t be when one looks objectively at Sanger’s stated motivations for birth control. While there is the idea that her drive for birth control started with good intent, many historians believe that her motivations devolved based on a now, debunked scientific theory, called Eugenics. This theory stated that it would be possible to improve the human race by eradicating a portion of it. That portion included the weak, feeble-minded, and certain “undesirable” races that according to eugenics supporters hinder the human race. Starting in the late 1800’s, this monstrous fake theory perpetuated itself among self-proclaimed intellectual circles, political factions, and some governments. Its prevalence in society at the time directly influenced Sanger’s push for birth control as a means of curbing such populations. As one neuroscientist put it,

“Sanger strongly backed the field of eugenics and saw birth control as an innovative and safe way to medically allow for limiting the abilities of certain populations to reproduce. Her eugenic beliefs also found themselves rooted in race, greatly affecting African American populations in America and furthering beliefs that people of color were lesser than, or appropriate for being used as test subjects for medical advancements. Both of these belief systems drove Sanger’s fight for widespread, easy access to birth control in America.”

After her exposure to the neo-Malthusians, Sanger wrote about how the country was suffering greatly due to uncontrolled reproduction, specifically the unstable majority of the “feeble-minded”, people living in city slums, overridden with disease, poverty, and other struggles. In her writings, she associated such feeble-mindedness with high fertility rates, which she defined as a biological menace. In those same writings, she stated that such things were the drivers of her advocation for contraception as a way to protect society from such inferior people reproducing.

In addition, she stated that society was too accepting of personal freedom, saying, “respecting the personal liberty of the individual only in regard to the unrestricted and irresponsible bringing into the world of filth and poverty and overcrowding procession of infants foredoomed to death or heritable disease.” She went on to say, “Birth control… is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science.”

Based on Sanger’s writings and the majority of historical interpretations of them, the African American population was directly in her crosshairs. As one historian noted, “In the book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Harriet Washington describes that while Sanger was a “complex, passionate woman” that shaped American reproductive policy by instigating the fall of the Comstock Laws, pushing the developing of the birth control pill, and founding what we know today as Planned Parenthood, she did so in ways that blatantly harmed the black American population.” In her work, The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger details the account of an African American girl who had sixteen children, and whom Sanger considered feeble-minded. As several historians have noted, race is emphasized in these writings, and as Sanger wrote more and more, she knew that alliances with prominent African American figures and clergy would be required to advance her cause. To accomplish this, she forged friendships with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Adam Glayton Powell Jr., and physicians that, by mere association, negated suspicions of racism and bad intent.

From culling the weak to working to eliminate African American populations, Sanger expressed harmful intent against those that, based on her writings, were not important enough to be born, or live. Historians and even some of her supporters have in recent years, had to acknowledge this fact and now, are finally addressing it and the harmful implications of said intentions being put into action.

Acknowledging Evil

We can have two conversations. The benefits of contraception and reproductive rights while being honest about the person and her stated, evil intent behind both. As said at the beginning of this podcast, our intent here is to show you the facts of history and let you decide on the outcome. What has been communicated to you here today are strictly facts, and in reviewing the facts, we can join the many historians and common humanity when we state that any intention to eradicate human beings is an evil one. Targeting and working to destroy people on the basis of race is extremely evil and must be stopped.

Margaret Sanger’s motivations for birth control may or may not have stemmed from a virtuous beginning. What is clear is that her continued motivation, driven by a desire to curb specific populations from procreating and shaping humanity into an image that she deemed acceptable, was evil, and because of that, and that alone, she is included here in this season.

When we look to history, we have to be serious about it, acknowledging the good and the bad. We cannot subjectively look at what we see, take the facts we want, and dismiss the rest. Doing so puts us at risk of using history to support opinion, rather than learning history to inform or change an opinion. In reviewing the life of Margret Sanger, we acknowledge the evil behind her intent, while continuing the conversations about reproductive rights, and being honest about the intended outcomes.

“We must be like the ox, and have no thought except for the Party. And have no love, but for the Angkar. People starve, but we must not grow food. We must honor the comrade children whose minds are not corrupted by the past.”

- Dith Pran, The Killing Fields, 1984 -

“I was fifteen years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power in April 1975. I can still remember how overwhelmed with joy I was that the war had finally ended. It did not matter who won. I and many Cambodians wanted peace at any price. The civil war had tired us out, and we could not make much sense out of killing our own brothers and sisters for a cause that was not ours. We were ready to support our new government to rebuild our country. We wanted to bring back that slow-paced, simple life we grew up with and loved dearly. At the time we didn't realize how high the price was that we had to pay for the Khmer Rouge's peace.

“The Khmer Rouge were very clever and brutal. Their tactics were effective because most of us refused to believe their malicious intentions. Their goal was to liberate us. They risked their own lives and gave up their families for ‘justice’ and ‘equality.’

“Even after our warmest welcome, the first word from the Khmer Rouge was a lie wrapped around a deep anger and hatred of the kind of society they felt Cambodia was becoming. They told us that Americans were going to bomb the cities. They forced millions of residents of Phnom Penh and other cities out of their homes. They separated us from our friends and neighbors to keep us off balance, to prevent us from forming any alliance to stand up and win back our rights. They ripped off our homes and our possessions. They did this intentionally, without mercy.

“They were willing to pay any cost, any lost lives for their mission. Innocent children, old women, and sick patients from hospital beds were included. Along the way, many innocent Cambodians were dying of starvation, disease, loss of loved ones, confusion, and execution.

“We were seduced into returning to our hometowns in the villages so they could reveal our true identities. Then the genocide began. First, it was the men.

“They took my father. They told my family that my father needed to be reeducated. Brainwashed. But my father's fate is unknown to this day. We can only imagine what happened to him. This is true for almost all Cambodian widows and orphans. We live in fear of finding out what atrocities were committed against our fathers, husbands, and brothers. What could they have done that deserved a tortured death?

“Later the Khmer Rouge killed the wives and children of the executed men in order to avoid revenge. They encouraged children to find fault with their own parents and spy on them. They openly showed their intention to destroy the family structure that once held love, faith, comfort, happiness, and companionship. They took young children from their homes to live in a commune so that they could indoctrinate them.

“Parents lost their children. Families were separated. We were not allowed to cry or show any grief when they took away our loved ones. A man would be killed if he lost an ox he was assigned to tend. A woman would be killed if she was too tired to work. Human life wasn't even worth a bullet. They clubbed the back of our necks and pushed us down to smother us and let us die in a deep hole with hundreds of other bodies.

“They told us we were void. We were less than a grain of rice in a large pile. The Khmer Rouge said that the Communist revolution could be successful with only two people. Our lives had no significance to their great Communist nation, and they told us, ‘To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.’”

Teeda Butt Mam’s story of the devastation she witnessed is only one of hundreds of thousands that came out of Cambodia’s brief experiment with communist rule during the 1970s. The Khmer Rouge, the popular name for the Communist Party of Kampuchea, ranks highly among history’s most brutal regimes. Its leader, an ignorant peasant named Pol Pot, murdered nearly a quarter of his country’s population in less than three years in an effort to remake Cambodian society in the image of his god, Karl Marx. The Khmer Rouge’s tactics mirrored those of other collectivist parties during the Cold War like the Soviet Union, and especially Communist China, in which at least fifty million innocent men, women, and children were starved or butchered in Mao Zedong’s horrific Cultural Revolution and “Great Leap Forward.” Cambodia still bears the scars of Pol Pot’s horrors, as do those who survived it.

A Utopian Vision

Cambodia had been a prosperous independent state for over a thousand years when the French colonized it during the 1860s. After its brief rule by Japan, the country received its independence eight years after the Second World War as France withdrew from Southeast Asia. Its leader, Norodom Sihanouk, aligned Cambodia with the United States in the Cold War as communism took root in neighboring Vietnam, but the Cambodian people languished under his neglectful rule. China and the Soviet Union took advantage of this situation by supporting the Khmer Rouge, a communist insurgency led by Pol Pot, and Sihanouk was deposed in 1970 at the start of a civil war. The Khmer Rouge won the war five years later thanks to massive public support and assistance from the communist great powers, and Pol Pot then began to bring his collectivist utopian vision into reality.

The Khmer Rouge was dominated by agrarian socialists, and government policies in the capital, Phnom Penh, ordered Cambodians to leave the cities and return to the land. Those who refused were forced from their homes and sent to work on collective farms, where bureaucrats imposed ridiculously high production quotas and either beat or murdered the poor souls who could not meet them. Labor camps sprang up across the country as well, and the Khmer Rouge separated families by sending men to these camps and women and children to the fields. Conditions in both were abhorrent, with limited shelters and no medical care; as a result, disease and death from exposure became commonplace. Communist officials gleefully ordered workers to eat the remains of their fellows who had perished, claiming that no resource should go to waste. Teeda Butt Mam recounted seeing a bureaucrat force a woman to cook her dead husband’s liver and eat it while he watched.

The dwindling food supply created by collective farming led to harsh rationing orders by Pol Pot’s administration. Cambodians who foraged for food in the wilderness were sent to interrogation centers for “reeducation” or simply murdered where they were found. By 1978, farm workers were receiving only a few ounces of rice each day to feed their entire families—there were even accounts of people getting only a single grain. All the while, Khmer Rouge officials lived in luxury and sometimes discarded half-eaten meals in the mud and filth where their subjects worked, laughing as starving men and women fought over the scraps to fill their distended bellies.

“Cogs in a Wheel”

In a previous episode on this podcast, I described how totalitarians view individuals as “cogs in a wheel” who are only useful if they conformed to edicts from those in power. If they do not, they are simply removed. Concentration camps, gulags, and the “killing fields” of Cambodia are among many tragic examples of this brutal practice. Under Pol Pot, the government viewed Cambodian intellectuals as “useless eaters” and targeted them for forced deportation or execution. University professors were sent to re-education camps, where they read Marx and Mao, learned to become useful to the new agrarian utopia as farm laborers, and were tortured in methods best left to reviews of the Saw movies. Pol Pot, whose education ended in what today we would call middle school, was so vindictive toward teachers of the young that he even looked on those who wore eyeglasses as enemies of the state. An account survived the Khmer regime of him watching as a young professor’s family was taken to a field outside Phnom Penh by Cambodian soldiers. They took off his spectacles, grabbed his infant son by the leg, and bashed the innocent baby’s head against a tree until he died. Then the soldiers shot both the sobbing professor and his wife.

Other “cogs” in Cambodian society that needed reshaping or removing were ethnic and religious minorities. Pol Pot hated the Vietnamese and believed they were foreign invaders, and he relocated the entire population inside Cambodia to prisons on the border. Those who confessed to being agents of the Vietnamese government were hanged on trees outside the camps, while anyone who insisted they were loyal Cambodian comrades were beaten mercilessly and had their throats slit. A small Muslim community call the Cham had lived in Cambodia for centuries, and they too felt the Khmer Rouge’s wrath. They were sent to prisons, where soldiers smeared the blood of pigs on their bodies before murdering them with bamboo spears and farm implements. The larger Christian and Buddhist populations were more fortunate; their churches and shrines were desecrated and closed, and many were waterboarded or branded with hot irons. But only a relatively few number perished at Pol Pot’s hands.

In 1976, the Khmer Rouge decided it needed a new facility in Phnom Penh to purge dissidents in a more effective manner. It took over a former high school and re-purposed it into Tuol Sleng, the “Hill of Poisonous Trees.” Over the next three years, more than twenty thousand Cambodians were imprisoned, tormented, and murdered in classrooms-turned-torture chambers. Of the total inmate population, there are only twelve documented survivors—seven adults and five children. Today, Tuol Sleng is a museum and memorial to the victims, and visitors are horrified to see crude water boards, bamboo stakes, and beds made of razor wire sitting alongside glass cabinets filled with over a thousand human skulls. Outside Phnom Penh is a sister facility called Choeung Ek, today the most famous of Cambodia’s many “killing fields.” Like Tuol Sleng, it is now a memorial, and it once held excess prisoners from the former school. Here, visitors can still see workers sifting through the dirt to find human remains nearly fifty years after the Khmer Rouge’s fall. Inside the main facility are more glass cabinets with more than five thousand skulls, many of which are small and broken as though they were crushed by the butt of a rifle or slammed against a tree.

Communist Against Communist

In December 1978, a simmering border dispute erupted into open war when Pol Pot’s army invaded the neighboring communist country of Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge hoped to seize control of three Vietnamese provinces with majority-Cambodian populations. The attack faltered after only two days, thanks largely to a recent purge of government and military officials by the Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia on Christmas Day. By mid-January, nearly half of Cambodia’s army had been destroyed, and Vietnam controlled a majority of the country. Pol Pot departed Phnom Penh before its fall to the invaders and established a military headquarters in western Cambodia. His government was gone, but the Khmer Rouge continued to fight for another two years. Eventually, though, the Vietnamese completed their conquest and set up a puppet regime in Phnom Penh. Pol Pot resigned his leadership of the Khmer Rouge, which entered into a coalition with other communist groups to rule the country. His influence soon dwindled along with his health, but the people of Cambodia remembered his brutal rule of their country.

The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to a rapprochement between the United States and Vietnam, and America ended its protests against the Vietnamese domination of Cambodia. A new government soon came to power in moderately-democratic elections, and the Khmer Rouge was thrown out. Pol Pot, now paralyzed by a stroke and dependent on oxygen, continued to press for resistance to the new democracy and a return to Cambodia’s agrarian roots, but his own party turned against him. In July 1997, he and three other Khmer Rouge generals were seized and placed under house arrest. He gave a final interview to an American journalist, in which he defended his crimes against humanity as an effort to restore Cambodian society to its pre-colonial greatness. Pol Pot died on April 15, 1998, possibly after ingesting a lethal dose of drugs. The former dictator’s guards burned his body on a pile of garbage and rubber tires. The Khmer Rouge soon followed its leader into history as the Cambodian army moved into its territory, with its last guerrilla commander being captured in March 1999.

The “Mirror” of Evil

In last week’s discussion on Vlad the Impaler, Joe and I discussed how evil can be a mirror that we hold up to our own faces. Evil is a choice. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge soldiers did not have to starve innocent farmers in the killing fields. They did not have to butcher dissidents or murder babies as their parents watched. They chose to do it. Their vision of a communist utopia demanded that they do it. With every step into the darkness, they moved closer and closer to the collectivist hell that Cambodia became.

After the Second World War, an American psychologist named Gustave Gilbert interviewed many surviving Nazi leaders during their trials in Nuremberg. He later wrote of that experience, “In my work with the defendants, I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” This was certainly true of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. There is no surviving account of them pausing, even for a moment, to think about their victims in the killing fields or at Tuol Sleng or Cheoung Ek. Their rabid pursuit of a socialist utopia driven by a fanatical devotion to the writings of the unemployed dilettante Karl Marx led them to become stains on the blood-soaked pages of communism’s history. Their end was appropriate, either killed in battle or their bodies burned on a heap of trash. But, honestly, I wonder if they even thought about how history would remember them. Their blindness to humanity seems to place that in doubt; for the brutal Khmer Rouge, all that mattered was an idea—“from each according to his ability, and to each according to his need.”

“Despair has its own calms.”

- Bram Stoker, Dracula

Hey folks, before we start this week’s episode I want to issue a warning. Your discretion is advised. This episode is graphic. And you have my word that I did not make it so. Jon and I teach and discuss history as it is, not as we would like it to be. That means we must be honest. That is our responsibility to you. As a result, please do not listen to this around children or if you are squeamish.

I have done my best to mitigate details with certain references, but again, our role here is to present the history to you, and sometimes that leads us down dark paths. The benefit for all of us is that we can do it together, and in doing so, emerge intact on the other side. One last thing, I end this podcast a little differently. I invite you, as always, to push back. Let me know your thoughts so we can discuss them next week.

Anyway, enough preamble. Darkness is ahead. Let’s face it together.

Vlad Dracula was born in Transylvania in 1431. Before he was born, his unstable country had been besieged from all sides for many years. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had been making incursions into southeastern Europe for over a century. These incursions signified an attempt at ongoing expansion for the purposes of influence and power. Wallachia, modern-day Romania, was situated between the Ottomans and the Hungarian Kingdom, making it a strategic stronghold for both groups and a battleground for the ongoing conflict. In addition, internal politics within Wallachia were volatile. This, combined with ongoing conflicts with Poland and Hungary, significantly weakened Wallachia’s chance to defend itself against the ongoing Ottoman invasion.

Vlad’s father, Vlad II Dracul and King of Wallachia had fought against the Ottomans but eventually accepted their terms for suzerainty, which required him to pay an annual tribute but gave Wallachia a certain amount of anatomy while protecting it from the surrounding countries of Hungry and Poland. Vlad’s lineage gave him direct access to the throne, while his family’s rivals (sometimes allied with surrounding countries) threatened his potential to rule in addition to his life.

When he was eleven years old, his father took him and his brother Radu on a diplomatic mission to the Ottomans to secure the suzerainty. After arriving, the Ottomans took Vlad and his brother and held them as collateral for the next five years. This kept them as a bargaining chip against their father, guaranteed loyalty to do the threat of harm, and provided the Ottomans time to indoctrinate the two young men with Turkish customs and rule. Vlad and Radu were not happy about being abandoned by their father and held captive by the Ottomans. Though some historians have stated that they were treated well, educated, and brought up in Turkish traditions of strategy and nobility, others have outlined the probable sexual abuse by leadership and Imams that took place in addition to gradual mistreatment within the Ottoman court. These experiences fueled Vlad’s growing hatred of their captors and compounded his desire to push against them when given the chance. His experiences were in direct contrast to his brother’s, who found favor in the Ottoman court and became fiercely loyal to their cause, both in faith and Turkish expansion.

The brothers were released by the Ottoman court in 1448. Vlad left and Radu stayed. Upon his return to Wallachia, Vlad immediately claimed the throne. His initial rule was short-lived, around two months, due to his internal conflicts with another group, the Boyars, a powerful land-owning nobility. Coming back to Wallachia, Vlad had limited resources and influence. He was opposed by Hungary who had put their backing behind another ruler in order to secure the region away from the Ottomans. As a result, Vlad led a small force against the Hungarian-backed ruler and was defeated, forcing him to once again leave Wallachia. Upon his exile, Vlad immediately began to seek out allies and resources in order to reestablish himself as ruler. His exile took him immediately to Moldavia to stay with his uncle, who was assassinated shortly thereafter. Vlad fled again, traveling over the next several years across the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, and other areas working to secure as many allies as possible in order to retake the Wallachian throne. Though initially opposed in Hungary, Vlad eventually gained support, and launched a campaign against his opponent in his home country, taking the throne and finally securing his father’s seat.

Second Rule and Cruelty

Upon retaking the throne in 1456, Vlad immediately began enacting harsh policies to consolidate power. He started this process by publicly torturing and murdering the Boyars who had opposed him in a public show of power. One specific, and preferred way he murdered his enemies was through a process called impalement, where a rounded wooded log was pushed through the anus or vagin* into the body until it came out of the mouth of the victim. Sometimes Vlad would do this while the people were still alive and was said to even relish watching them slowly die. This was something he perfected and employed throughout his life, starting with the Boyers.

As he fought against his rivals, property was seized and redistributed to allies or kept for himself. In addition, some of his public policies severely weakened the influence of the nobility and consolidated the power of the crown under his rule. His drive to centralize authority ensured that the resources of his country were directed to him, and his cruelty with his opponents put an innate fear into any who considered fighting against him. In addition to consolidating power, some historians have shown that Vlad attempted to rid the Wallachia political system of corruption, while others have stipulated that said attempts were made as part of his power consolidation and to provide him more opportunities to torture and inflict pain. Other reforms were specific to infrastructure and law, with the repair and building of roads and bridges and the installation of harsh, public punishments for adultery theft and ironically, murder.

One of his many targets during this time was the Saxons who populated neighboring Transylvania. At the time, they experienced certain protections from the Hungarian King and historically had pushed back against Vlad’s early attempts at rule and consolidation of power. Once power had been consolidated, Vlad retaliated by impaling hundreds of Saxons both in his country and in Transylvania. Many of these people he publicly, brutally murdered had nothing to do with the conflict. Vlad did not care but instead wanted to demonstrate brutality to force obedience. After this incursion, plundering, and the horrific murder of thousands, a peace deal was reached in 1460 and the terror ended, but not without leaving the countryside with the rotting, impaled victims he deemed expendable.

Defying the Ottomans and the Impalement Forest

By this time, Vlad was developing a reputation, and this may have contributed to both Poland and Hungary deciding against direct assaults on Wallachia. Believing his power to be centralized and established, Vlad launched his campaign against the Ottomans by first refusing to pay the tribute for three consecutive years. An envoy was sent by the Sultan who demanded that Vlad come to Constantinople to answer for his crimes. After his refusal, Vlad launched raids into Ottoman territory, taking fortresses and capturing thousands of prisoners. These attacks continued until the Sultan landed a force of 150,000 Turks into Wallachia to defeat Vlad and install his brother, Radu upon the throne. The sheer size of this force made for easy victories across the country, with the Ottomans taking the capital within a few weeks. Experienced in war, the Turks were used to setting up comprehensive supply lines and communications, which accelerated the march.

In response to the Ottoman landing and victories, Vlad pulled back from Ottoman lands and marched instead against the enemy on his native soil. Knowing that he was vastly outnumbered, and having limited supplies, arms, and methods by which to retreat, Vlad instead resorted to guerilla tactics, conducting skirmishes, night raids, and a full disruption of Ottoman supply lines. This approach is considered a desperate attempt to not only push the forces back but to make the occupation of Wallachia as costly in both men and arms as possible. Vlad knew he could not defeat the Ottomans in open combat, so he sought to demoralize them through raids, resource disruption, and terror so that they would leave and never come back. Historians have also speculated that these tactics were acts of sheer desperation – or insanity – due to the fact that at if and when the Ottomans did leave, they could at any time send another force at a later date to retake the country. Whatever the reason, Vlads attacks on occupying Ottoman forces continued.

One of the most infamous attacks occurred as a night raid in June 1462. Vlad and his forces raided the Sultan’s camp in an attempt to assassinate him, kill as many soldiers as possible, and burn supplies. This raid was not a success, as Vlad got lost in the massive camp and attacked the wrong tents. In addition, Turkish forces were able to regroup quickly and push Vlad and his army back into a full retreat. The attack and subsequent failure of the raid was not what made it notable history. What makes it stand out, is what happened after.

The Sultan and his forces raised the camp and prepared to the pursue Vlad, which took several hours. Once on the move, they encountered burned villages, farmland, and fields that had been set ablaze, and emptied. Smoke filled the forests to the point that the army could only see a few steps ahead of them. Orders and commands would come through the ranks to compensate for the lack of visibility, keeping the troops in line as they marched forward. Throughout that day, it is reported by a Greek historian who traveled with the Turks that “no green remained”. Everything had been destroyed. When investigating homes and other buildings, no people were found. It was as if the entire world had emptied and set on fire.

Then, late in the day, the front columns of the army came to a halt. It is said that commanders began to ride back and forth at full speeds, almost in a panic. The Greek historian, Laonikos, was asked to come to the head of the columns and survey what had stopped the army in its tracks. When he got to the front, the Sultan was sitting on his horse, staring at the landscape in front of them. It is said that Laonikos looked and put his hand over his mouth.

Thousands upon thousands of long poles had been embedded in the earth. A person was impaled on each one. Laonikos describes what he saw:

The sultan's army entered into the area of the impalements, which was seventeen stades long and seven stades wide. There were large stakes there on which, as it was said, about twenty thousand men, women, and children had been spitted, quite a sight for the Turks and the sultan himself. The Turks were dumbfounded when they saw the multitude of men on the stakes. There were infants too affixed to their mothers on the stakes, and birds had made their nests in their entrails.

This spectacle, called the impaled forest due to the sheer magnitude of the number of victims, caused the Ottoman army to pause. Turkish soldiers, and native Wallachian men, women, and children had all been subjected to the same horrific death. The villages that the army had passed through had been emptied for this purpose, and the scorched earth tactic used by Vlad was only a foreshadowing of what he was doing. Estimates of the number of victims impaled range from 20-30,000, with some historians arguing that it was a much smaller number. Though there is a debate on the total amount of people found in this forest, there is no contesting the display of absolute evil shown in this act. In addition to what was found on the scene, other writings from those who served Vlad say that once the thousands of bodies had been put on display, Vlad had a table made for himself in the middle of the field. There, he ate his dinner among the twitching corpses, sometimes even dipping his bread in the blood that fell onto his table.

Besides the sheer enjoyment of the massacre, one of Vlad’s intentions was to dissuade the Ottomans from their pursuit, which he did, but only for a short while. The cost of the invasion, plus the heat and ongoing need to keep his men fed and watered, was the real cause for a partial retreat. Shortly after this event, the Sultan left a large portion of his army in the command of Vlad’s brother, Radu. The Sultan now gone, Radu pursued his brother until Vlad fled to the Carpathian Mountains.

For the next several years, Vlad would once again seek to build up alliances with surrounding countries and areas in order to reclaim his throne from Radu. He would find some success in these efforts, and would once again wage war against the Turks until he was able to reclaim his throne in 1476. A few weeks later, he was killed in battle.

The Psychology of a Monster

In this podcast, we regularly warn you against looking through the modern lens when studying history. Hindsight always makes it easy to suggest what should have happened, what someone should have done, or if they had just done A, then they would have achieved B. There are exceptions to this warning. Sometimes, in our journey through history, we encounter something or someone so vile, that the first reaction is the correct one. We have talked about a few of those people in this podcast and will continue to do so. This is one of those encounters.

When looking at history, we can objectively conclude that Vlad was a monster. Full stop. The tactics he employed, both on and off the battlefield, appear – quite clearly – to be the result of his love for brutality, torture, and blood. Some modern psychologists have tried to understand what kind of man would do such things, and have concluded that, “Vlad may have possessed both psychopathic personality disorder and paranoid personality disorder. people with paranoid personality disorder suffer from a pattern of behaviors derived from a persistent mistrust of others and a belief that others are out to get them. They are vengeful, jealous, hold grudges, are prone to sometimes violent retaliation, and will manipulate social cues to justify their bias.”

In addition to being a psychopath, Vlad also probably had a certain level of OCD. This manifested itself as his desire that the poles on which he had his victims impaled all be a specific size, or change in length depending on rank or status. Through the consistent application of psychotic behavior, he probably experienced a phenomenon called psychic numbing, which kept him from feeling empathy or any emotions for those around him. This manifested in his hobby of skinning animals alive and then setting them free, watching as they died in agony and shock. Other instances of this was his impaling of animals, something he saw as practice for when he would do it to human beings. Additional examples include his torturing and murdering of wives who did not – in his eyes – take care of their husbands, the gutting of a woman to prove she was not carrying his child, the burning of a barn full of beggars after he had invited them in for a free feast, and having the turbans of Turkish soldiers nailed to their heads when they would not remove them in his presence.

Some have made arguments that such behavior is the product of the time and the life that Vlad had lived. While these factors certainly had an impact, they do not explain or excuse the actions that Vlad took to secure power. As one psychologist put it, “Some attribute this to long and relentless revenge against those who had caused him to suffer so much pain and humiliation during his time as an Ottoman hostage, driven by an affectionless childhood where he was bred to feel entitled and superior. However, much of Vlad’s threats to violence were either indiscriminate or directed against his own people; suggesting a more habitual, compulsive violence ingrained deeply within him.”

Stopping Evil

Generally, in our podcasts, we try not to make conclusions, as we feel it may subvert your own deliberations regarding the event or person. In this case, I’m making an exception. I, obviously, still want you to come to your own conclusions and invite you to share them with us. I hope that you all will write and argue with me about my summations, and I look forward to your questions regarding this person and his vile history. That said, there are certain people in history who are, without argument, evil, and as a result, our conclusion regarding them and their actions can shape our response when we encounter similar evil in the world today. So, with that in mind, here we go.

Vlad was more akin to a rabid dog than he was to a human. Many historians agree. His actions and desire to inflict harm was only outweighed by his selfish desire for the throne that he, due to his many bad choices, put in jeopardy. His utter hatred for the Ottomans became an excuse for him to conduct as many atrocities as possible as if to punish the world for what he had endured. Vlad’s brutal actions were NOT the result of brilliant tactics employed to subvert foreign invaders or rebelling peoples. He could have utilized said tactics without the brutality that he so enjoyed. The more opportunities he had to be brutal, the more he embraced it and as a result, the more brutal he became. Even in times of peace, he looked for reasons to kill, maim, and destroy. There was but one solution when dealing with such a monster, and thankfully, this solution was enacted on a battlefield within sight of the castle that he fought to gain his entire life.

Sometimes when we look at history, we see the darkest, most vile extremes of humanity. In this season, we will encounter many more. When we see them, we do not learn from them, but from those who survived. We learn from the circ*mstances that fostered and encouraged those who seek to do evil. We understand the course of actions that some took to end the reigns of terror, and we decide the measures that we will take to step in and be the barrier between the innocent, and the oncoming brutality. When we study the life of Vlad the Impaler, we see utter darkness, and as students of history, we have the context that gives us the ability and choice to be the light.

"Ivan the Terrible would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God got his way in this matter. He ought to have been still more deci-sive!"

- Joseph Stalin -

Two men stood in a large room shouting at one another, raging over family and war or accusing each other of incompetence and cowardice. A third man stood nearby, servant of one and friend to both. In a corner, a young woman cowered with her face bruised and her body shaking. Anger swirled around the pair as words grew ever more harsh. And then, the older man swung his scepter, the symbol of God's might wielded through him on earth, and it crashed into the temple of the younger man. Blood poured from the wound as the youth crumpled to the ground. And then, as if a veil had been lifted from his eyes, the Tsar of all Russia's knees gave out. He cradled his victim in his arms and howled to the heavens, "May I be damned! I've killed my son!"

Ivan IV’s long reign was among the most consequential for the Russian empire. His early reforms seemed to indicate that Russia was on the brink of a new age, only for it to fall into darkness as the tsar descended into paranoia and madness. The world soon gave him a new name as war and repression became ways of life under the man history knows as Ivan the Terrible.

A Promise of Hope

The lands of far-eastern Europe were wild and unknown to most in the West during the late Middle Ages. The people lived in small city-states whose authority spread slowly across hundreds of miles of empty space. By the 13th century, the Novgorod Republic had become the most powerful state in the endless tracts of "Rus-land," but a small city called Moscow was rising to challenge it. Prince Ivan III, who reigned from 1462 to 1505, expanded his lands to the north and east, and his courtiers established legal and civil codes that made Moscow a center of power and progress in the region. His son, Vasili III, conquered small neighboring cities, which set the stage for more conflict in the future. The Rus collectively faced threats in the south, particularly from the Mongol successor-states in Crimea and along the Volga River, as well as more distant rivals like the Ottoman Turks, the Swedes, and rising powers in Eastern Europe.

Ivan Vasilyevich was born to Prince Vasili and his second wife Elena Glinskaya in Moscow in August 1530. As the eldest son, he was born to rule, but his father's early death in 1537 placed his future in jeopardy. The Glinskaya family was a powerful force in the Muscovite court with many ruthless rivals. Princess Elena served as head of a regency court for her seven-year-old son, and her popularity with the people of Moscow led other families in the city to consider replacing her and Ivan with someone from their ranks. Elena died only a year later, probably poisoned by the Shuisky family since they took control of the council for the next nine years. The loss of his parents at such a young age certainly impacted the young prince.

The coronation ceremony for Ivan IV in January 1547 was a majestic display of Church and state power. Moscow had become the center of the Orthodox Church since the fall of Constantinople a century earlier, and the Church's authority was total in much of Rus-land. Now sixteen years old, the young ruler moved quickly to cement his power over Moscow and its lands. He removed the Shuiskys from power, declared publicly that he would rule in his own right and not be manipulated by couriers or churchmen, and formally assumed a title his grandfather had used only in private correspondence: Tsar of all Russia. The court in Moscow adopted imperial customs and traditions, with visitors seeing the tsar on a carven ivory throne wearing the Kazan Crown, taken in battle when Moscow conquered that city in 1552. It was clear to all who met Ivan IV that he was a new sort of Russian ruler.

As Prince of Moscow, Ivan's first responsibility was to protect the city and its people from danger. He left most of this task to his courtiers but did take direct responsibility on two occasions, both involving fire. Shortly after his coronation, a fire broke out in the center of Moscow and spread quickly to the Kremlin armories, which were destroyed in a massive explosion. Over two thousand people died in the inferno. The devastation set off a brief rebellion against the tsar, who blamed it on his mother's family, the Glenskayas, rather than the ruling Shuiskys. Swift measures quelled the uprising, and Ivan spent the next two years rebuilding the city. This work included the construction of St. Basil's Cathedral, the iconic church in the center of Red Square that still frames the Moscow skyline today. A quarter-century later, in 1571, a Tartar-Turkish army marched on Moscow and deliberately set fire to its suburbs, and again the city burned. Much had changed in the tsar's life and attitude toward others, however, and reconstruction efforts stalled for decades.

Probably the defining moment in Ivan IV's life was his marriage to Anastasia Romanovna. The pair grew incredibly close and loved each other deeply despite the political nature of their union. Anastasia bore the tsar six children, but only two survived into adulthood, his sons Ivan and Feodor. The tsaritsa also encouraged her husband to implement reforms to better the lives of everyday Muscovites. Ivan altered the city's legal code in 1550 to establish independent judicial courts and ruling councils in local government; both of these were centuries earlier than similar re-forms in more progressive Western European states. He also expanded Moscow after the first fire and built new houses for peasants and granaries to store food. Most importantly, he convened the Council of the Hundred Chapters, which worked to streamline the teachings of the Orthodox Church. Ivan and the Moscow patriarch both feared a schism like the Protestant Reformation, which was already tearing Europe apart in a religious war, and the synod's reforms codified doctrinal changes that immunized the Orthodox Church from similar violent splits. Tragically, Ivan's re-forming spirit perished with Anastasia in 1560. She may have been poisoned, and the tsar sank into a deep depression. He became more tyrannical in his rule after his wife’s death, which had disastrous consequences for his people and his family.

A New Power Rises

Few rulers in the capitals of Europe showed much interest in Russia during the 16th century, and there was almost no cultural contact or trade with far-off Moscow. The Rus had no ice-free ports on the Baltic Sea at a time when ocean vessels carried most commercial goods, and the sheer distance between the Russian economic centers and the rest of Europe made overland trade impossible. But this began to change slowly thanks to two developments in European history: the discovery of the New World and the outbreak of Catholic-Protestant warfare. England, another distant minor power in the minds of most Europeans, began to search for passages through the New World to China, and it also sent ships north of Scandinavia looking for a "Northeast Passage" to reach the Far East. English ships thus made contact with the Muscovites in the tiny village of Archangel on Russia's northern coast in the 1550s. Moscow soon sent furs to London, while the English brought Western goods and knowledge to Ivan's city. Contact with the outside world accelerated the Rus' development as a modern society.

But trade was a minor part of Ivan's foreign policy; he wanted to expand Moscow's control of all Russian lands west of the Ural Mountains. To that end, he forged a lasting and historic alliance with the Cossack horse-lords of the Caspian Sea basin, and these warriors became the backbone of the imperial army. He then waged war against the Tartar khanates in Kazan and Astrakhan and expanded his rule south toward the Caucuses Mountains. The conquest of Astrakhan at the northern edge of the Caspian Sea brought him into conflict with the Ottoman Turks, and the first Rus-so-Turkish War of 1568-70 led to three centuries of sporadic warfare between those two empires. Ivan's troops swept across the flat plains northeast of the Black Sea and drove the Ottomans back with stunning success—some of the only Christian victories over the mighty Turkish empire in those days. By the close of his third decade on the throne, the tsar controlled the largest contiguous realm in Europe. But he wanted more.

Russia's drive west toward the European heartlands began when Ivan declared war on the Crimean Khanate shortly after his victory over the Turks. This last bastion of Tartar strength held firm thanks to its excellent defensive geography, and its armies were responsible for the burning of Moscow a year into the war. Ivan realized he could not capture the Crimean Peninsula and sued for peace, but his efforts brought the Russians into what is now Ukraine for the first time and set a long (and continuing) precedent of conflict in that part of the world.

As Ivan's reign drew to its close, his armies marched toward the Baltic Sea to capture warm-water ports for more trade with the West. Livonia, modern-day Latvia, beckoned as a new jewel for the Russian crown since several northern European countries had been fighting each other for control of the region. In 1562, Russia invaded Livonia, then under Lithuanian control, and crushed the garrisons defending it. Its armies then fought off small expeditions from Sweden and Denmark-Norway, and victory seemed to be at hand. But the stubborn Lithuanians refused to concede; their leaders were at work forging an alliance with the powerful Kingdom of Poland, which culminated in the 1569 Treaty of Lublin and creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This military superpower marched on Livonia and drove Ivan's forces back, then continued into the Russian motherland. The war soon devolved into a stalemate, but Moscow could not negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Poles and Lithuanians. The crown's ministers had no direction from the throne, whose occupant was now interested only in himself.

Hope Becomes Terror

Ivan married his second wife, Maria Temryukovna, in 1561, and the new tsaritsa was partly responsible for Ivan's descent into evil. As a power behind the throne, Maria convinced her husband that enemies were inside his court, which fed his own paranoia and recalled the losses of his past. Maria then urged Ivan to establish a secret police organization answerable only to the tsar, the oprichnina. The first of many clandestine services to threaten Russians' lives, the oprichnina sought out opponents of the tsar's rule and inspired terror across the country. Their first target was the boyars, minor Russian noblemen who owned land and serfs around Moscow, and many were imprisoned and murdered or sent across the Urals into Siberia with only the clothes on their backs. Those who survived were subject to mass resettlement in lands far from the capital where they could not threaten the tsar, and Ivan redistributed their property to loyal nobles or even the peasants who had sat in juries and convicted their former masters.

In 1570, the oprichnina arrived in the city of Novgorod, the historic center of Russian culture, after reports reached Moscow that its boyars were conspiring with churchmen to break away from Orthodox control. There were also rumors that Nov-gorod might defect to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was now besieging the nearby city of Pskov. Ivan's oprichniki agents entered the city in force days before Ivan arrived with an army and began taking names of accused traitors. The city's leaders met their tsar with a declaration of friendship, which Ivan rejected; he then ordered his soldiers to attack. The people were unprotected, and both soldiers and oprichniki alike swarmed through the streets and looted or burned entire city blocks. Not even the churches were spared—priests and monks were dragged down the stairs and beaten or flayed alive as their parishioners watched. The oprichnina then set up courts to try the accused boyars, who were always declared guilty after horrific tortures. The condemned and their families, down to newborn infants, were then thrown into the Volkhov River as soldiers watched and laughed while spearing anyone who emerged from the water with lances and boat hooks. The middle-class townsfolk and peasants from outside the walls then faced Ivan's wrath. They were usually locked in their homes and burned alive or exiled to Siberia to face starvation and slow, icy death. Historians debate the number of lives lost to Ivan's wrath at Novgorod, but estimates range between three- and twelve thousand—many of whom were innocent of all charges.

The ongoing war with Poland-Lithuania gnawed at the tsar daily, as did any criticism of his leadership of the empire. His right-hand man in his final years was Boris Gudonov, who rose through the ranks to serve as chief minister and de facto head of the army. Another source of frustration was the tsar's son, Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich. The heir had married a woman his father deemed unsuitable, and the tsar sent her to a convent a year later because she could not give him a grandson. Her husband was outraged at Ivan's treatment of his beloved, and he married a second time—only to have the tsar send her away after five years with no grandson. Now a grown man with his own views on how Russia ought to be governed, Ivan Ivanovich began to consult with Gudonov and the military leaders about how to win the war, which his paranoiac father believed was tantamount to betrayal and treason. Rurik family tension reached its peak in 1581 when Ivan Ivanovich demanded that his father give him command of the troops trying to retake Pskov from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In November 1581, the 27-year-old Ivan Ivanovich confronted his father in Moscow in person. The tsar had shouted horrific abuse at Ivan's third wife, Yelena, who was pregnant and wearing light clothing that, though comfortable, was too revealing. Historians debate what happened next, as the two surviving eyewitnesses gave contradictory accounts. As the tale goes, Ivan IV was so enraged at his daugh-ter-in-law's immodesty that he struck her repeatedly, leading Ivan Ivanovich to intervene and screaming that his father had already sent two of his wives into exile and now threatened the life of his third and their unborn child. The argument then turned to politics and war, with Ivan denouncing his son as a traitor for conspiring against him and Ivan Ivanovich mocking his father's failure to relieve Pskov. Ivan then raised his scepter and struck his son, as well as Boris Gudonov when he tried to stop the attack. Ivan Ivanovich fell bleeding from a wound to his temple, the victim of all the rage and paranoia his father had built up for decades. Ivan then fell to his knees weeping that he had killed his son, a scene captured in a haunting painting by Ilya Repin centuries later that recalls Mary cradling Jesus in the Pieta statue. Ivan Ivanovich briefly regained consciousness and apologized to his father before slipping into a coma; he died four days later. Heartbreakingly, Princess Yelena suffered a miscarriage around the same time.

The last three years of Ivan IV's life were dominated by the end of the Livonian War. Russia could not retake its former conquests, but it did relieve Pskov and drive the Polish-Lithuanian armies from its lands. The treaty that ended the war in 1583 divided Livonia among the combatants with Sweden getting most of the land and Russia left with very little. Death came for Ivan a year later while he played chess with a friend. His doctors said he had a stroke, and the throne passed to his only surviving son Feodor, who ruled for fourteen years but died without an heir. After Feodor I, the Rurik dynasty came to an end. Russia fell under the sway of various rulers who claimed the title "tsar," and the country endured twenty years of what became known as the "Time of Troubles." Famine devastated the population and killed as many as one in three Russians, and the Swedes and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth invaded again and occupied Moscow for nearly a decade. The Time of Troubles ended in 1613 with the ascension of Mikhail Romanov to the throne, the first in a new dynasty that would rule for three centuries until the empire endured another troubling time known as the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

A Cause of Evil

Prince Ivan III of Moscow became known as "Ivan the Great" for his wise rule, but his grandson received a different moniker: "Ivan the Terrible." The Russian word grozny is controversial among historians, and many insist its translation of "terrible" is in the more archaic sense of "inspiring fear," "dangerous," or "powerful." Many Russian authors, especially during the Soviet era, accused Western propaganda both during Ivan's life and in the Cold War as the source of what one called a "slanderous misinterpretation of another Great Ivan." Those who studied Ivan the Terrible in the centuries after his death tried to find reasons for his many crimes, especially the Massacre of Novgorod and the alleged murder of his son. Interestingly, thanks to some Soviet medical experts, we might now know the cause of his evil deeds.

In the 1960s, the Soviet government allowed scientists to exhume the body of Ivan the Terrible from its resting place in a Moscow cathedral and conduct inquiries into how he lived and died. They confirmed many accounts of his physical appearance—deep-set Asiatic eyes, tall and strong at the height of his power, a long nose and bushy beard. But when they examined his body to find a cause of death, they found evidence that the first Tsar of all Russia had suffered from a degenerative muscular ailment that probably left him paralyzed at the end of his life. This malady had two important side effects. The first was epileptic seizures, one of which was probably the cause of his death rather than a stroke. The second was a temporal lobe disorder that affected the reasoning centers of his brain. The experts published their findings, and historians have begun to reevaluate Ivan the Terrible in the light of new science. Is it possible that Ivan's descent into madness and evil was the result of a mental illness, one that he could not control and of which doctors knew nothing? Does that perhaps excuse some of the acts he took to remove threats from his court and nation? Can evil be explained away medically, and does illness absolve individuals of their crimes? We leave that to you.

“I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

– Lyndon Baines Johnson

“You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”

– Ho Chi Minh

The horizon grew brighter. Set against the rising smoke, the rising sun looked almost artificial. Ahead, he could just see the outlines of bodies set against piles of dirt and craters from mortar shells. Through the binoculars, he could still see movement beyond the horizon, but it was getting smaller before vanishing into the line of jungle. He waited for the sun to rise, burn away the morning fog, and leave a clear line of sight on the tree line before sending his men out into the field.

The next several hours were an endless scouring of the killing field in front of them. His men searched the bodies that were still intact for intelligence or other pieces of information. Massive holes were dug to accommodate the mass graves required for the bodies of Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers. Construction equipment was used to push the piles of bodies into the holes before dirt was pushed over them by the same machine. He had seen something like this only a few times before.

Around midday, a major addressed him with a salute and provided a pile of contraband found on the bodies. He took it and watched the man head back out into the field, issuing orders to pull new wire and plant additional claymores and other explosives. The clean-up was over. It was time to prepare again.

On top of the pile of papers and photos, was a typed note. He unfolded it and read it aloud, to himself.

“Remember, we cannot defeat the Americans on the battlefield. We must defeat them at home. We will defeat them by turning their own people against them and make them eat themselves. When you fight, remember that you fight until the Americans are forced to surrender.”

The Lieutenant Colonel looked up from the paper as his men prepared the field again for the coming fight, and said nothing.

As we look at villains in history, we want to look at actions and their effects. The policies of Lyndon Baines Johnson and Ho Chi Minh were the reflection of two leaders operating in different contexts. Though the method by which they exercised their intentions was different, the root of their “why” is in question. In this episode, we want to look at both the intention and result from each leader by examining comparisons of policy during their tenure. The contexts of culture may require different methods for enacting said policy, but the intentions and subsequent outcomes show the result. For example, LBJ used the American process to send men to war, while Ho Chi Minh created his processes to do the same. What are the differences between such actions, regardless of the method used? We examine that today.

Foreign Policies

This, characterized by the Vietnam War, is the most direct comparison and possibly the most destructive for both leaders. One sought to subjugate a country through Marxist totalitarianism using force, genocide, and consolidation of power. The other used any means necessary to increase political power through a conflict due to pride and ego. In both cases, innocents paid the price.

Before his landslide election, Johnson had worked with John F. Kennedy to manage growing support from the US government to the government of South Vietnam. This was due to the growing insurgency from the communists in the north, led by Ho Chi Minh, taking control of that part of the country. Once President, Johnson sought to escalate US involvement to offset the domino effect on the region, where it was believed that one area falling to communism would lead to other areas following suit.

The president accomplished this incident by working with the CIA and other intelligence agencies to stage the Gulf of Tonkin incident, where it was reported that US destroyers were attacked by the North Vietnamese. What was true about the incident was that the USS Maddox was targeted by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on August 2, 1964. In this attack, there was no damage to the USS Maddox or any American Sailor. What was untrue was the second attack, which never happened. The false report of the second attack was used by Johnson and the US government, to grant the president unilateral power to commit whatever resources he saw fit without congressional approval. As a result, Johnson pushed for a full deployment of American servicemen to Vietnam to ensure that the communist north was stopped.

Over the next six years, American forces rose from around 16,000 to over 500,000. Service members were ordered to carry out military strategies that came from politicians in Washington rather than commanders in the field, and those who survived were ridiculed, forever scared, and forgotten.

The primary goal for Ho Chi Minh was to reunify Vietnam under communist rule. He did this through force, bloodshed, and barbarism. Financed by communist allies such as the Soviet Union and China, Ho resisted and defeated the French occupation at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The United States had been sending advisors to aid the French since 1950 and began increasing their military presence soon after the departure of the French to ensure that South Vietnam could withstand the coming communist assault. Ho consolidated power as a result of the surrender, but always kept his eyes on South Vietnam as his final goal. In the north, Ho created the North Vietnamese Army and instituted Marxist principles of land sharing and other policies while recruiting the disenfranchised people who were tired of the corruption of the South Vietnamese government. Those who stood against him were murdered. Entire regions were liquidated of all people. Villages were massacred and the bodies were deposited in mass graves. One of the most infamous massacres occurred at Hue City during the Tet Offensive of 1968, where NVA and Vietcong forces slaughtered hundreds of citizens believed to have helped the South Vietnamese. It was only after American forces retook the city were the mass graves found. As the conflict grew, so did US involvement to the point that the United States clashed directly with Ho’s forces, winning all engagements but losing the war due to US corruption and lack of competent military management.

Each leader focused on the domestic policies in line with their culture and desired outcome, using the rules established within the confines of the rule of law or the law that they desired to make.

The cornerstone of Johnson’s domestic policy was his "Great Society" programs. These included the War on Poverty and urban renewal and became the basis for ongoing programs such as Medicaid and Medicare. Additionally, he was an advocate for and the signer of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which solidified the rights of African Americans across the country.

Though he signed these important laws, historians have argued about his real reason for doing so. The country was changing, and there is the belief that Johnson pushed these forward as a result of such change. Privately, Johnson used derogatory, racist language towards minorities. In addition, the majority of democrats, mostly from the south, had to be talked into supporting the bill for political reasons. Had it not been for Republicans the bills would not have passed, a fact noted by Johnson himself. In addition to his racist private views, Johnson’s “Great Society” programs have caused innumerable problems that are still being felt today. The War on Poverty set societal expectations for ongoing government support, encouraging dependency while doing very little to combat poverty. Some historians have disputed these criticisms and have written that the War on Poverty though it had flaws, did help alleviate the suffering of many impoverished Americans.

Ho’s approach to domestic policy was very different, and in context, reflective of his ongoing war with the occupying French and Americans. After WWII, Ho founded the communist party and took control of Hanoi in 1945. Subsequent “reforms” were instituted to enforce his Marxist ideology. Here, things take a bad turn. His policies aimed at land redistribution meant the displacement and general, widespread genocide of farmers and families.

To put this in perspective, consider this as you sit in your home or car. You have finished working for the day, and sitting down to dinner, begin to talk with your family. Imagine, for a moment, your children laughing at something that happened that day, or someone telling a joke that makes you smile. After dinner, everyone goes their way to do what they want before getting ready for bed and turning in for the night. Suddenly, you and your family are awakened by soldiers breaking down your door. You are dragged out by your hair as you watch your children thrown onto the ground. Before you can even realize what is happening, you watch your children and other family members stabbed to death. As they lay there, bleeding out on the ground and weeping silently from the pain and fear, the communists come to you. Your bodies are thrown into a mass, unmarked grave, and the property is reallocated for the government. Your pictures are stripped from the walls. Your belongings are collected and redistributed. All that made you who you were is completely erased. At some point in the future, your empty home is distributed to a loyal family who will obey and serve the communists well.

This was a cornerstone of Ho’s “reforms”. Some historians have sought to mask such atrocity of how Ho worked to improve literacy rates, gender equality, and healthcare for the population. While some of this may be true, nothing good outweighs the absolute horror rendered by Ho and his forces. Even today, mass graves of bodies are still being found. Some American veterans have spoken about the atrocities they saw and tried to prevent, even as the last American chopper left the US embassy in 1975, before the red curtain closed around the country completely.

Standing Against Evil

In contrasting Lyndon Johnson and Ho Chi Minh, it may seem easy to say that there is no comparison. After all, Johnson did not commit such atrocities or order them. He also enacted legislation that ensured rights for minorities and sought to solve societal issues for American society as a whole. While that is true, it would be historically irresponsible to ignore the many bad decisions of Johnson. Moreover, it is horrendous to dismiss the atrocities committed by Ho to highlight whatever perceived good he may have done.

When standing against evil, it is important to observe evil for what it is, in whatever context. It was evil of Johnson to falsify the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Doing so escalated a war. It was also evil for Ho to be continually allowed to commit his atrocities. So, what was the answer? Unfortunately, given the actions that were taken in the context of the time, we will never know.

Evil actions can take many forms. Some are worse than others and may seem to negate the rest. This, however, is a fallacy. Johnson’s actions to start the war were evil. Ho’s atrocities were more evil. One does not negate the other and both are true. In the context of history, we must be careful not to appropriate justifications when we compare the actions of people. It is possible for one atrocity to be worse than the other, and both still be wrong.

When we see choices made in history for the purpose of elevating a person, bad results are inevitable. In contrast, when honest actions are applied to free the person, there is a history of actual solutions that arise. The choice of enacting such solutions becomes yet another distinction between evil ambition and righteous sacrifice. As we look to history, we must be honest about what is there. Through this honesty, we will be better equipped to understand evil, in whatever context, and be part of the force that pushes against it.

In borderland raids | They came in their hordes | Ransacking villages | Taking the spoils | With nothing to lose | And possessions few | Bold | Sturdy | Fearless and cruel! | I shed the blood of Saxon men.

- Sir Christopher Lee, from the album “Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross”

Ten long years of war in the dark forests of Saxony, and there was no end in sight. Centuries earlier, these woods had witnessed the destruction of mighty Roman legions, a fact that several Frankish scribes had already noted in their chronicles. Per-haps their king would fare better than the Roman Emperor Augustus. Their enemy, the Saxons, were a far greater threat than the older Germanic tribes had been. When confronted with the truth of holy writ and the might of Christendom’s armies, they had refused to bow to the Frankish King Charles and clung to their pagan ways. Now, a decade after the first uprising along the border, Charles had resolved to suppress the Saxons’ desire for independence once and for all. He had learned of a re-volt near the Süntel massif that had killed several members of his court. The Royal Frankish Annals recorded what followed:

When he heard this, the Lord King Charles rushed to the place with all the Franks that he could gather on short notice and advanced to where the Aller flows into the Weser. Then all the Saxons came together again, submitted to the authority of the Lord King, and surrendered the evildoers who were chiefly responsible for this revolt to be put to death—four thousand five hundred of them. The sentence was carried out.

Interpreting Evil

In the last two podcasts, Joe described events that occurred thousands of years ago in circ*mstances so different from our own that it’s difficult to be certain what happened and why. To close out this “mini-arc” in our season, I thought it important to address events in the past and how people interpret them. Distance in time can sometimes obscure motives, as we saw with Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, and Xerxes. People certainly knew these men’s motives for harsh and evil deeds at the time, but many of those records are gone. And distance is not the only complicating factor in interpreting the past; so is bias.

King Charles of the Franks had waged many “wars of evangelism” in his early reign and was determined to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ by any means necessary. In 772 AD, a rising of the pagan Saxons in what is now northwest Germany compelled Charles to invade the region. He destroyed several towns as well as an Irminsul or “Great Pillar,” a sacred object within Germanic paganism, located either in the modern town of Obermarsberg or fifteen miles away in the Teutoburg Forest (where Germanic hordes had once massacred Caesar Augustus’ legions in 9 AD). Charles hoped that his quick strike into Saxony would end the uprising, but instead, it sparked almost thirty years of war.

A decade into the conflict, the Saxons destroyed a Frankish army encamped near the Süntel massif. Among the dead were several of King Charles’ friends and courtiers, and the Frankish scholar Einhard recorded that Charles was enraged at the Saxons’ refusal to submit to God’s anointed king. He assembled his army and pursued the rebels, cornering them where the Aller and Weser rivers met outside the village of Verden. There, he forced every Saxon who surrendered to him to swear fealty, bow before a crucifix and pray to holy icons, and then give up the names of anyone who had been at Süntel and had killed a Frankish soldier or nobleman. Einhard’s account concludes with a more detailed version of what the Frankish Annals provides, that Charles gave orders that over four thousand Saxon warriors be taken into the forests, their heads cut off with swords and axes, and the bodies be left for animals. This “bloody verdict at Verden” took a full day in October 782 to carry out, and it was burned into Saxon and other Germanic tribes’ collective memories.

The Saxon war continued for another twenty years, and Charles’ armies also battled non-believers in southern France and Spain, across the Alps in northern Italy, and along the coast when the Vikings began to raid settlements in the Low Countries. In fact, some historians credit the massacre at Verden as inspiring the Danes to fight the Franks rather than submit to their rule. There were periods of peace, usually when a Saxon settlement converted and accepted baptism—only to then rise up after the Frankish armies had moved on. What happened at Verden is similar to many barbaric tales of medieval justice, and few contemporaries raised any objections to Charles’ actions. The Church specifically cited his “defense of the faith” eighteen years after the massacre when Pope Leo III proclaimed the king “Charles the Great, Emperor of the Romans.” Charlemagne’s legend as the “Father of Europe” seldom included mention of the massacre at Verden, and historians who brought it up often faced the Church’s ire for daring to critique God’s anointed.

Much of the next twelve centuries of scholarship centered on the two surviving accounts of the massacre, both found in the Royal Frankish Annals. Given that its author, Einhard, was a personal friend of Charlemagne, many historians doubted the Annals’ veracity. Some questioned the number of Saxons killed or Charles’ motive for the massacre, and others doubted whether it even took place since such bloodshed would have enriched the Saxons’ reputation in their warrior-centric society. A few scholars also examined Charlemagne’s opponent in the Saxon wars, the warchief Widukind, who led his people in battle until his capture three years after the Verden massacre. He then submitted to Frankish rule, accepted Christian baptism, and abandoned his pagan ways. Yet amidst all this discussion and debate, almost no one raised the question of whether or not Charlemagne was right to order the death of so many enemy warriors. Widukind was a Frankish bête noir who had to be defeated at any cost, so Charlemagne’s deeds were not acts of evil. They were merely “just what rulers did” or “a display of deep piety.” But then, a turning point in European historiography changed all of that.

Evil Identifies Evil

In 1934, the National Socialist race theorist Hermann Gauche touched off a furious argument among German historians about Charlemagne. As a devout pagan, Gauche believed that King Charles ought not be called “the Great” but rather “the Slaughterer” or “the Butcher” for his actions at Verden. He further claimed that the Franks had used Verden to inaugurate a genocide against pagans and that Widukind was “the Great” leader in that period for fighting to preserve Germanic ways. Gauche’s motives were clear, and he made no excuse for hating Christians, their Church, and their heroes of the past. Other Nazi “scholars” soon jumped on the bandwagon. Alfred Rosenberg, the party’s chief racial theorist worked with the propagandist Joseph Goebbels to write plays about Widukind—which were so awful that only two were produced and neither received a second performance. Heinrich Himmler, an arch-villain of Nazi Germany who would later supervise the Holocaust, built icons that resembled the Irminsul outside the three “order castles,” elite party schools that indoctrinated the Reich’s future leaders in Nazi ideology and filled their lives with neo-pagan Nordic rituals worshipping sun-gods and world-trees. Charle-magne’s reassessment as a villain became complete a year later when the city of Aachen, once his imperial capital, canceled the annual celebration of his birthday and the SS built a memorial at Verden to commemorate the emperor’s victims.

And then, as often happened in the Nazi Reich, something changed. A group of German historians wrote a book, Karl der Grosse oder Charlemagne? that ques-tioned the emperor’s alleged villainy and reminded readers of his many accom-plishments. The German people started asking questions, and this was unacceptable in the Nazi state. So Hitler himself intervened and declared Charlemagne to be a historic figure and Reich hero. The Führer was no doubt dreaming of conquests that would outstrip those of any other world-historical figure, and he wanted his nation to associate Nazi majesty with that of Charles the Great. The emperor became “Karl der Grosse” once again, and Germany’s historians memory-holed their earlier criti-cism of his massacre at Verden.

Perspectives on Evil

The idea that any good came from the Nazi era in Germany is ridiculous, but scholars have acknowledged a minuscule contribution its monstrous leaders made to history. The world was not yet aware of the Third Reich’s crimes in 1935-36, and historians read the works of Gauche, Rosenberg, and others. They then started looking at their own assessments of the “Father of Europe.” Was he a great warrior who Christianized the pagans, unified much of the Continent, and ended the so-called Dark Ages? Frankish scribes and Church scholars thought so and usually ignored what today we would call the war crime at Verden. Or was he a brutal tyrant who murdered pagans and destroyed their culture and traditions? The Nazis took this view, at least until their demented Führer wanted the emperor as a historic forerunner. The answer modern historians came up with was “Yes.” To both. Today’s scholarship around Charlemagne, as we covered three years ago on this podcast in the episode “Light & Darkness” is complex. The emperor’s reign revived European culture and civilization after centuries of post-Roman decline, but that revival came at a terrible (and, sadly, common) price in both lives and treasure.

As we keep saying this season, evil must be opposed. But first, it must be recognized. It is sometimes difficult to recognize villains in history if we only read certain perspectives. This is a growing trend in academics and one that I find deeply disturbing. Many scholars now insist students not read sources because their author said or did something that is objectively evil. That is not only bad scholarship—it can actually be dangerous because it precludes a complete understanding of history. I do not in any way mean to accept or praise monsters just because they happen upon a different interpretation of the past; I am not so foolhardy as to laud the Nazi distortions of history. But today’s understanding of Charlemagne’s massacre at Verden comes directly from conversations that started in Nazi Germany. And there is a lesson in that that goes far beyond one event that happened almost thirteen hundred years ago. If we, as students of the past, want to get the broadest and clearest understanding of historic events so we can avoid old pitfalls and oppose new villains, we should be open to every interpretation of history—even if they come from racists and warmongers. We can recognize the evil in their deeds and the hatred in their words, but we can also learn from their perspectives and gain a better understanding of evil in our world today.

“Was there a nation in Asia that Xerxes did not take with him against Greece? Was there a river, except the greatest, that his army did not drink dry?”

-Herodotus, Histories

Xerxes I, also known as Xerxes the Great, was a Persian king who ruled over the vast Achaemenid Empire from 486 BCE to 465 BCE. He was the son of King Darius I and Atossa, the daughter of Cyrus the Great. This lineage protected Xerxes during his time as a prince and solidified his claim to the throne.

He was raised in the capital of Babylon and at the age of seven, began to receive his education in philosophy, math, riding, archery, and swordsmanship. The aristocratic method during this time included goals to attain wisdom, bravery, and prudence. He was given opportunities to govern and learn the bureaucracy of the capital, and empire.

At the age of 32, Darius was informed of a revolt in Egypt. The king had been preparing for a campaign to Greece at the time but shifted his planning to handle the new uprising. Before doing so, it was Persian law that a king must name his successor before embarking on such an attack. Due to Xerxes being born of Atossa, a direct descendent of Cyrus the Great, Darius named him as successor over that of his older brother. His brother protested, and when Darius passed away a few weeks later, his brother continued lobbying for the throne as the elder. Due to his lineage, Xerxes prevailed, was named king, and immediately began to consolidate power.

City-Worlds

Before we dive in, I want to take a pause and give you, our audience, a glimpse into the human population at this time. The first reason to equip you with an accurate idea of what it meant to be an ancient empire. The second reason is to correct possible perceptions that we form based on our own experience. Time and again Jon and I have sought pushback on the danger of such an application, both for your benefit and our own, and so we continue that now.

When one thinks of the term, “city”, there is an immediate association with the modern cities of today. We think of the vast metropolis, associate the probable population, and apply both to the ancient civilization in question. For example, we broadcast from a city near Indianapolis, which in 2023 had a population of around 1.9 million. Larger cities, such as Los Angeles or New York, which average a whopping 6 million people. Knowing this, it is natural to associate such totals with the ancient world. This is wrong.

The total population of Babylon during the time of Xerxes reached its height of just over 200,000 people, which today is the size of a suburb. At the time of Jesus’s birth, the city of Bethlehem under the reign of King Herod was roughly 1,500 people, which today is the size of a populated city block. As time went on, cities grew larger, with the city of Rome reaching 1-2 million at the height of the Roman Empire.

The Persian Empire during the life of Xerxes covered over 2 million square miles of land. Even with their vast army, it was almost impossible to police the borders of the empire. Instead, the empire instituted an imperial bureaucracy governed by satraps who were loyal to the king. These leaders presided over other cities within the empire. Satraps issued reports and provided wealth to the capital. If this was disrupted by barbarians (non-Persians), then an army would be sent to wipe out the invaders.

Persian, like other nations in the world, was comprised of civilized cities with bordering agricultural land. Cities traded, and sold goods and services, shipping both to other cities in and out of the empire. The largest empire at the time, it wanted for nothing, had control over its satraps, and was in a good financial state. It’s this world that Xerxes was born into, and from which he governed.

Early Successes

The consolidation of power came in the form of suppressing revolts in Babylon and Egypt, both of which were under Persian rule. Even as Xerxes assembled his armies to deal with these uprisings, his Commander and Chief of the Army, Mardonius, began to persuade him to pursue an invasion of Greece, but Xerxes first had to contend with the uprisings.

He had subjugated Babylon, despite those in his line being a friend to the city, and committed offenses against the population by removing the statue of Marduk, the primary deity. Some historians speculate that the statue, being made of pure gold, had been melted down, but this is unlikely. Though he did not worship such a deity, he had no desire to cause additional unrest. The removal of the deity would have been enough as a show of power. This, in addition to not attending the Marduk festival each year, had diminished his rule in the eyes of the city inhabitants. As a result, they revolted twice against him which resulted in an extended siege before he laid the rebellion to waste. His campaigns in Egypt turned out much the same, with his successes throughout 485 BC mounting, and his rule unquestionable.

During this time, the vast wealth of the Persian Empire was almost incalculable. Treasure stores in several major cities were growing each year, with regional satraps continuing to bring and share in the build-up of wealth. Standardized infrastructure, governance, and demonstrative shows of strength kept the empire strong and positioned for continued growth.

This – and other factors – should have dissuaded Xerxes from invading Greece which, due to its continued infighting, would not add much to the treasury. In addition, due to the landscape of Ancient Greece, there were very few strategic advantages to conquering it, other than simply extending the empire. The cost of the invasion, coupled with the resources expended to constantly supply the men and arms, defied all expectations and as a result, Xerxes was counseled heavily to disregard the endeavor and concentrate on the growth of the empire elsewhere. In the end, the memory of his father’s loss at Marathon in 490 B.C. was on his mind, and with members of his family continually reminding him of this, he constantly looked to the West. This, coupled with his early successes, convinced him that there was no other choice other than to invade and conquer Greece.

This brings us to the concept of hubris, which is defined as excessive pride, confidence, and self-importance. The latter, self-importance, was an obvious trait held by the ruler of the largest empire in the ancient world. Pride and confidence are not bad if kept in check, but given his position, Xerxes had no reason to hold back or consider the consequences of what would happen if he was unable to defeat the Greeks. In his mind, there simply was no other way the invasion could go. Instead of listening to wise counsel, he ignored the benefits of growing the vast fortune of his empire and instead embarked on an endeavor that put everything in his world in jeopardy simply because he absolutely knew he would not lose. This was hubris, and because of this hubris, Xerxes I began preparation.

Invasion of Greece

Xerxes spent nearly four years preparing for the invasion, amassing both men and resources. Herodotus and other ancient sources estimated the Persian force to be between 2-5 million men, but modern sources cite it as 100-200,000. In 481 BC, Xerxes marched his marched his army north and then west to the Hellespont, the waterway that stood between Persia and Greece. In addition to his land force, Xerxes also sent a massive fleet of 1,200 ships filled with men and supplies to rendezvous and support the overland march.

During the march, Xerxes stopped in Sardis to treat the King who lavished the emperor with riches and opulence. The celebration continued the next few days, and as it did, bad omens – such as an eclipse – began to show. Xerxes, as counseled by his spiritual advisors, ignored this and other signs that showed success was not his future. Not all ignored the signs. The leader of Sardis requested that his son be removed from service because of what he saw, which enraged Xerxes who had the man’s son pulled from the ranks and cut in half before marching his entire army between the two pieces.

Reaching the Hellespont, he commissioned engineers to build a bridge across it. After months of work, a storm destroyed the bridge he had built and washed away all the materials. To punish the sea for its disobedience, he ordered the water to receive 30 lashes from a whip, the surviving engineers to be beheaded, and dropped shackles into the water. He then ordered another bridge built which was completed in April of 480 BC. With the bridge built, the Persian forces crossed the Hellespont and marched through Thrace and Macedonia, encountering little resistance.

Marching south, the Persian army reached Thermopylae, a narrow stretch of land that lay between the mountains and the sea. There, King Leonidas of Sparta lead seven thousand men against Xerxes hordes. Such a stand was possible for two reasons. First, the landscape afforded no chance for the Spartans and other Greeks to be flanked, making the number of the Persian army count for nothing. Second, such an arrangement was ideal for hoplite – and Spartan – warfare. At this time, the whole of Spartan culture revolved around combat. Men were raised to be warriors from an early age, conditioned for war throughout their lives, and eager to fulfill the purpose found in sacrifice. The Persians did not know this and were even less concerned about Spartan fortitude when their spies reported the men of Sparta being groomed in mass by their wives with scented oils on their hair and beards before the battle. This was interpreted as a weakness. In reality, it was a preparation by the Spartans for their journey into the underworld.

The Persians met King Leonidas and his force at Thermopylae, and for three days, the small group of Greeks held off the entire Persian army. It was not until the King was betrayed did Xerxes destroyed the Spartans and even then, the sheer will shown there to resist inspired many to take up arms to defend Greece. We cover this battle in more detail in earlier seasons of the podcast, and as always, invite you to listen.

Early success in the Greek invasion overshadowed the delay by the Spartans, but the level of hubris exhibited by Xerxes was about to be tested again. The Persian and Greek naval fleets met at Artemisium and after several days of fighting, the Greeks prevailed, but not without suffering heavy losses. As Greek forces began to shrink, Persian forces moved faster. Cities that resisted were razed and pillaged for supplies and the countryside was burned. Greek forces continued to retreat and consolidate, abandoning Athens which was easily captured and burned to the ground. Greece was shirking, and as momentum increased for the Persians so did the cost of the invasion. In response to this and the confidence inspired by the loss of Athens, Xerxes sought to end the war as soon as possible by outflanking the Greeks with a naval assault and amphibious landing.

At this point in the invasion, the Greeks had pulled back and were using the landscape to dig in. Experience should have told Xerxes that even with the landing from his fleet, they would be facing a battle like the one they faced with the Spartans. This is where, again, hubris plays a part. Modern historians have speculated that the emperor could have halted his advance and reinforced his position. Supply lines were running thin, his forces were exhausted, and the terrain of Greece would have provided him the same strategic advances as it did the native Greeks. Again, Xerxes was counseled to remain and wait for strengthened supply lines and reinforcements. Again, he ignored the counsel and commenced with the land and sea invasion. There was simply no way he could lose.

As the Persian fleet advanced, they met the Greeks at the naval Battle of Salamis, where the Greek navy, led by Themistocles, inflicted significant losses on the Persian fleet, driving them back. With the naval fleet decimated, the Persians were left to advance over the land without support or supply. In addition, there was the fear that the now emboldened Greek naval would sail to the Hellespont and destroy the bridge created by the Persians, blocking any possible retreat. Due to this, a Persian general named Mardonius and Xerxes’ wife persuaded him to leave Greece and head back to Persia. The general promised that he would finish the invasion himself and bring the victory over the Greeks back to Xerxes as a prize.

Xerxes retreated to his homeland and during his journey, learned of the Battle of Plataea and the sea battle of Mycale, where his forces were annihilated In 479 BC the second invasion of Greece ended, and Xerxes, possibility humbled by the loss of his armies, a vast sum of his wealth, and his prestige, never to set foot in Greece again.

Later Life

The once-mighty Persian invasion force was now in disarray, and Xerxes focused on consolidating power within his empire and concentrating on the building of monuments, which was a common practice used by ancient kings to build prestige. Through higher taxes and tribute, he constructed the Persepolis, a magnificent palace complex that became the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. The grandeur of Persepolis, with its imposing structures and intricate carvings, reflected the wealth and power of the Persian Empire under Xerxes. The city served as a symbol of the empire's cultural and political achievements.

Despite these attempts to redeem his reputation, Xerxes' later years were marred by internal strife and challenges to his rule. His reign witnessed a decline in the once-unified Achaemenid Empire, with satraps gaining more autonomy and rebellions erupting in various provinces. In the end, Xerxes was assassinated in 465 BC by members of the court. His death marked the conclusion of a reign that, while characterized by military campaigns and architectural achievements, also faced internal discord and challenges to imperial authority.

Standing Against Evil

When looking at the life of Xerxes, there are several lessons related to the theme of this season, two of which we will concentrate on here, and the rest we will leave for the discussion, to which we invite your questions and contributions.

First, it is easy for us to pass over facts like “Xerxes burned Athens” or he “advanced”. It is easy for us because we do not take the time to consider what that means. When he burned Athens, he massacred anyone who remained in the city. Evacuations had occurred, but that doesn’t mean the city was empty. Men, women, and children were butchered. Let’s hold here for a moment to consider such horror. Though the Greeks were victorious, they paid was beyond words. Cities, towns, farms…human lives, were ended for no other reason than the pride felt by a single man. One man, one choice. The people suffered. It is our responsibility not to simply read past such things, but to remember what they meant, and the cost associated.

Second, the story of Xerxes and his life requires us to consider the fact that to understand evil, we need only look in the mirror. The plague of pride and inflated self-importance can reap unparalleled destruction on our choices, motivations, and lives. Compound such a temperament with political office or positions of corporate power, and we begin to see the same behaviors we have witnessed in our episode today. Most of us are not rulers of vast empires. In addition, we were not born into royal households. That said, we are human. Xerxes, despite his claims and the claims of others, was just a man. He was born and he died. He made choices, received counsel, and was responsible for all his behavior. We are no different.

To stand against evil requires us to recognize the traits that drove the monsters of history to do their deeds. It compels us not simply to read past them or take them lightly. It also requires us to look within and accept that all of us, regardless of status or position, have the same capacity to commit such atrocities if we do not hold ourselves accountable. The history of Xerxes cautions us to examine our intentions and in those examinations, strive to be better.

How do leaders confront villains? Among history’s most important lessons are seeing how people and nations face down rising evil. In this episode, we are going to examine the actions of three statesmen as they looked outward and saw gathering storms on the horizon. They took different approaches; some failed and others succeeded. And perhaps their deeds can shape our own if ever our societies are under threat.

The dark is generous.

Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from the truths of others.

The dark protects us from what we dare not know.

Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreams in night’s embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in the day’s harsh light. But the greatest of its comforts is the illusion that dark is temporary: that every night brings a new day. Because it’s the day that is temporary.

Day is the illusion.

Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self.

With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.

James Buchanan

The 1856 presidential election in the United States was unique in many ways. It was the first in which the newly-formed Republican Party competed on a platform of ending what its leaders called the “twin relics of barbarism,” slavery and polygamy. Several minor parties nominated candidates as well, and the Democrats selected the relatively unknown diplomat James Buchanan. He had served as an ambassador abroad for most of the previous decade and was thus untainted by the controversy about chattel slavery. Buchanan won the election by sweeping the South and much of the lower North, and he pledged to preserve the South’s “peculiar institution” and respect voters’ wishes in matters of popular sovereignty.

Two days into his administration, the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Southern slaveowners could bring their slaves into free territory. President Buchanan likely knew of the case’s outcome thanks to his close association with Chief Justice Roger Taney. It is curious that he spoke of honoring the voters in his inauguration given that the Court had just taken slavery out of the political sphere—it was now, by judicial fiat, legal in most of the United States. The Dred Scott decision probably made civil war inevitable, and some Northern abolitionists began to speak openly of secession. Their argument was that a minority of Southerners had now captured every governing institution in Washington, DC, and they wished to form a new country that would preserve the rights of all people regardless of race.

Just four years later, President Buchanan learned that his successor would be the Republican Abraham Lincoln, who had won the presidency despite his name appearing on the ballot in only four out of more than a thousand counties in slave-owning states. Now Southerners called for breaking up the Union. Buchanan, a long supporter of slavery, believed that since Lincoln’s election had caused this crisis of the Union, he should be the one to fix it. The president gave a half-hearted endorsem*nt to a packet of amendments to the U.S. Constitution as Congress tried to stave off a political disaster. These would have permitted slavery in federal territories below the old 36°30′ line set up under the Missouri Compromise (since ruled unconstitutional in Dred Scott), and forbade Congress or the president from abolishing slavery in the South. Most historians believe that Buchanan’s efforts showed that he did not understand the magnitude of the crisis facing the United States. Many Southern politicians, known as “fire-eaters” because they would rather eat fire than see slavery abolished, refused to limit slavery to certain states and territories, and Northern Republicans like President-elect Lincoln knew that further compromise with Southerners was futile. The amendments failed in Congress, and the United States hurtled toward disunion.

South Carolina, long the most quarrelsome of the slave states, seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860, and six more states followed it over the next seven weeks. President Buchanan did not act to bring the secessionists back into line but instead urged Lincoln and the Republicans to compromise on slavery. New measures proposed in Congress fell on deaf ears as “secesh” troops from the seven now-independent states took control of federal armories and fortresses across the South. Buchanan’s secretary of war insisted that the commander-in-chief’s inaction would precipitate a North-South conflict, but Buchanan still clung to hope that the slave states would not start a war until after he was out of office.

Events in South Carolina dominated Buchanan’s last days as president. Federal troops had secured Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, and “secesh” soldiers now took up positions and prepared artillery for an attack. The governor insisted that Buchanan order his men to give up the fort, but the president instead chose to reinforce Sumter with men and supplies. Unfortunately, he did not inform its commander that help was on the way, and the mission failed. A message reached the White House on March 3, 1861, that Fort Sumter was nearly out of food and fresh water, but the presidential inauguration was less than 24 hours away and Buchanan did nothing—though, in fairness, there was nothing he could have done by that point. Civil war came five weeks later when President Lincoln called up volunteers to suppress the rebellion and South Carolina militia attacked Fort Sumter. The war devastated the American South, cost nearly a million lives lost or changed forever, but it finally abolished the United States’ great national sin of chattel slavery.

The dark is generous, and it is patient.

It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt.

The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout.

The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it waits behind the star that gives them light.

The dark’s patience is infinite.

Eventually, even stars burn out.

Neville Chamberlain

Fans of this podcast and history buffs worldwide know the story of World War Two’s origins, how the Western Allies chose to appease Adolf Hitler and the Nazis out of fear of another continental war and guilt at how an earlier generation of Allied statesmen had humiliated Germany. There is little doubt that appeasem*nt emboldened the villains in Berlin, but that is not the only lesson of Neville Chamberlain’s premiership in Great Britain.

Winston Churchill and other opponents of appeasem*nt had spent years describing Germany’s rearmament programs in parliamentary speeches and newspaper editorials, and Chamberlain had looked on these reports with disbelief. But as crises mounted in the Rhineland, Spain, Austria, and the Sudetenland, Allied leaders realized that they needed to strengthen their militaries in case the unthinkable came to pass. Chamberlain began to speak in Parliament about the necessity of rebuilding the British Army and increasing aircraft production in the country. This satisfied many of his opponents (though not the stubborn Churchill), and when the prime minister bought peace for the price of Czechoslovakia’s freedom at Munich, most in Britain believed that the government would immediately build up the military’s fighting strength. Some of Chamberlain’s defenders today argue that appeasem*nt actually helped the Allies ultimately prevail in the war.

But the facts of history are stubborn things, and they point out a flaw in Chamberlain’s deeds. From October 1938 to September 1939, British and French rhetoric grew more bellicose. Both governments issued declarations that they would protect Po-land and other states in Eastern Europe from Nazi aggression, and those countries’ leaders believed these words. However, examining Anglo-French production statistics shows that neither power increased their output of weapons in those eleven months. Nor did they step up recruitment and training within their respective militaries. They did not match their aggressive words with deeds. When war came, Germany overran Poland and crushed France, then subjected Britain’s cities to merciless bombardment. Tens of thousands died, and while the war ended with Allied victory, the price was the greatest shedding of blood in human history.

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.

It always wins because it is everywhere.

It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

John Paul II

As Nazi thugs swarmed through Polish streets looking for Jews and other undesirables, thousands of young men and women volunteered to work for the Germans to avoid being kidnapped and sent to slave labor camps. One of these was the eighteen-year-old Karol Józef Wojtyła, an aspiring actor and linguist. The devoutly Catholic young man spent the war working in quarries and factories, avoiding arrest whenever the Nazis “cleansed” a neighborhood in Kraków, and acting in local theater troops. Wojtyła entered seminary when the war ended and was ordained as a priest a year later in 1946. He served in various Church capacities in Poland and often wept at his country’s broken dreams of freedom. Nazi tyranny had ended in 1945 with the promise of liberation by the Red Army, only to be replaced by more enduring oppression under Soviet rule. Free speech was banned, open elections were an international joke, and dissenters paid with their lives.

The Catholic Church in Poland was probably the strongest national church behind the Iron Curtain, and Wojtyła was a leading figure in it. He pressed for reforms within the Church and also urged the puppet government in Warsaw to loosen its harsh controls on Polish life. His youthful looks, elegant language, and powerful messages resonated in the hearts of millions on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and his star continued to rise within his Church. Wojtyła became Archbishop of Kraków and a cardinal in the Church, and though many expected him to rise to the papacy, he was content to serve God and his people in Poland.

In 1978, Pope John Paul I died after only a month on St. Peter’s Throne, and the College of Cardinals selected Wojtyła to be his successor after a three-day conclave in Vatican City. Observers knew that the youngest pope in centuries would be a revitalizing force in the Church, but few predicted that he would help lead a charge against the most evil force of repression the world had seen in generations. His early adulthood under Nazism and church service in Soviet Poland shaped his outlook, and soon it would help transform the world.

“Do not be afraid. Open, I say open wide the doors for Christ. To His saving power open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization, and development. Be not afraid.” These words in John Paul II’s Inauguration Mass were, for many Catholics, the central message of his papacy. He had seen man’s inhumanity to man in his early life, and he believed that only Christ’s love would cast out that darkness. “Be not afraid” may have been mere words to Westerners who read them, but they sank deep into the hearts of millions of Catholics living under communist tyranny. A year into his papacy, on his first visit to Poland, crowds followed John Paul everywhere he went and chanted “We want God…we want God!” The puppet government in Warsaw considered breaking up these events if the pope spoke against their regime, but he never gave them an excuse. “Be not afraid” meant nothing to the scientific atheists who worshipped at the altar of Karl Marx, but the words put steel into the backbones of average Poles who for decades had remained silent against the villains who ruled them.

One man who heard John Paul’s message of courage was Lech Wałęsa, a young dockworker in Gdansk and a quiet opponent of the government. He took the words “be not afraid” to heart, and in 1980 formed Solidarność, the “Solidarity” labor union. These associations were illegal in the worker’s paradise of communist Poland, but Wałęsa’s movement soon spread across the country. Soviet spies infiltrated the union and beat or arrested members whenever they could, but Solidarity’s power only grew as more and more Polish workers remembered to “be not afraid.” Though not a Christian or Church-affiliated organization, Solidarity’s members often quoted John Paul in their literature, and the pope’s image regularly appeared on banners in their street marches. The Soviets knew that John Paul was a threat to their power in Eastern Europe, and many Western intelligence agencies pointed fingers at Moscow when a militant fascist shot and gravely wounded the pope in St. Peter’s Square. The man insisted that he was acting alone, and historians still debate his motives.

What is not open for debate is the effect that “be not afraid” had on the world. John Paul worked with Western leaders like Ronald Reagan to broadcast his words of courage into the captive nations using the “Voice of America” radio network, and people in communist states across the globe began to ask questions. In Central Asia, Muslims living under Soviet control began to turn back to their faith as John Paul spoke of unity among all faiths against the scientific atheism preached from Moscow. In Latin America, anticommunist guerrillas listened to scratchy broadcasts of the pope’s messages as they battled Cuban-backed communists for control of their countries. And in Eastern Europe, Solidarity members and other reformers languishing in Soviet prisons remembered to “be not afraid” while their fellows continued to march in the streets and endure communism’s brutality. Cries of “we want God” and “be not afraid” echoed in the streets of every city and town under the Red Army’s jackboots, and even the cracks of gunfire could not silence them.

In the midst of World War Two, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill reportedly had a conversation about religion. According to the British prime minister, Stalin dismissed the power of Christianity with the words, “The pope? How many divisions has he got?” Authenticity aside, communism’s rejection of human dignity could not compete with the messages of hope coming from Vatican City in the 1980s. Solidarity’s success in bringing down the Soviet puppets in Warsaw and the revival of a democratic Poland is one of many testament to John Paul’s influence. Lech Wałęsa himself said that there would have been no free Poland without “be not afraid.” Although historians debate the exact amount of credit to give the pope for the revolutions of 1989 and the downfall of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, those who heard him and felt their hearts and hands strengthened by “be not afraid” have continued to praise John Paul II as an inspiration for taking down the evil that oppressed them. He did not lead armies in battle or demonstrators in the streets, but he became a model of clear, honest, and un-shakeable resolve in the face of villainy, and his words drove others to leave an evil empire on the ash heap of history.

The dark is generous and it is patient and it always wins – but in the heart of its strength lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.

Love is more than a candle.

Love can ignite the stars.

Standing Against Evil

Evil must be opposed. It cannot be ignored or embraced, as James Buchanan once did, or it leads to incalculable suffering and misery like that of the American slave plantations. It cannot be appeased or confronted with mere words, as Neville Chamberlain tried to do, or it emboldens villains to continue their systematic slaughter. It must be opposed in both word and deed. Pope John Paul the Great gave us just one of many examples. His words inspired others to brave actions, and his message of “be not afraid” reminds us that though evil can destroy the body, it cannot destroy the human soul.

Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. (Outside the Church, there is no salvation.)

- St. Cyprian of Carthage, quoted in Unam sanctam by Pope Boniface VIII -

A small chapel in the German town of Erfurt was hardly a proper venue for world-shaping events. Nothing much had happened in this part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Augustinian monk who swept the chapel's floor thought mainly about his lunch. His straw broom pushed dust from the tombs built into the floor before the altar. The monk then lit candles and said a brief prayer. He heard the doors open and turned to see a group of young men walking single-file toward him. The new servants of God were ready to take their vows and be ordained in His Church. Moments later, the bish-op swept into the chapel resplendent in his best clerical garb. He stood before the new priests and led them through their oath to the Almighty. The monk, standing off to the side, was barely listening. He saw his new colleagues kneeling before the altar on the freshly-swept tombs, their feet caked with mud. He thought to himself, "All my work wasted."

Church Challenges

Religious strife has been a sad part of human history for millennia, and medieval Eu-rope was no exception. By the 13th century, the Western Church had broken with its Eastern Orthodox brethren over papal authority and fought barbaric Crusades in the Holy Land. It now confronted rising heresies and broad challenges to its authority in Europe. The greatest new threat was Catharism, a dualistic belief system that taught its followers to reject all matter as evil and to regard the Church as the devil's instrument to oppress mankind. Pope Innocent III had called a crusade against the Cathars and nearly wiped them out, but examples of moral depravity and corruption among the clergy still rankled those in the lower orders of society.

The papacy did not let challenges to its authority go unanswered, and Rome es-tablished the Episcopal Inquisition during the Cathar crisis to push back against the great heresy spreading in medieval France. Pope Lucius III had issued a bull in 1184 that created these religious courts to prosecute Cathars, but these had largely failed and forced Innocent III to wage war against them. Innocent's cousin, Pope Gregory IX, re-placed the episcopal courts with a new Papal Inquisition early in his reign that would direct the Church's anti-heresy campaigns from the Vatican. The Inquisition quickly es-tablished a reputation for fairness and honesty in dealing with nonbelievers, especially after Pope Innocent IV issued Ad extirpanda in 1252 that restricted inquisitors' use of physical force—meaning torture—against heretics. Under this decree, a heretic could be coerced into confessing only if the methods did not cause the loss of life or limb, was used only once, and only if the inquisitor was certain of the accused's guilt.

The early inquisitions were relatively benign compared to what came later, but reformers grew more vocal in the early 14th century as conflicts within the Church be-came more pronounced. In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued a statement known as Unam sanctam and decreed that "it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff." This touched off a major conflict be-tween Rome and the King of France, Philip IV, that culminated in what historians call the "Avignon Papacy." French soldiers arrested Boniface and mistreated him so badly that he died in captivity. Philip then put his friend Raymond de Got on the papal throne in Avignon as Clement V. The seventy-year split in the Western Church caused many believers to choose sides and only demonstrated that Christendom was in serious trou-ble.

At the same time, the Catholic monarchs of Castile and Aragon in modern-day Spain were waging a long war to reclaim the Iberian Peninsula from the Islamic Em-pire. This Reconquista instilled a religious fervor in the people of Spain that was un-matched anywhere else in Europe. Spanish society, divided into numerous kingdoms and principalities, was one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse in the Chris-tian world. Iberia had the largest population of non-white Europeans whose ancestry was North African, as well as a significant number of Jews who had migrated there from the Near East. Gradually, Castile and Aragon drove the Islamic armies back to-ward the Strait of Gibraltar, their soldiers' hearts filled with the belief that they were reclaiming their lands for God and their Church.

Rise of the Inquisitors

It is a regrettable trend in history to take the worst examples of humanity and apply them to an entire group of people, and this is certainly true when it comes to the Inqui-sition. This is not meant to diminish the crimes against humanity that many inquisi-tors committed, but it is important to stress that modern research into this period of Church history reveals that much of the Inquisition's work actually saved lives. More on that later. With the Church's blessing on these new religious courts, some political lead-ers saw an opportunity to rid themselves of opponents by denouncing them as heretics. This evil practice either deceived or empowered zealous heretic-hunters, especially in France and the Holy Roman Empire.

In 1233, before Innocent IV had restricted the use of torture by the Inquisition, the Dominican friar Robert le Bougre arrived in southern France where Catharism was still present even after the crusade. From his base at Carcassonne near Toulouse, le Bougre paid informers and tortured innocents to find anyone who still followed this heresy. He traveled across the kingdom looking for Cathars and, whenever he found them, he usually took little time to see if the accused were actually spiritual deviants or just unlucky peasants who had offended a local lord. The records of this period are in-complete, but there is clear evidence that le Bougre burned at least two hundred people at the stake, many of whose guilt was not established by the papal courts. Le Bougre was eventually dismissed from his post and recalled to Rome by Pope Gregory IX, who was disgusted by his crude methods of extracting confessions by pain.

Even more terrifying was Konrad von Marburg, a German nobleman-turned-priest who joined the Inquisition after fighting in Innocent III's crusade against the Cathars. On his return to the Holy Roman Empire, he took a position in its Inquisition court at Mainz and began hunting heretics in central Germany. History records that Konrad believed even the flimsiest accusation of heresy and tended to believe that the accused were guilty until proven innocent. He whipped up mobs in the towns he visited and is said to have laughed as women begged him for mercy and men pleaded for their lives as flames licked at their bodies. His followers promised informers that their lives would be spared if they denounced their fellows as heretics, only to find themselves tied to the stake and burned when the courts carried out their sentences. Pope Gregory IX, who would later reprimand Robert le Bougre for his methods, actually praised Konrad von Marburg and gave him permission to exceed the Inquisition's restrictions on tor-ture. When Konrad was murdered while traveling on a deserted road by some German knights, the pope declared him to have been an upholder of the Christian faith. Howev-er, his actions turned many in the Holy Roman Empire against the Inquisition, and his reputation endured long enough to ensure that the courts' actions were far less vicious in Germany than elsewhere in Europe for the next two centuries.

Reexamining History

In 2000, Pope John Paul II opened Vatican City's archives to religious and secular his-torians so they could examine the Catholic Church's history with a fresh, dispassionate eye. Among the many revelations that came about through their work was a new inter-pretation of the Inquisition. Professor Thomas F. Madden of St. Louis University in Missouri summarized this revisionist approach to the period in a lengthy essay pub-lished in National Review. Among his conclusions was that much of the public's under-standing of the Inquisition was clouded by later events during the Protestant Refor-mation. Madden wrote:

The Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress peo-ple; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions…Heresy was a crime against the state [emphasis in original]…Rulers, whose authority was believed to come from God, had no patience for heretics. Neither did common people, who saw them as dangerous outsiders who would bring down divine wrath. [I]t was not so easy to discern whether the accused was really a heretic. For starters, one needed some basic theological training—something most medie-val lords sorely lacked. The result is that uncounted thousands across Europe were executed by secular authorities without fair trials or a competent as-sessment of the validity of the charge.

Now, this is only one historian's viewpoint when it comes to a dark chapter in Church history, and I take no official position on the matter—we here at 15-Minute His-tory leave it for you to decide. There is also a legal matter that complicates the popular view of the Inquisition. Professor Madden mentioned it in the passage quoted earlier: heresy was a capital offense punished by the state, not the Church. The papal bull that created the first Inquisition courts in 1184 included the statement, "Ecclesia non novit sanguinem," "The Church knows not blood." Thus, at least on paper, the Church did not execute heretics; it handed convicted dissenters over to the state for punishment up to and including execution. Now, this distinction hardly mattered to those burned at the stake, but it is important for students of history who are assigning blame for the many deaths that occurred in those years.

We must remember that the villains of history can often stain those around them with their deeds. Medieval European Christians embraced religious devotion entirely, not just on Sundays, and they feared the wrath of God should their community harbor any dissenters. This was due in part to unbiblical teachings by some corrupt priests and, more generally, a lack of access to the Scriptures themselves. Christ's teachings of charity and "letting him who is without sin cast the first stone" were unknown at a time when few could read and no one outside the clergy had access to the Bible. Once again, this in no way excuses the infamy of inquisitors, but it does perhaps explain why so many well-meaning Christians were willing to accept crimes committed in God's name.

The Spanish Inquisition

Monty Python jokes aside, most people today know of the Inquisition through stories of what happened in Spain in the late 15th century. In 1478, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella asked Pope Sixtus IV to establish an Inquisition court in their kingdom as their war against the Muslims reached its climax. Queen Isabella had spent her youth in the company of a fervent Dominican cleric named Tomás de Torquemada, whose words of warning against heretics then shaped her reign. The pope granted their request and created the Holy Office for the Propagation of the Faith in Madrid, and this large bu-reaucracy came to be known today as the Spanish Inquisition.

Ferdinand and Isabella named Torquemada to lead this office as High Inquisitor in 1482. The Protestant Reformation was still nearly a half-century away in Spain, and Torquemada believed that the greatest threats to Spanish piety were the conversos and moriscos, Jews and Muslims, respectively, who had converted to Christianity. Torque-mada suspected, correctly, that some in these communities had renounced their old faiths to save their lives, and he intended to use the Inquisition to root out these trai-tors to the Church. Antisemitism was rife in Spain with all the blood libels against the Jews common to history, and Islamophobia was natural given the ongoing war be-tween Christians and Muslims in the country. Torquemada spent his early years as High Inquisitor staffing his bureaucracy with priests who shared his suspicion of non-believers and dictating memoranda on how they would be treated. History records that his work was dispassionate; he did not express hatred toward these people but simply believed they ought to be examined and, if guilty of heresy, punished. The Inquisition had already created procedures for the auto-da-fé, or "act of faith," the trial and pun-ishment of heretics, and Torquemada refined them to turn the act into a celebration of religious faith. Or so he claimed.

The reality of the auto-da-fé was far more brutal, at least for some. It began with a Mass, then a grace period of up to forty days for heretics to confess their crimes and be forgiven. Those denounced by Torquemada's army of spies and informers who did not ask for mercy were then arrested, charged with heresy, and examined by the inquis-itors. Those who confessed or whose heresies were considered “minor"—which was a majority of cases according to surviving records—received light sentences that left few scars. Torquemada's men used brutal methods on the unrepentant to extract confes-sions, which were only deemed valid after the accused had endured intense physical pain—whether being whipped in public; having their bodies stretched on the rack; or, in the case of women, being given the "water cure," a form of waterboarding with the ac-cused lying on a bed of smoldering coals. Once all accused heretics had been examined and tortured, the court assembled in a town square to read out the sentences after an all-night prayer vigil. Those who had repented were paraded through the streets in sackcloth to show they had been forgiven, and they then fell at the inquisitors' feet in thanks at being spared. The guilty, who did not know their fate until this moment, were then taken from the crowd, tied to stakes in the center of town, and burned to death as their family and neighbors watched. Cries of mercy and pleas for relief went unan-swered, and accounts record that inquisitors looked on silently as their victims died. Torquemada himself attended several auto-da-fé during his career. He never laughed like a modern villain but simply sat stone-faced as his vision of justice was carried out.

The Spanish Holy Office for the Propagation of the Faith kept detailed records of the charges laid down in its many auto-da-fé, but the total number killed, maimed, or released is unknown. Historians estimate that between three- and ten thousand people, mostly Jewish conversos and Muslim moriscos perished in the Inquisition. Most of the moriscos who survived fled to North Africa or the Middle East, and Ferdinand and Isa-bella expelled the remaining conversos in the Alhambra Decree of 1491. The Inquisi-tion's work then slowed for a generation (during which time Tomás de Torquemada died peacefully in bed at the age of 77). It began again when reforming Protestants ar-rived from France and continued until its dissolution in 1834.

Standing Against Evil

In the early 15th century, years before Torquemada's grisly work began in Spain, the Holy Roman Empire put aside its distaste for the Inquisition and allowed it to prose-cute heretics once again. Its chief targets were reformers clamoring for changes in the-ology and practice. The Czech theologian Jan Hus spent his professional life insisting that the Church's corruption stemmed from the lack of access Christians had to the Bi-ble, and this crime led to his examination by the Inquisition and a sentence of death. On July 6, 1415, he stood before the court and was asked for his final words. Hus, whose name in English is translated as "goose," spoke what some believed to be a prophecy: "You are going to burn a goose, but in one hundred years you will have a swan which you can neither roast nor boil." According to some accounts, the Bishop of Constance who presided over the court replied, "Over my dead body."

Some of those who stood against corruption in the medieval Church believed in false gods. Some were political opponents of kings and princes. And some believed, as do most people of faith today, that God blesses the meek and the pure of heart rather than those who lust for power. These men and women stood against evil, and some paid with their lives. The villains who killed them let evil take root in their hearts even as they thought they were doing God's work. And yet in the end, the Truth prevailed. The return of the Bible into Europeans’ hands allowed them to learn God’s Word and reject its corruption by the Church. Perhaps the greatest enemy of evil is knowledge. One of the early examples of passing this knowledge to others serves as an example. Almost a hundred years after Jan Hus' death, a young monk lay prostrate before the altar in a small chapel in the German town of Erfurt. His heart was already full of doubt at some of the teachings his Church had given him, and he felt compelled to proclaim that salva-tion came by faith and not from any earthly works. His name was Martin Luther. His family coat of arms included the image of a swan. And he lay over the tomb of the Bishop of Constance.

Every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he’s not, he’s a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he’s scared.

- George S. Patton, Jr., 1944, the cleanest part of his famous “Third Army speech” I could find -

The dull hum of aircraft filled the morning air. German soldiers looked up from the French town of St. Lô, expecting to see a few enemy fighters bearing down on them. Their hearts froze in their chests as nearly a thousand bombers emerged from the clouds. They had heard of the devastation wrought by their enemy on the Fatherland’s cities, but St. Lô was only a tiny provincial settlement far from the Paris metropolis. In minutes, their world was aflame as Allied bombs exploded around them and tore flesh and metal apart in equal measure. The panzer division holding St. Lô was nearly annihilated in the first of three waves, and little was left as the sun reached its noon height. Then, the survivors heard engines approaching from the north and east in the direction of the Normandy beaches. Tanks and half-tracks bearing white stars swarmed through the town, finishing off the defenders and ripping open the Nazi left flank that had held the Allies back for over a month.

The Third United States Army is one of the best-known units of the Second World War. From the opening move on St. Lô in August 1944 to the war’s end nine months later, it liberated an area of Nazi-occupied Europe roughly the size of Afghanistan. Its soldiers were the best-trained men in the US Army, its officers and NCOs among the most professional in American military history, and its record of battle remains unsurpassed in enemy casualties inflicted and land covered. Most of the credit is due, of course, to the soldiers in tanks and trucks, but even the proudest of these would point to their commander as the man who made the Third Army such a terrifying weapon of war: General George S. Patton, Jr.

“Never tell a man how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

George Patton was born into a family with a long history of military service. He learned their stories from a young age and always intended to follow in his ancestors’ footsteps. He was known to be a happy, carefree child who struggled in math and reading because of dyslexia but excelled in history and science. On graduating from West Point in 1909, he began to craft a gruff and foul-mouthed persona that, he believed, was proper for a leader in those days. Three themes dominated Patton’s early service in the Army. The first was his molding into an exceptional military commander, much of which was due to General John “Blackjack” Pershing, his commander in the 1916 Mexican Punitive Expedition. The two men worked together in perfect harmony, with Pershing leading by example and Patton watching and learning everything from the importance of speed and supplies to the power of a commander’s presence on the battlefield. Patton knew that excellence in his work was the key to promotion and success, and Pershing was the best example of the day. He even modeled his physical appearance on his friend and mentor right down to his immaculate uniform and stern visage or “war face” that greeted everyone he met.

Patton loved to move fast. As a cavalryman, he learned to ride and played polo regularly, and he bought one of the first American-made automobiles shortly after graduating from West Point. Unlike many higher-ranked officers in those days, Patton believed that autos would revolutionize warfare and embraced their use—though he mourned the loss of prestige his beloved cavalry would suffer as a result. His armored cars played a decisive role in ending Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s raids on American towns along the Mexican border. During the First World War, he almost single-handedly built the US Army’s Light Tank School, writing training manuals and devising maneuvers with only a young lieutenant as his aid. Patton loved training and seeing the men he led grow into the best soldiers they could be, and he pushed them as hard as he pushed himself. He became the expert on mechanized warfare in America during the interwar period. Books on the subject filled his library, including—fortunately—Infantry Attacks by the German Great War veteran Captain Erwin Rommel, and Patton added new and innovative tactics into his training regimes.

Few generals can claim never to have been defeated in combat, but Patton was one of them. In many ways, his worst enemy was not the Germans or Italians but his own mouth. His use of “colorful metaphors” was legendary; he once quipped that “you can’t run an army without profanity, and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn’t fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.” Patton cursed fluently in every situation, even at home, and it certainly made an impact on those who heard it. His language shocked Army wives at social functions, and even his second daughter, Ruth Ellen, was reprimanded at school while in the fifth grade for her vivid use of profanity. (When confronted by her mother, Ruth Ellen blamed her father for teaching her the words.) Teachers and co*cktail party attendees may have shuddered at Patton’s words, but his soldiers loved them—one wrote later that he “cussed beautifully”—and so did most of his fellow generals. Douglas MacArthur’s language grew more coarse after meeting Patton in the First World War, Dwight Eisenhower let occasional barbs go between the two friends, and the famously soft-spoken Omar Bradley chuckled as he cursed ill-disciplined soldiers in North Africa. But Patton’s tendency to say whatever was on his mind would eventually get him into plenty of trouble.

“Accept the challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory.”

When the Second World War began in September 1939, General Patton was serving as deputy commander of the 2nd Armored Division. As tensions rose with both Germany and Japan, America began to mobilize and modernize its armed forces, and Patton played a key role in developing its armored warfare doctrine. A 1940 training exercise in Georgia and Florida brought him to the attention of George Marshall, the Army’s Chief of Staff, who knew that Pat-ton would play a key role if war ever came. Patton’s longtime friend, Major Dwight Eisenhower, asked for a place in his division and hoped to serve alongside him on the battlefield. But Marshall had other plans for this officer.

Patton’s obsession with training and emphasis on keeping contact with the enemy (or, as he put it, “holding them by the nose and kicking them in the balls”) spread quickly throughout the US Army. At Fort Knox, KY, General Adna Chaffee drilled his I Armored Corps using Pat-ton’s training model, as did General Walter Kruger with the newly-formed Third Army in Houston, TX. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, Patton took command of the I Armored Corps and forged it into the best-performing unit in the entire Army. He departed the United States with his corps that fall as part of Operation Torch and landed in French-controlled Morocco in November 1942. The general took on an additional role as Morocco’s military governor and reported to Dwight Eisenhower, his subordinate-turned-superior in North Africa.

General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, though weakened by a defeat at El Alamein in Egypt, struck a devastating blow to the II US Armored Corps in February 1943 at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia. Eisenhower knew the corps needed a commander who could inspire—or terrify—the demoralized soldiers and sent Patton east to take the job. After twelve days of harsh but necessary training and discipline, he turned II Corps around, beat Rommel at El Guettar, and opened the road to Allied victory in North Africa. His old command, the I Armored Corps, then arrived and merged into the Seventh US Army to drive alongside Bernard Law Mont-gomery’s Eighth British Army toward Tunis and what remained of the Afrika Korps.

Patton certainly had a high opinion of himself and was eager for military glory. General Montgomery, to that point the shining hero of victory for Great Britain, shared these traits in spades. Both Eisenhower and his successor in the Mediterranean command, British General Harold Alexander, had to balance these two prima donnas’ competitive urges when planning an attack on the island of Sicily to knock Italy out of the war. Alexander gave Montgomery the prime position in the landings and relegated Patton to a supporting role, causing furious anti-British outbursts at the latter’s headquarters. But Patton did his job, and the Seventh Army protected the Eighth from German and Italian flanking attacks in the campaign’s early days. When Montgomery slowed his advance at Catania, Patton leapt westward toward the city of Palermo on the island’s far corner. He wanted to clear its defenders and, perhaps, beat the British to Messina, the port opposite Italy’s “toe” and the campaign’s final objective. He ended up achieving both goals and greeted his British competitor with a smirk in Messina’s town square.

But success came with a price for the general his men now called “Old Blood and Guts.” On two different occasions in August 1943 during the drive from Palermo to Messina, Patton had visited wounded soldiers in field hospitals, where he encountered men suffering from “shell-shock”—what we now call PTSD. In what some of his defenders justified as attempts to encourage the men to shape up, he barked at them harshly and called them “cowards.” But then he went too far—he slapped both in their faces with his gloves, threw one bodily out of the hospital tent, and threatened to shoot the other one himself. Even Patton’s closest friends knew he had gone too far. The retired General Pershing criticized him publicly, thus ending their long friendship, and Eisenhower ordered him to apologize to the soldiers, to eyewitnesses in both hospitals and to the entire Seventh Army one unit at a time. A chastened Patton obeyed and also gave his superior a letter expressing his remorse the next time he saw him.

The reaction to the “slapping incidents” varied wildly. General John Lucas, who was with Patton in one hospital tent, remarked that his actions were harsh but justified. Most soldiers shrugged the stories off as Patton just being “Old Blood and Guts,” and one division cheered his name endlessly and refused to let him speak when he appeared before them to deliver his apology. But the press and, when the stories broke in America, the public were utterly apoplectic. Patton had always been adversarial toward reporters, and some embellished the incidents beyond all journalistic standards, but the damage was done. Newspapers howled for his dismissal, but Eisenhower refused. One of his associates, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, reminded him of Abraham Lincoln’s words when reporters demanded he remove Ulysses S. Grant: “I cannot spare this man—he fights.” Eisenhower did take the Seventh Army away from Patton and sent him on a tour of several Mediterranean sites: Corsica, Sardinia, Malta, and Egypt. The Germans, who respected (or feared) Patton’s ferocity in war and could not believe the Americans would be so foolish as to punish him for such a triviality, watched his movements very closely. They assumed he was preparing his next campaign in the war, perhaps in the Balkans. This was part of Eisenhower’s plan, and though his friend endured harsh rebukes in the press and a difficult period “in the doghouse,” so to speak, he still had a job for George Patton.

“Always do everything you ask of those you command.”

In December 1943, with the Italian campaign underway and the Russians grinding Germany’s armies to pieces on the Eastern Front, General Courtney Hodges’ Third Army got word it would be leaving for Great Britain. Planning for the cross-channel invasion of France to open a second front was underway at SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces, and it would be the largest amphibious operation yet attempted in the war. Many Mediterrane-an veterans held key posts at SHAEF with Eisenhower at the top, Montgomery commanding all Allied ground forces in the invasion, and Bradley heading up the US Army component. Conspicuously absent was George Patton, and Third Army soldiers speculated about his role in the coming battle on the long trans-Atlantic voyage. On arriving in southern England, they began working up to full readiness alongside soldiers from the United Kingdom, Free France, and Canada. Everyone knew that cracking Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” would be difficult, but with summer approaching they were ready to get into action.

So was General Patton, now stationed in East Anglia far from the soldiers training for the attack. Eisenhower had given him command of the First US Army Group, or FUSAG, com-prising twelve divisions that would storm ashore at the Pas-de-Calais, the closest point on the French coast to the British Isles. But FUSAG existed only on paper and was the war’s greatest deception operation. Eisenhower knew the Germans were watching “Old Blood and Guts,” and his men set up wooden tanks and trucks that looked real from a distance and then leaked false reports to the press of Patton’s role in the coming attack. His war record in Tunisia and Sicily loomed so large in the collective German mind that they concentrated large units in Calais and held them there even after the Allies breached the Atlantic Wall in Normandy on June 6, 1944.

The Third Army did not participate in the early stages of Operation Overlord and arrived in Normandy in July. The Allied advance had bogged down in the difficult countryside and around the stubbornly-defended city of Caen. SHAEF needed someone to break the enemy flank and get the front lines moving, and Patton was the man for the job. His arrival in France in a cargo plane laden with supplies was inglorious at best, but his mood brightened when General Bradley summoned him to his field headquarters and described Operation Cobra to him. Allied planes would carpet-bomb the German forces defending St. Lô in western Nor-mandy to allow his new command, the Third Army, to break out and sweep toward Paris. Bradley watched his former superior grow almost giddy as he left his “doghouse,” and Patton ended the meeting promising to keep his head down and his mouth shut—he had learned his lesson.

Despite his harsh demeanor and foul language, George Patton was a deeply religious man. He believed—and said many times while in the “doghouse”—that God was preparing him for a great task. Now he had his chance and got to work as soon as he arrived at Third Army headquarters. The officers he met had heard many stories of “Old Blood and Guts” and were surprised to learn he cared deeply about them and the men they led. He still had plenty of fire in him, but he seemed more at peace with himself in this new job. Of course, Patton’s “war face” and salty language returned in his famous “Third Army speech” given to most units in the days before Operation Cobra. He spoke in heroic terms of glorious victory after harsh fighting and, in words that are mostly unrepeatable in a family-friendly podcast, reminded the men he called “you wonderful guys” that he would be with them in the field all the way, maybe even to Berlin.

The Third Army’s drive across France is one of the greatest military campaigns in history. It’s thunderous beginning after the bombing of St. Lô quickly gave way to massive traffic jams around the crossroads at Avranches, which Courtney Hodges later described as “pushing two hundred thousand men and forty thousand vehicles through what amounted to a straw.” But once the army was out of Normandy and in the open French countryside, Patton drove them ever forward. He rode with his men in a Jeep or tank, stopping to visit the wounded in field hospitals (where doctors quietly shielded shell-shocked patients from his glaring eyes) and even directing traffic personally whenever two units needed to use the same narrow French road. The Germans reeled back at the onrushing Third Army, which moved so quickly that bat-talion commanders sometimes got lost after driving right off their campaign maps.

Patton’s speed got other Allied armies moving as well. General Hodges, now command-ing First Army, raced to keep up with his old unit and secure the flanks against an enemy counterattack. Even the cautious Field Marshal Montgomery pushed through to take Caen and then move east—he would not let Patton get too far ahead of him this time. By mid-August, the Americans and British had driven the Germans into a “pocket” around Falaise, and Eisenhower ordered Patton to move north and Montgomery south to seal them in. The Third Army turned immediately and drove toward a demarcation line at Argentan, but Montgomery took his time and let his old rival come to him. Patton reached Argentan and then asked Bradley for permission to continue, but SHAEF ordered him to stop, and more than a quarter-million Germans escaped the Falaise pocket. Soldiers outside Patton’s headquarters could hear him shouting that his old friends, Bradley and Eisenhower, had become politicians more interested in keeping Montgomery happy than winning battles. When the British finally captured Falaise and only fifty thousand Germans, the Third Army resumed its drive toward Paris. As it approached the “City of Lights,” the garrison commander, General Dietrich von Choltitz, disobeyed Hitler’s order to destroy its monuments and instead surrendered his entire division. Patton made a chivalrous gesture of his own and allowed General Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd French Armored Division to liberate their beloved capital.

The Allies had landed a second force in southern France in the late summer, and General Eisenhower now commanded millions of soldiers from almost a dozen countries all driving toward one objective: the Rhine River, Germany’s last natural defense. The Allied armies advanced in a “wave” at roughly the same speed, meaning that the slowest units set the pace. Patton bridled at SHAEF tolerating Montgomery’s slow-and-steady approach to war and fumed whenever fuel supplies for the Third Army ran low. He once shouted at a supply truck driver delivering rations, “I’ll shoot the next man who brings me food. Give us gasoline; we can eat our belts!” Patton even dipped into his own pockets to buy fuel for his army, and soldiers often drove their tanks until they ran dry and then fought the Germans hand-to-hand where they stopped. But logistics reared its ugly head in the European Theater of Operations. Until the port of Antwerp in Belgium was cleared of mines in late October 1944, all supplies for the eight Allied army groups came from Normandy, where the road network had been largely destroyed before Operation Overlord. It took time to get food, ammunition, and gasoline to the armies in eastern France. Together with another delay in Montgomery’s area of operations, a botched effort to liberate the Netherlands that resulted in ten thousand Americans killed or captured, the Allies knew they could not cross the Rhine before winter. Victory would have to wait until 1945.

Like Germany’s fighting capacity, Adolf Hitler’s mental state was rapidly deteriorating, especially after the July 20th attempt on his life—in which Patton’s old adversary Erwin Rommel was implicated. But the Führer and his Wehrmacht summoned enough strength for one last shot at victory in the West. Germany would attack through the Ardennes Forest on the Franco-Belgian border where its panzers had broken through the Allied lines and raced for the Channel coast in 1940. This time they would drive on Antwerp and cut Eisenhower’s supply lines, then negotiate peace with the Western Allies and turn to confront the onrushing Soviet Red Army. The plan was solid, and Germany had enough men for the operation (thanks in part to veteran troops escaping Falaise months earlier). Panzers hit a weak point between two of Bradley’s armies in mid-December and pushed a bulge into the Allied front. It seemed that Germany might be on the verge of a miracle but for two American units: the 101st Airborne Division’s elite paratroopers and the battle-hardened “wonderful guys” of the Third Army.

The 101st had dug in around the tiny Belgian village of Bastogne and was soon surrounded by the Germans. They held the line in the bitter cold on the frozen ground against vicious attacks. One hundred miles to the south, Patton was approaching the Rhine when Bradley summoned him to a conference at Verdun with other SHAEF commanders. General Eisenhower laid out the situation in a cheerful tone that somewhat belied the serious situation and asked if anyone could hit the German flanks and relieve Bastogne. Montgomery demurred, and Brad-ley then called on Patton. The Third Army had some of the best intelligence officers in the war, and Patton had three different plans to shift his axis of advance in his pocket. He told Eisenhower he could attack the German flank with two divisions in two days—in fact, his men were already moving. Impressed with how well Patton had trained his men, Eisenhower ordered all other armies to hold fast and gave his friend whatever gas and other supplies he needed.

But SHAEF’s master of war could not give the Third Army good weather, and clouds had shrouded the sun over the battlefield for weeks. Patton and his men needed clear skies for the artillery and, more important, air support from Allied fighter bombers. The general’s war diary, printed after his death in War As I Knew It, included a comment about his asking God for good weather. He even summoned an army chaplain, Father James Hugh O’Neill, to discuss the Almighty’s stubbornness in helping the Allies. According to O’Neill, Patton commented, “I am a strong believer in prayer. There are three ways that men get what they want: by planning, by working, and by praying.” He then asked O’Neill to write a prayer and distribute it to everyone in the Third Army. The chaplain followed orders and included it in a training letter distributed as the army turned north toward the German flank. And, by grace or fate, the skies cleared on December 20th, the first of the two-day advance. Allied planes strafed the Germans mercilessly as the Third Army crashed into the enemy and drove on Bastogne. The 101st’s be-leaguered paratroopers saw relief on the horizon on Christmas night and were back in friendly territory the following morning.

“It is foolish to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.”

The Third Army entered Germany in March 1945, and Patton memorialized the historic movement by urinating into the Rhine River. SHAEF wanted to drive forward to join hands with the Russians as far east as possible, and Eisenhower often ordered armies to bypass heavily-defended German cities and let Allied bombers reduce them to ashes. One of these orders involved Trier, the oldest city in Germany, which SHAEF planners believed would require four divisions to secure. Eisenhower chuckled to himself when he got a message from Patton that read, “Have taken Trier with two divisions. What do you want me to do? Give it back?”

These moments of levity were rare as the war’s horrific cost became real to Allied soldiers in Germany. They met hundreds of thousands of homeless families streaming toward their lines fleeing the Russians or found themselves forced to guard masses of surrendered soldiers happy to be free of their Führer. When the Third Army liberated two concentration camps, Ohrdruf and Buchenwald in central Germany, the Americans were beyond words and became physically sick at the gruesome sights of Nazi barbarism. Patton, Bradley, and Eisenhower all visited the camps, and “Old Blood and Guts” went white as a sheet at Ohrdruf, totally unprepared to witness man’s inhumanity to man. He immediately suggested that Eisenhower get reporters and US government officials into the camps to document the Nazis’ genocidal crimes. Then he had another idea. He had learned that some Nazi officials in nearby towns had claimed ignorance of the Holocaust, so Patton ordered that they be marched through the camps to see what happens when good people remain silent in the face of evil.

Both Patton and Montgomery hoped to be first into Berlin, but this honor went to the Soviets in a political decision at SHAEF. The Third Army crossed central Germany and ended the war in Czechoslovakia, where they met the Red Army outside Prague. With the Third Reich in ruins and Patton’s great task fulfilled, he found himself out of sorts amidst the worldwide celebrations. His new job was to be military governor of Bavaria, for which he was sadly ill-suited. (His reputation denied him the chance to transfer to Douglas MacArthur’s Pacific command.) He also went home on a goodwill tour to sell war bonds and saw his wife and children for the first time in three years.

To put it bluntly, George Patton was bred for war and hated peace. He yearned for a new enemy but faced an old one instead—his own mouth. Official Allied policy in occupied Germany barred former Nazi Party members from government service. Patton initially agreed with this plan but soon found himself swamped with administrative problems. American soldiers did not know how to maintain Bavaria’s civilian infrastructure, and the only German experts were ex-Nazis. So he defied Eisenhower’s order and kept low-ranking party members in their posts. Even worse, a reporter asked him about de-Nazification and he replied that most Nazis had joined the party the way Americans became Republicans or Democrats. This comment drew a sharp rebuke from General Eisenhower. Patton’s rhetoric also grew more anti-Russian, which made some sense as suspicions grew about postwar Soviet intentions, and he seemed eager for yet another war. His colleagues were shocked when he exclaimed in a staff meeting that the Allies ought to be rearming their former German enemies to defeat their Russian allies. And, bizarrely for someone who had seen the terrors of Buchenwald with his own eyes, Patton began to spout antisemitic tropes about Jews and world communism in language that was only slightly less profane than Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Historians offered many possible reasons for Patton’s increasingly-erratic behavior ranging from a mental collapse to an ancestral white supremacist attitude. Personally, I think the best explanation comes from one of the general’s favorite books: “For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind: But the tongue can no man tame.”

Enough was enough, and Eisenhower stripped Patton of his command. He became the administrator of the US Army’s research institute documenting the war and filled his days writing letters to his family, hunting with his beloved bull terrier Willie, and traveling across Europe to visit old and famous sites. But nothing stirred his passions like war, and it was gone—like the Third Army, most of whose veterans had gone home and been discharged from service. He considered retirement himself, but it was perhaps grace or fate that spared him from fading isolation in a world at peace.

During the Third Army’s race across Normandy, Patton had said gravely that “the best end for an officer is the last bullet of the war.” His end was not to be like that of Caesar but Alexander or Napoleon. On December 9, 1945, he and his chief of staff were driving near Spey-er in western Germany to go hunting. Glimpsing burned-out cars on the road, Patton said, “How awful war is. Think of the waste.” Minutes later, a US Army truck collided with his car. The other passengers suffered only minor injuries, but Patton’s head slammed into a glass partition separating the front and rear seats. The blow broke his neck and left him paralyzed. He spent the last twelve days of his life in the hospital with his wife Beatrice at his side in agonizing pain from large fishhooks inserted below his cheekbones to ease pressure on his neck. “This is a hell of a way to die,” he breathed shortly before the end.

An Army honor guard brought George Patton’s body to the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial outside Hamm, where he was buried on Christmas Eve. He initially lay in a row with other Third Army casualties, but as visitors flocked to the site its administrators decided to move him. Today, Patton rests facing many of the “wonderful guys” he had led in triumph to defeat Nazi tyranny in a simple soldier’s grave marked with a white cross.

What is there left to say about George S. Patton, Jr.? Plenty, and even a double-length podcast barely scratches the surface of this complicated hero’s life. I am indebted to the late Carlo d’Este’s book Patton: A Genius for War, as well as lessons from Dr. Thomas Connor at Hillsdale College in writing this episode. Joe and I will get into many topics I couldn’t cover next week—Patton’s competing in the Olympics, his belief in reincarnation, an incident where he stood on a car shooting into the air, and maybe more. As always, please send me your questions; you can probably tell how much I enjoy talking about General Patton.

This season is about heroes, and with its end in sight, I wanted to tell you, our wonderful audience, about one of mine. Of course, there is always the disclaimer about not admiring everything in our heroes’ lives, and some of Patton’s words and deeds were utterly reprehensible. I consider General Patton to be a personal hero for three reasons. First, he strove for excellence in every part of his life, something I try to do as a teacher and podcaster. Second, he reminds me that even great men and women have flaws—and some have big ones. I could tell you stories of how my own words jeopardized my career, and my list of flaws is extensive. But third, and most important, even flawed heroes like George Patton can inspire others to acts of courage and greatness. I try to do this as a history teacher, and you can do the same in whatever circ*mstances grace or fate places you. We may not destroy a monstrous tyranny like George Patton and the Third Army did, but we can be heroes for each other every day.

"Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors.”

- T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom -

The riders sat on their mounts, horses and camels, and gazed across the desert toward the shimmering sea and a small village on its shore. An old fortress dominated what passed for a skyline, the only building that stood more than two stories above the ground. Clusters of palm trees waved in the hot, dry wind, and the soldiers could see knots of people moving about in the town's plaza. No enemy troops were visible and no defenses prepared. The long journey across the desert toward their target had yielded a strategic surprise. Fifty men on horseback stayed in place, while the larger group of four hundred men riding camels began to move left and right. The soldiers on foot rested, knowing they would soon have to run across rocky ground to keep up with the cavalry. Two men had planned this attack; one would lead the horsem*n straight toward the target while the other rode his camel around to hit the flanks. With only a nod from their leader, the men charged toward the town of Aqaba.

Most students of the First World War know of the great campaigns by mighty armies on the Western and Eastern fronts. Some know of smaller battles fought in Italy, Greece, and on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey. But few—apart from some movie buffs—know the story of the Great Arab Revolt of 1916-18 that brought down an empire that had lasted for over six centuries and gave us the modern Middle East with all its glories and terrors. The revolt was a minor affair in the minds of generals in London, Paris, Berlin, and Constantinople, and its impact on the overall course of the Great War was small. But it produced some of the greatest heroes of that war, men whose deeds shaped the future course of millions of lives around the world.

The Ottoman Empire

By the 14th century, the region of Anatolia (today the western half of the nation of Turkey) had been the center of the Byzantine Empire for almost seven hundred years. From their citadel at Constantinople, the emperors of the East had governed the region and drawn its wealth northward to defend their lands against Balkan principalities that threatened their frontier on the Danube River. But a growing threat from Muslim tribal groups soon forced the Byzantine rulers to look south. The most powerful of these factions was led by Osman, the Uch Bey or "marcher lord" of the Sultanate of Rum in central Anatolia. Osman was determined to unite all Muslim nations into one caliphate, a single Islamic empire that would stretch from the mountains of Persia to the deserts of Libya, but he focused his attention first on the great Christian power to the north. In 1302, he defeated the Byzantines in battle at Bapheus and then declared himself to be the sultan of a new nation that would one day bear his name: the "Ottoman" Empire.

In the centuries that followed, Ottoman power spread rapidly across Anatolia and then in all directions out from Constantinople, which Sultan Mehmed II captured from the Byzantines in 1453. Mehmed's great-grandson, Suleiman the Magnificent, gained control of the Balkans in southeastern Europe and laid siege to Vienna in 1529 (though he could not capture it). Ot-toman power peaked under Suleiman, and a calamitous naval defeat at Lepanto by Spanish and Italian ships showed that the empire's outward strength might be a bit hollow. Nevertheless, the Ottomans held back the growing economic and military power of Spain, Russia, and the Italian states into the 19th century.

The Industrial Revolution transformed the states of northern Europe and, combined with the decadence and ineffectiveness of Ottoman leadership, ultimately doomed the empire. The British, French, Austrians, and Russians gradually carved off pieces of Ottoman territory, and by the turn of the 20th century, its society was beginning to fracture. Turkish nationalists wondered why they should share the empire with outsiders, while Arab groups in Arabia and Mesopotamia began to demand independence from Constantinople's rule. Sultan Mehmed V, the 35th Ottoman ruler, took the empire into the First World War on the side of Germany's Central Powers in part to aid his friend, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had built a "Berlin-to-Baghdad" railroad and invested large sums of money into the empire (for which he was honored with the naming of a new city in central Turkey as “Kayseri”). Mehmed also hoped that a war with Great Britain to reclaim Egypt and smaller British possessions in the Persian Gulf would unite the feuding tribes in the empire and allow him to keep his throne.

The "Eastern Question" and Allied Plans

Much of nineteenth-century European foreign policy centered around the so-called "Eastern Question" and the fate of Ottoman lands in the Balkans once the empire finally collapsed. It had been a prime factor in tensions between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the decades preceding the Great War, especially since the Russian czars hoped to gain control of the Dardanelles, the ocean passage between the Black and Aegean seas to give them access to the wider world. Naturally, the Ottomans opposed these Russian designs, as granting them passage would mean letting the czar sail heavily-armed warships right through their capital city, Constantinople.

Once the Ottomans had declared war on the Allied Powers, new visions of imperial glory filled the minds of soldiers and bureaucrats in London and Paris. Their Russian allies would, naturally, gain the Dardanelles when they won the war, but Britain and France began to discuss the possibility of carving up the Ottoman hinterlands in the Middle East for themselves. (Their horrific losses at Gallipoli had convinced them that Turkey could remain an independent country.) To this end, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, began to correspond with Emir Hussein bin Ali of Mecca about whether or not Arab nationalists might help the Allies overthrow the Ottoman government. Hussein had been part of the First Arab Conference a year before the war's outbreak and had demanded greater autonomy for the empire's Arab population—which Mehmed V had rejected. He thus agreed to McMahon's plan and reached out to other nationalist groups to begin planning what he called a "great Ar-ab revolt" backed with Anglo-French weapons and, more important, money.

At the same time, two diplomats began drafting a secret treaty between their two governments: Britain's Mark Sykes and France's François Georges-Picot. They did not inform the Arabs, who were now planning their uprising with Allied help; both governments were content to let their new partners have Arabia but preferred to take the rest of the Ottoman Empire for themselves. Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Britain would gain control of Palestine, Jordan, and southern Iraq while France would receive Lebanon, Syria, and Kurdistan in northern Iraq. Russia then got into the mix and was to receive western Armenia (though its defeat by Germany in 1917 abrogated that agreement). With their plans in place, the Western Allies began to send military advisors to the Arabs who could help them organize the revolt.

Lawrence of Arabia

The Arab revolt began in June 1916 when Hussein bin Ali's supporters overthrew the Ottoman garrison in Mecca, the holiest city in the Islamic faith, in a bloody month-long battle. Once victorious, the Arabs then proclaimed their leader King of Hejaz, the Arabic name for what is now northwestern Saudi Arabia. The uprising spread quickly in the next few months with the fall of Ta'if and Jeddah aided by British and French gunboats on the Red Sea. The campaign went well given the difficult terrain, but the Allies wanted it to move more swiftly. Some tribal leaders refused to support Hussein in the revolt's early months, fearing he might seek to become "king of Arabia," which slowed progress toward victory. European advisors did their best to keep their partners united, but the British General Edward Allenby in Egypt who was responsible for that area of operations felt the campaign needed a single figure to unite all Arab nationalists into a single force. He sent a subordinate, Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, to the Hejaz as his personal representative to the Arabs.

T.E. Lawrence is a fascinating character in history. He was first and foremost an archaeologist, having studied history at Jesus College, Oxford, and then worked at the British Museum for several years before the Great War. He volunteered for Army service when war came and was stationed in the Arab Bureau in Egypt. Unlike most Europeans in those days, and especially those in colonial service far from home, Lawrence treated locals—no matter their rank, position, or wealth—as equals and was totally unconcerned with the titles and status of others (or of himself). On arriving in the Hejaz, he soon became friends with Faisal, the third son of King Hussein and a key figure in the Arab Revolt. Faisal's elder brothers had participated in the initial uprising in Mecca and elsewhere in Arabia, but both the king and Lawrence believed that Faisal was the best man to carry the war north into Palestine and Syria. The two men worked together to plan a campaign that would carry the war northward to Damascus, the center of Ottoman power outside Anatolia. General Allenby had intended Lawrence to serve mainly as a strategist and logistical expert, believing him to be too valuable to risk on the battlefield, but Lawrence insisted that he share the Arabs' dangers in war. He spent much of 1916 and early 1917 building relationships with various Bedouin tribes in northern Arabia and convincing them to join Hussein and Faisal in the revolt. Perhaps his greatest friend and ally in the war was Auda Abu Tayi, a leader in the Howeitat tribe of Bedouins, who respected Lawrence's efforts to respect Arab desert culture and their Islamic faith. Lawrence dressed in Arab clothing (he found the British Army uniform "abominable," especially when riding camels) and appreciated his allies' dedication to their god.

Ottoman forces in the Hejaz depended on a single rail line that ran from Damascus, through Palestine, and into Arabia for their supplies. The Arabs had assaulted several points along the line, but Ottoman reinforcements always drove them back and repaired the tracks. Prince Faisal believed that victory depended on linking his forces by land with the British in Egypt. The fortress of Aqaba, a small town at the head of the right-hand "finger" of the Red Sea, bordered Egypt and could serve as a port of supply. General Allenby opposed a move on Aqaba for two reasons. First, the Ottomans had hardened its defenses after an ineffective British gunboat attack in 1916; second, six hundred miles of barren desert separated the town from the Hejaz population centers. But Faisal insisted, and Lawrence disobeyed his superior's orders and helped him plan the attack.

In June 1917, Lawrence and Auda Abu Tayi led a small force of Howeitat and other Arab Bedouins across the desert toward Aqaba in what most military observers believed was a futile attack. They reached the town's outer defenses without incident on July 2nd, and the Ottomans were caught entirely off guard. Auda led fifty horsem*n down from the hills that overlooked the small village of Aba el Lissan, while Lawrence and another Bedouin leader divided the four hundred camel riders between them and assaulted the defenders' flanks. The results were stunning—three hundred Ottoman soldiers killed and almost two hundred captured for only two Arab deaths. The Arabs continued on to Aqaba and took it without incident on July 6th.

At this point in the war, the Ottoman Empire was reeling on several fronts. Their war against the Russians had stalled in Armenia (though Germany's role in the coming Russian Revolution would soon close down that front), and British Indian forces operating out of Ku-wait had conquered much of Mesopotamia and were approaching Baghdad and Kut, the keys to Iraq and the empire's breadbasket. With visions of desert victory brightening an otherwise dark mood in London, General Allenby formed the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and began moving toward Jerusalem. Lawrence, now given a free hand to negotiate with Arab tribesmen and bring them into the revolt, moved north as well through Jordan with Auda and Faisal, following the Ottoman railway and seizing one town after another. His job was to defend Allen-by's eastern flank and protect the main drive through Palestine—if the Ottomans could send reinforcements down the railroad into Jordan, they might recapture Aqaba, invade the Sinai Peninsula, and cut the British off.

Prince Faisal left Lawrence and Auda in Jordan and returned south to lay siege to Medina and was not present for many of the battles along the road to Damascus. At Dera'a in November 1917, Lawrence was captured and abused by an Ottoman bey, a local chieftain. The nature and severity of his injuries are the subjects of debate even today, but history records that Auda's Howeitat soldiers rescued him, and he resumed his military and diplomatic work. The advance toward Damascus resumed, though slowed by the diversion of Allied supplies away from the Arab campaign when Germany launched its final offensive in March 1918. By the fall of 1918, with the United States in the war and grinding Germany's armies into dust on the Western Front, the Arabs and Allenby's British troops had joined up outside Damascus. The Allies encircled the city with cavalry forces, bombed its Ottoman and German defenders with aircraft, and shelled its outer fortresses with artillery. After a five-day siege, Damascus surrendered. Faisal, who had arrived from the ongoing siege of Medina to take part in the attack, proclaimed himself King of Syria and raised the Hejaz flag over the citadel.

After the War

The British and French imperial attitudes toward non-Europeans spelled trouble in the post-war world. As delegates from all the Allied and associated powers gathered at the Palace of Versailles (including King Faisal of Syria), French military officials arrived in Damascus to implement the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Faisal received advice at Versailles from the noted British journalist Gertrude Bell, who had been the first to report on the Ottoman genocide of its Armenian population, and she urged him to stand firm against France's effort to deny him his throne. He also met with Chaim Weizmann and agreed to support Britain's Balfour Declaration that Palestine would eventually become a Jewish homeland. Faisal declared in a letter to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter that, "We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement...We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home." However, the king insisted that Britain and France would first have to recognize Arab sovereignty in their new kingdoms, which never happened and so his embrace of Zionism faded. When the peace treaties were drafted and the conference ended, Faisal returned to Syria to secure his position. The Syrian National Congress proclaimed him king in March 1920, but French forces arrived only weeks later to secure their new mandate in the country and expelled him after a brief war. At the 1921 Cairo Conference, the British offered him the throne of their new mandate in Iraq; he accepted and took up his seat in Bagh-dad later that year (with Gertrude Bell as his chief advisor). He remained on the throne until his death in 1933 and was a powerful voice for Arab nationalism in opposition to the Europeans' mandates in the Middle East.

King Hussein of the Hejaz was furious when he learned of the Sykes-Picot Agreement during the 1919 peace conference and refused his signature to any of the treaties it produced. Unlike his son Faisal, he opposed the Balfour Declaration and would not see Palestine given to what he called "Zionist invaders." British financial support for his government then dried up and he was left to govern Arabia alone. Hussein soon found himself facing a revolt by the powerful House of Saud, which controlled much of eastern Arabia. Britain offered assistance against Abdulaziz Ibn Saud if Hussein would agree to the Balfour Declaration, but the stub-born King of Hejaz refused. He fled Mecca as Saudi forces approached the city in 1925 and set-tled in the British Mandate of Jordan, where his son Abdullah I was king, and then to the British-controlled island of Cyprus until he was paralyzed by a stroke in 1930. Abdullah asked the British to allow his father to return to Amman for care; they agreed, and Hussein remained with his son until his death in 1931. He is buried in the Haram esh-Sharif on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. Hussein's deposing by the nominally pro-British House of Saud laid the foundation for the oil-based monarchy that still rules Saudi Arabia today, while his son's dynasty still rules the now-independent Kingdom of Jordan under King Abdullah II.

Auda abu Tayi left his countrymen's service after the French seizure of Syria in 1920 and retired to a palace outside Amman, Jordan. He built the immense home with silver captured from the Ottomans but died before its completion in 1924. Historians today recognize his skill in battle but also disagree as to his motives during the Arab Revolt. He seemed to be driven to action both by a desire for wealth and a genuine belief in Arab nationalism, but Western historians (and movie-makers) typically emphasized only the former. His portrayal in the 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia as a man driven by money so incensed his descendants that they sued the filmmakers for defamation—though the case was later dropped.

T.E. Lawrence returned to Great Britain after the war. His actions in Arabia had won him tremendous fame in his country, and both authors and playwrights offered him fortunes for his story. But Lawrence was totally uninterested in either—or in any kinds of civilian com-forts. He soon found himself dissatisfied with the bureaucratic nature of peacetime government service. He advised Winston Churchill for a year at the Colonial Office but then joined the fledgling Royal Air Force as a pilot in 1922 under a false name. When his identity became public, he was expelled briefly but returned in 1925 and continued to serve until his death. Lawrence published several books, most famously his account of the Arab Revolt in Seven Pillars of Wisdom and a new translation of Homer's The Odyssey. His personal life was a bit of a shambles—he had many relationships with women but did not seem interested in physical intimacy with anyone, though scandalous reports of extramarital affairs appeared in newspapers across Great Britain. His only real joy in these years seemed to be in fast and dangerous vehicles—cars, planes, boats, and motorcycles. He served as an RAF test pilot, bought several racing boats and seaplanes, and rode bikes over Dorset where he settled down. On May 13, 1935, he lost control of his motorcycle while veering to avoid two cyclists in the road and was thrown over the handlebars. He died in hospital six days later at the age of 46. T.E. Lawrence remained a famous and controversial figure in British history for his personal foibles, his bravery in battle, and his fair and equal treatment of those of a different race in a time when white imperialism was the norm in the world. His acquaintance Winston Churchill described him in death in characteristically-heroic terms: "We shall not see his like again. His name will live in history. It will live in the annals of war...It will live in the legends of Arabia."

Early Life

Audie Murphy was born on June 20, 1925, in Kingston, Texas. He was the seventh of twelve children and like his siblings, forced to move repeatedly as his parents sought work wherever they could find it. As difficult as life was, things got even harder when the Great Depression hit in 1929. His father took jobs on various farms while his mother worked wherever she could to help the family make ends meet. To help support the family, Murphy dropped out of school in the fifth grade, taking on various odd jobs such as picking cotton and delivering newspapers.

To say things were difficult during the Great Depression is a drastic understatement, and deserves its own podcast, which we hope to do next season. Until then, take a moment and consider that during the Depression one in four workers lost their jobs and over 25% of the nation’s workforce was unemployed. Families across America lost their savings and everything they owned through no fault of their own. For the Murphys, who had nothing even before the depression, this meant that any of the 12 children over the age of 6 would have to find some sort of work to feed themselves. It is often tempting to look at the modern-day (even think about the crash of 2008) and try to do a comparison between the challenges we now face and those faced by the families during that time. With as much grace as possible, I would advise against this consideration. None of us, including me, have even a conceptual idea of the hardship faced by Americans during that time. There is no comparison between then and now, at any level, and we are best served by the knowledge and context of that time, so we can remember what happened then to be thankful for what we have now.

It was in this hard reality that Audi Murphy grew up, where his father abandoned the entire family and he was forced to provide for everyone at the age of 16, where his mother eventually died, and he watched his younger siblings get sent to orphanages. The contrast and absolute of right and wrong were forged for Murphy during this time in his life and served him through many of his decisions and actions, both the good and the bad. It was through this lens that he read about the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and decided to enlist in the armed forces at the age of 17.

The Italian Campaign

Murphy first tried to enlist in both the Marine Corps and the Army Airborne. At five feet, five inches tall, underweight, and underage, he was rejected by both. He was later advised to spend a few months gaining weight before applying again, which he did by eating bananas and drinking milk. After working with his sister to falsify his age, he reapplied and was recruited by the U.S. Army on June 30, 1942.

He went through 13 weeks of basic training before being sent to advanced infantry training in late fall, where he thrived in the wheel of Army life and grew desperate to prove himself in combat. He was eventually assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, and his first taste of combat was in North Africa. It wasn’t until early July 1943 during the invasion of Sicily that Murphy got his first full taste of war. After his regiment landed on the southern edge of the island, they began their long march toward the strategic port of Messina, which was the first step to retaking the whole of Italy. It was here that Murphy lost many of his romantic views of the war. Surrounded by pack mules, inundated with hunger, thirst, endless marches, and utter exhaustion, Murphy’s discipline and experience with previous hardship helped him excel in the environment. Furthermore, these experiences only solidified his matter-of-fact views regarding the war and the Army’s role in it. One such incident that showed this was when he spotted two Italian officers escaping across a field. Without hesitation, Murphy calmly shot both of them. When asked why he did that, his simple reply was, “That’s our job.”

After recovering from Malaria and insisting that he rejoin his previous unit, Murphy would see combat again after his company was pinned down in a rock quarry by German gunfire. Murphy organized those with him and returned fire, eventually advancing on the Germans, killing several as others fled. After Messina was taken by Allied forces, Murphy’s unit continued the terrible hike up the Italian boot experiencing hard conditions and engaging in fierce combat. “I began feeling like a fugitive from the law of averages,” Murphy said once after being pinned down in on a beach after the disastrous Anzio landing. “Experience helps. You seldom learn that a situation is as bad as the imagination paints it.”

Through his many engagements, Murphy proved to have a natural tactical intelligence. Coupled with his self-discipline, this enabled him to steel his nerves in the face of true horror and work with his unit to accomplish assigned objectives. As the campaign in Italy continued the number of acquaintances around him progressively dwindled until eventually, he became the last of his 235 unit to survive the invasion. After the taking of Rome on June 5, 1944, Audie went on a short leave, staying in the city as the Army continued its advance north. Alone in the city, his friends dead, he observed other solitary American soldiers and remarked, “We prowl through Rome like ghosts,” he reported, “finding no satisfaction in anything we see or do. I feel like a man briefly reprieved from death, and there is no joy within me. We can have no hope until the war is ended. Thinking of the men on the fighting fronts, I grow lonely on the streets of Rome.”

The Invasion of France and Push Across Europe

Murphy landed with his company in Southern France on August 15, 1944 and was almost immediately pinned down by German gunfire. Reinforcing the line, his unit provided cover fire while Murphy borrowed a .30 caliber machine gun from a heavy weapons platoon. With his best friend, Private Lattie Tipton, he increased the rate of fire on the German position and killed two of the enemy in the process. Once they exhausted their ammunition, they charged the German position with their carbines and grenades, overtaking it as their unit slowly moved up behind them. As they continued advancing on additional enemy positions, one of the German soldiers raised a white flag of surrender. Both Murphy and Tipton lowered their weapons and Tipton advanced on the German to accept his surrender, but before he could do so, the German killed him. Seeing the lifeless body of his best friend fall to the ground, Murphy became enraged. Grabbing an abandoned German machine gun, he charged, firing the gun from the hip with one hand and throwing grenades with the other. In all, he destroyed several fortified German positions, killing five, wounding two, and capturing more. For this feat of bravery, Murphy was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. When asked how felt after being presented the award, he said, “I won the DSC. But all he (Tipton) got was death.”

As the war continued, Murphy’s unit advanced quickly, and as before, Murphy watched his friends continue to die around him. “So many men have come and gone that I can no longer keep track of them,” he lamented. “I have isolated myself as much as possible, desiring only to do my work and be left alone. I feel burnt out, emotionally and physically exhausted. Let the hill be strewn with corpses, so long as I do not have to turn over the bodies and find the familiar face of a friend.”

During the month of October of 1944, now Sergeant Murphy accidentally led his men into two ambushes. The first of the two pinned his unit down until he was single-handedly able to flank the German patrol and wipe them out. On the second occasion, he crawled forward under extreme enemy fire to call in accurate artillery onto the enemy positions. For these events and his heroism in both, he was awarded the prestigious Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster.

As the fighting continued, so did he, and as the engagements mounted and his leadership became more and more evident his superiors – as they had done many times before - offered him a battlefield commission to make him an officer. Murphy again initially refused, citing his lack of schooling as being an obstacle to him being able to complete paperwork and other administrative duties. In addition, officers were regularly rotated out of companies and Murphy wanted to remain with his. It was only after the Army adjusted his administrative duties and ordered that he stay with his company did Murphy agree to the commission. Now 2nd Lieutenant Murphy, he found himself in command of 120 men and despite his best attempts, began to connect them whenever possible.

By this time, Murphy was already one of the most decorated soldiers in the US Army. He had served and survived countless engagements across several theatres of war, seen friends die around him, and proven many feats of uncommon valor, but the challenge of his life was still to come.

Winning the Medal of Honor

During the month of January 1945, the 3rd Infantry Division had been ordered to clear a large wooded area near the city of Colmar. It was the dead of winter, with the snow and wind being so violent that his men were unable to dig foxholes into the frozen ground. “This night seemed unusually long, and the snow colder than I ever dreamed it could be,” Murphy later wrote. “The sound of picks on frozen ground beat against my eardrums like mad.” When his superior officer was wounded not long after their advance, Murphy took command. At this point, every officer and enlisted man in his company was either dead or wounded, reducing the company’s strength from 120 to only 18 able riflemen. Nevertheless, Murphy’s orders were to hold the line. They dug into the frozen ground after several hours and were later reinforced by a pair of M-10 tank destroyers. Additional reinforcements that were set to arrive did not, and the 18 men with two armored vehicles found themselves holding the line against an unknown number of enemy infantry and armor.

On the morning of January 26th, Murphy and his men saw movement in the tree line ahead. As the morning fog cleared, over 200 infantrymen and six Mark VI Tiger Tanks appeared and began a counterattack.

I will stop here for a moment and give you, our amazing audience, an opportunity to take in this scene. First, consider 18 men with two armored vehicles against 200 infantry. Faced with only infantry, there is no strategic or tactical way Murphy’s men could hold the line. Second, add the armor. A single Tiger tank was near impossible to destroy by allied armor. To put in perspective, a single Tiger Tank could take out more than 12 American tanks (The Sherman) before being crippled enough to finally be put down. It fired an 88-millimeter shell, the most powerful of the German artillery, and could decimate an entire town without any support. Six of these advanced on Murphy and his 18 men. Six. I don’t need to tell you the odds of the 18 men winning against such a force, because there are no odds. It’s zero. Listen now and join us in awe at what happened next. Remember…this is real history.

Seeing the approaching force, the Tank Destroyers open fire on the Tigers but have no effect. Both are destroyed within the first 30 minutes of the attack. Murphy radios in for an artillery barrage, giving exact coordinates on the enemy’s position. As the shells began to fall, he and the rest of his men watch in horror as the American artillery shells bounced off the approaching Tiger tanks, even after direct hits. Opening the map and putting it on the ground in his foxhole, Murphy weighs his options. He then turns to his platoon sergeant, and yells, “Get the hell out of here! That’s an order! I’ll hold the line. Go, now.” His sergeant hesitantly pulls the men back leaving Murphy alone on the line.

German troops and armor are now only 200 yards away. Murphy rises over the edge of his foxhole and fires his carbine until his ammunition ran out. The artillery continues to fall, taking out more German infantry.

150 yards away. Murphy calls in new coordinates for the artillery. “Keep it coming!” he screams into the radio as shells fall. He grabs a dropped rifle and expells its ammunition into the approaching line.

100 yards away. He calls in new coordinates and the barrage continues. The Tigers and German artillery unleash on his position. He fires his sidearm at the line, trying to compensate for distance. He looks around in desperation. Atop one of the burning tank destroyers, he spots an unspoiled Browning .50 caliber machine gun. He wraps the radio around his shoulder, runs to the burning vehicle, climbs to the top, and opens fire on the approaching German line. The .50 caliber begins cutting down German infantry.

50 yards away. He calls in the new coordinates to the artillery teams. They call back asking him how close the enemy is. He radios back that he will hand the radio to the Germans so they can give them their exact position. He continues to expel rounds from the Browning. The vehicle continues to burn around him, searing his hands and clothes.

25 yards away. The Tigers, German artillery, and infantrymen are firing at what they believe to be a full line of American GIs. Murphy continues to fire. He reloads the Browning and drops the hammer again, killing anything he can see. Both American and German artillery is now falling around him.

10 years away. He starts throwing every grenade he has at the line of Germans. The Tigers halt as American artillery continues to fall. Murphy depletes the rounds from the Browning. He watches as the German infantry begins to retreat. Then, for reasons that he questioned the rest of his life, the Tigers begin to pull back.

With the vehicle now entirely consumed by fire and his rounds depleted, Murphy leaps from the wreckage and begins his retreat. Behind him, the tank destroyer finally explodes with such force that it knocks Murphy to the ground. He eventually gets back to his remaining men, regroups, and then clears the woods of any remaining Germans.

For his actions in this engagement, Murphy was awarded the Medal of Honor on June 2, 1945. By this time, Murphy was the most decorated soldier in the war. “In addition to his nation’s highest honor, the Texan had earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star with oak leaf cluster, the Legion of Merit, the prized Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Bronze Star with cluster, a Purple Heart with cluster, the Presidential Unit Citation, the French Fourragere, the French Legion of Honor, the Croix de Guerre with Palm and Silver Star, the French Liberation Medal, the Belgian Croix de Guerre with Palm, and campaign ribbons—28 medals and citations in all. He had spent 400 days on the front lines in Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany, and was officially credited with having killed, wounded, or captured 240 enemy soldiers. And he had saved the lives of many of his own men. Yet he was still too young to vote.”

Post-War

Audie Murphy was sent home from the war on June 10, 1945, to national acclaim. He returned to Texas and began to pursue a career in acting, appearing in over 40 films, including the 1955 classic "To Hell and Back," based on his memoir of the same name. Murphy was also active in veterans' affairs and spoke out about his experiences in combat. He was a strong advocate for the rights of veterans and worked to raise awareness about the challenges they faced. He was a founding member of the National Veterans Foundation and served on the board of the World War II Memorial Foundation. Murphy struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that was not well understood at the time. He suffered from nightmares and flashbacks. He had financial difficulties for much of his civilian life but was eventually able to pull himself back again to some level of success before dying in a plane crash on May 28, 1971.

Legacy

This season is about heroes. Throughout the season we have shown you many heroes and that such people come in many forms. Audie Murphy was in the truest sense, a hero. As it is with most of our podcasts, we have shown you some highlights to encourage you to read more about Murphy and his life, while also working to spin out our discussion next week. When taking in the whole of Audie Murphy’s life, we see a man who cared for those around him, being fiercely loyal to his friends while adhering to a code of discipline that enabled him to accomplish unimaginable feats of bravery and fortitude. In the stories of history, we see an example that many heroes after him followed. His determination, drive, and conviction pulled him into the impossible and showed him the way to victory. This season is about heroes. With Audie Murphy, we see not only the classic definition of the word but the history that made it manifest.

As we peer into society’s future, we—you and I, and your government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 1961 -

The president sat at his desk in the Oval Office as technicians scurried about setting up lights and cameras. He looked down at the speech, his last to the nation he had served for almost a half-century, and his thoughts no doubt turned to the tumultuous events of his life. Two world wars, nations devastated and then reborn, and the constant menace of a new enemy armed with terrible weapons. But perhaps he also thought of the advancements he had witnessed: economic revival and a new standard of living, an unpopular war imperfectly ended, and a world still thriving despite the threat of atomic devastation. His long life was nearing its end, and America’s oldest president would soon hand power to the youngest ever elected. Change was upon the country, and its people deserved one last message from a man who had led it through many dangers. He took a breath and began to speak. “Good evening, my fellow Americans.”

Dwight David Eisenhower served his country in and out of uniform for more than four decades. His life, like that of his entire generation, witnessed the greatest transformation of human society in its long history. He was born only ten years after Thomas Edison had patented the incandescent lightbulb and was only three when America’s first automobile took to the streets. On his death in 1969, most homes in the United States had electric appliances, and NASA was only months away from landing a man on the moon. Eisenhower’s military career earned him near-universal praise, especially his leadership of Allied forces in Europe during the Second World War. He won two landslide elections to the presidency that ended the opposing party’s twenty-year hold of the nation’s highest office, and most presidential historians credit his eight years as a time of unparalleled prosperity and, for the most part, peace.

But as the nation entered a new decade, the winds of change began to blow. The postwar “baby boom” was nearing its end, and many young Americans believed it was time for the country to move past the ideals of patriotism and national sacrifice that had dominated society since the Great Depression. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts had inspired millions of young people in the 1960 presidential campaign with his youthful optimism and message of a “new frontier” for America. He’d won a close election against Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, who had conceded defeat graciously despite widespread accusations of voting irregularities in several states.

President Eisenhower was concerned about several recent trends in American government. Before leaving the White House to his successor, he wanted to give his countrymen one final warning in a televised “farewell address” from the Oval Office. He began by wishing President-elect Kennedy good fortune in office, asked the leaders of both political parties to work together in a bipartisan manner, and reminded the American people of the trials they had witnessed and overcome in the last eight years. His message was one of faith in the American spirit and confidence that the coming new generation of leaders would preserve the nation. He then offered two warnings to the nation that, some later observers believed, were little short of prophetic.

The Military-Industrial Complex

For the first 150 years of its history, the United States had no real armaments industry. Some small and large arms manufacturers could trace their history back to before the Civil War, but they operated as individual firms without any centralized direction. However, the stresses of two world wars and some unimaginable increases in demand for weaponry had given the federal government the chance to subsidize, regulate, and direct America’s growing arms industry. From firearms manufacturers like Springfield and Winchester to vehicle factories owned by General Motors and Boeing, the Department of War poured billions of dollars into these companies to arm and equip soldiers defending freedom on battlefields around the world.

President Eisenhower applauded these developments up to a point and wielded their products with great skill during the Second World War. But as the Cold War with the Soviet Union heated up in the late 1940s, he became concerned as members of Congress from both political parties began taking campaign donations from large firms within what he called America’s “defense establishment.” He also worried that the country was spending billions of dollars each year to enhance its security—more, as he put it in his farewell address, “than the net income of all United States corporations.”

So what was to be done? The president’s answer has become the most often-quoted passage of his speech. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Despite what some critics said, both at the time and in later years, President Eisenhower was not spinning an unsubstantiated “what if” scenario. He, and the world, had seen a country fall victim to the power of a military-industrial complex quite recently. During the 1930s, business magnates in Germany poured vast sums of money into the National Socialist Party. Adolf Hitler’s promise of war to rectify the injustices done to Germany at Versailles meant millions in profit for men like Gustav von Krupp and Fritz Thyssen. These men, and the firms they led, rearmed Hitler’s military and reaped huge financial rewards as a result. (For more on the German industrialists’ ties to the Nazis, you ought to check out of episode “The Arms of Krupp.”) The Allied Powers had defeated the German military-industrial complex in 1945 at tremendous cost, and President Eisenhower hoped the American people would recognize a reemergence of fascist corporatism if ever it reared its evil head, and that they would heed this warning and watch over their own military-industrial complex very closely.

A Scientific-Technological Elite

During the 1950s, the United States had leaped past most of its competitors abroad in scientific research and innovation. Homes hummed with refrigerators and electric ovens; automobiles filled the country’s new national highway system (built at great expense by the federal government); and military scientists were hard at work making larger and deadlier nuclear warheads. Again, President Eisenhower acknowledged the importance of these advances and paid tribute to their (mostly) positive impact on American life. But the president remained wary as the nation’s leaders gave huge sums of money to research institutes instead of relying on, as he put it, “the solitary inventor tinkering in his shop.” As with the military-industrial complex, he worried that government-funded science might lead to a weakening of America’s democratic institutions.

Eisenhower’s words on this subject were less rooted in recent history than they were a speculation on the future. “For every old blackboard [at a research university] there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever-present—and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system—ever aiming toward the supreme goal of our free society.

Looking Ahead

If you’re eyeing your device and wondering if I’m about to get political, be at ease. Joe and I might discuss some recent events next week—and we’d love to get your questions and comments as well. But let’s let history be our guide and examine just a few moments after Eisenhower’s speech in 1961 to see whether or not his words of warning had any merit.

Let’s start with the military-industrial complex. Do arms manufacturers wield considerable influence in our government? Absolutely—every corporation does, and has for decades. Is this good for our country? Ask me next week. Do defense companies fund the campaigns of politicians who want more defense spending? Yes—it’s in their interest. Study after study from non-partisan groups like the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute proves that defense contractors’ profits rise in direct proportion to the number of U.S. soldiers and pieces of equipment deployed to war zones anywhere in the world. Does this benefit our security? Sometimes—you can ask me for specifics if you want next week. Are there examples of abuses of power in the defense contractor system? Do you even have to ask? Companies overcharge the Defense Department for billions of dollars each year, and few members of Congress or bureaucrats take note of these up-charges. And, sadly, the facts show that it gets much worse.

In 1971, the “Pentagon Papers” revealed that defense companies were part of the national push for war in Vietnam after the (CIA-manufactured) Gulf of Tonkin Incident seven years earlier. Both President Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, received huge campaign contributions from these firms and ramped up both the war and their contributors’ profits. The same was true in the George W. Bush administration before the 2003 invasion of Iraq (as proved in the “Iraqi Papers” published in 2009). The political aspects of these wars and whether they were or were not necessary to protect the United States is best left to our discussion next week, and any ill feelings toward business or elected leaders involved ought never trickle down to the men and women who fought in them. But these revelations and many others—the Ukraine war, the first Persian Gulf War, Granada, Afghanistan, Iran-Contra, and even the recently-revealed CIA role in, shall we say, an event that took place in Dallas, TX, in November 1963—all point to increasing influence of the military-industrial complex in national security and foreign policy. Whether such influence is warranted or not is up to American voters.

Which leads us nicely to another point President Eisenhower made, that of an alert and knowledgeable citizenry. Does the military-industrial complex pose a threat to a free society and democratic institutions as the president suggested? Honestly, that depends on your political perspective. History shows that the party in the White House has tended to be more pro-defenses industry since the end of World War Two, while those out of power often point out instances of waste, fraud, and abuse. But whether you wear a MAGA hat or voted for Bernie Sanders, you should at least inform yourself of who is funding the men and women for whom you vote. Here in the United States, campaign contributions are public information by law, and the same is true in most open and developed societies around the world (many of whom have their own military-industrial complexes). It may take some digging to find out how much money a presidential candidate or your local member of Congress received from defense contractors, and you’ll probably have to look at SuperPACs and other outside groups that support them as well. But if this issue matters to you, I’d suggest it’s worth your time.

And what about a federally-funded scientific and technological elite? Does it exist? Definitely. Every major technological or scientific advancement of the last 75 years, from the invention of velcro and the Internet to the human genome project and electric vehicles was funded at least in part by American taxpayers. To cite just one specific example, one of the world’s wealthiest men, Elon Musk, depends on federal subsidies paid to Tesla for a large part of his fortune. Are these payments beneficial? Usually, the technology and inventions they produced often improve all our lives (though I’m less and less convinced of the Internet and social media’s benefits). Have there been abuses? Again, the answer is obvious. Plenty of research and technology firms get government grants after kicking some money to political campaigns. We have certainly seen an increase in such funding in the last couple of decades, and again, voters have the right and responsibility to check funding disclosures and budget statements in Congress if they care about this.

The last question to consider is whether or not this scientific-technological elite poses a threat to democracy. Again, that depends on your political views, and if you’re reaching for your device, hold up and wait a minute. I won’t mention anything that’s been in the news recently that rhymes with “Schmovid” or “schmensorship”—I promise. I’ll just offer you two historical points to wrap this up. First, the scientists who developed nuclear weapons became the most fervent opponents of their use. Several, including J. Robert Oppenheimer himself, believed authoritarian rulers would use these weapons to suppress democratic movements in their countries. History certainly bears this out; China, Russia, and Pakistan have all languished under dictators at times who used the fear of nuclear war to stay in power. So the fruits of government-backed science and technology can sometimes be used for terrible purposes. Second, remember that “the science” once taught Americans that people with different skin colors were not humans and told Germans that Jews deserved death in concentration camps. Science is always changing, and ever-evolving as we discover more and more about our wonderful world. But merging it with public policy, even with the best of intentions, does not always enhance liberty or protect democracy.

This season is about heroes, and President Dwight Eisenhower certainly earned that title. He led Allied soldiers to victory in humanity’s deadliest war, crushed a tyranny that dehumanized and murdered millions and kept his country safe and prosperous in uncertain times. As we’ve shown many times this season, heroes often stand up and warn their fellows of coming danger, and those who take heed might be mocked or derided. But I believe, and I’d like to think that Eisenhower would agree, that a nation of watchful citizens, law-abiding but ever-vigilant, is a nation filled with heroes. That is what Dwight Eisenhower hoped America, and all free nations, would be.

“Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.”

―Isaac Newton

The two men walked out the door and into the garden. The weather was warm, with the sun falling over the horizon, almost blinding them as it set. They talked and strolled to an apple tree and sitting beneath it, sipped their tea as they watched the tall grass move against the wind. One of the men turned to his friend and spoke.

“You know, I was just in the same situation not long ago, when the notion of gravitation came into my mind.

“I’m sure it weighed on you heavily,” said the man with a chuckle.

The other man merely smiled and looked out across the field in deep contemplation.

“It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple,” he said finally. “And I wondered to myself, why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground…?”

Early Life

Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. He was the only son of a wealthy farmer, also named Isaac Newton, and a mother named Hannah. His father died months before he was born, leaving his mother to raise him. When he was three years old, she remarried and moved away, leaving him in the care of his maternal grandmother. According to many historians, Newton resented his mother and stepfather for this, referencing it many times later in his life via journal entries and in conversations with close friends.

To deal with the dejection and abandonment of his mother, the young Newton spent his spare time reading and tinkering with mechanical toys, taking them apart and then reassembling them again and again. When he turned 12, he was sent to the King’s School in Grantham, where he would stay until the age of 17. Due to his upbringing, Newton had several learning and behavioral issues early in his academic career. Despite this, he showed promise, with many of his teachers and the schoolmaster recognizing his potential and encouraging him to continue his studies. While at King’s school, he learned Latin and Ancient Greek – two staples for English boarding schools at the time. For Newton, this created the foundation for his deep interest in mathematics as it relates to the natural world. Even early in life, Newton had a deep religious faith and throughout his academic career, there was never a time when he divorced his discoveries in natural philosophy from his views on faith and God. One could not exist without the other, and as he learned more about mathematics, natural philosophy, and complexities that required an intentional creator, he found his faith validated all the more. His time at King’s School encouraged his burgeoning interest in the “why” of things around him and served as the catalyst for discovering the “how” through testing and experimentation.

Adherence to, and redefinition of, Natural Philosophy

Before we continue, I want to clarify that the term and title of “scientist” is almost exclusively a 19th-century invention. Before the creation of the word in 1833, those who studied the natural world and how it worked operated within the realm of what was called natural philosophy. Before Newton, the modern delineation of sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology had not yet been formed. As a result, the category of natural philosophy comprised many different areas of study, from the research of heavenly bodies to the nature of matter and the human psyche. Natural philosophers saw the natural world as an overt machine that was governed by rules set within space and time. The field was vast, as were the number of practitioners who worked to discover the “why” and “how” of the natural world. Newton, who had shown a penchant for mathematics, naturally entered into this field when he joined Trinity College, Cambridge at the age of 18.

At Cambridge, Newton was fully able to explore his interest in why different elements interact, and how those interactions helped answer the larger question he posed regarding the nature of the universe. At that time, the ideas and theories of Aristotle governed the foundations of natural philosophy. Aristotelian traditions concentrated on the nature of objects and on causation rather than mathematic discipline. Though Newton immersed himself in this philosophy, he joined many of those who came before him by rejecting this approach, believing instead that new mathematical, conceptual, and experimental methods were required to gain a true understanding of space, time, light, and motion.

For Newton, this took the form of his first written piece in 1664, titled “Certain Philosophical Questions”, where he revealed his new understanding of nature as influenced by Rene Descartes. Descartes was a seminal figure in the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, joining other prominent leaders in natural philosophy to push against older practices. Descartes's writings made a lasting impact on Newton and served as a “true north” for much of his early arguments against Aristotelian tradition.

As Newton delved more and more into the mathematics behind some of Descartes's philosophy, he began to question the scope of some conclusions. Through further study, he determined that Cartesians – self-described followers of Descartes – did not go deep enough into the mathematics that governed the natural world. As a result, Newton eventually came to reject much of Cartesiasim, instead centering on natural absolutes that would serve as the foundation for his theories. Specifically, “Newton began to formulate a distinction that would remain salient throughout his long intellectual career, contending that a philosopher must distinguish between a conclusion or claim about some feature of nature that is derived from experimental or observational evidence, and a conclusion or claim that is a mere “hypothesis”, a kind of speculation about nature that is not, or not yet anyway, so derived. Newton’s much later proclamation in the second edition of the Principia (1713), “Hypotheses non fingo”, or “I feign no hypotheses”, would infuriate his critics just as much as it would prod his followers into making the pronouncement a central component of a newly emerging Newtonian method.”

Descartes believed that mathematical and mechanical principles were a mere foundation of all natural science, while Newton believed that mathematical models – such as the study of motion – were tools for specifically explaining the behavior of the natural world and that through said mathematics, he could prove it.

The Slope of a Curve & the Preliminary Discovery of Calculus

In 1669, Newton wrote, On the Analysis by Infinite series, where he began exploring the problem of tangents, which involves finding the slope of a curve at a particular point. To solve this problem, he developed a “method of fluxions," which involved calculating the rate of change of a curve over time. Translated in today’s terms, Newton stated that the fundamental problems of the infinitesimal calculus were: (1) given a fluent (or function), to find its fluxion (or derivative); and, (2) given a fluxion or function, to find a corresponding fluent or indefinite integral).

He distributed “On Analysis…” within his inner circle who, over time, shared the work with others. This publication was highly regarded and seen as a seminal work within the field of mathematics as a way of solving problems related to rates of change and the accumulation of infinitesimal quantities. Newton also began working on a method for calculating areas under curves. This work led to the development of integral calculus, which involves finding the accumulation of infinitesimal quantities. In summary, Newton systematically discovered the way to determine quantities as rates of change, and in doing so, created calculus.

Optics and Particles

Around the time that Newton was becoming aware of calculus, he was also pursuing the study of light. Influenced again by Descartes's assertions about the nature and quality of light, Newton began conducting experiments with prisms. From 1667-1672 he investigated the refraction of light, discovering the light spectrum, and as a result, concluded that light existed as a series of particles rather than waves, as stated by Newton:

“These things being so, it can be no longer disputed, whether there be colors in the dark, nor whether they be the qualities of the objects we see, no nor perhaps, whether Light be a Body. For, since Colours are the qualities of Light, having its Rays for their entire and immediate subject, how can we think those Rays qualities also, unless one quality may be the subject of and sustain another; which in effect is to call it substance. We should not know Bodies for substances, were it not for their sensible qualities, and the Principal of those being now found due to something else, we have as good reason to believe that to be a substance also.”

In this, he surmises that since rays of light have colors as features, colors should be regarded as qualities or properties of the rays; but doing so requires us to think of the rays as bearers of qualities. Stay with me here folks. He concludes by saying that light is a stream of particles (or corpuscles), and not waves because waves are a component of something else (such as waves on a lake), whereas particles are unique and distinctive. According to this theory, these particles move in straight lines until they are reflected or refracted by a surface. This theory challenged the prevailing view at the time, which held that light was made up of waves.

The idea that light was composed of particles was, at the time, a revolutionary idea wrought with controversy, which Newton utterly detested. His distaste for debate was often described as defensiveness by his colleagues, who would encourage him to debate his ideas in order to help said ideas gain more prominence. For Newton, his frustration with those that would argue against his ideas may have been based on a belief that his opponents simply didn’t get it. This presumption by Newton was not based on arrogance on his part, but rather a genuine annoyance that he had to stop his work to argue the reality of his work.

Principia

From 1679-1687, Newton returned to his study of celestial mechanics. His depth of work and immersion into it is best illustrated by a true story of an encounter he had with Sir Edmond Halley at Cambridge in 1684. Halley had heard that the Royal Society – of which Newton was a part – was studying how to make approximations of planetary objects and their movement – Kepler Laws – and understand why the objects moved in the way they did.

“Halley asked Newton the following question: what kind of curve would a planet describe in its orbit around the Sun if it were acted upon by an attractive force that was inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the Sun? Newton immediately replied that the curve would be an ellipse (rather than, say, a circle). Halley was amazed that Newton had the answer at the ready.”

The reason Newton had the answer ready is that he was working actively working on one of the most influential books in the history of natural philosophy and science, the Principia. Published in 1687, the book was a “quantitative description of the motions of visible bodies” and contains Newton’s three laws of motion.

1. that a body remains in its state of rest unless it is compelled to change that state by a force impressed on it;

2. that the change of motion (the change of velocity times the mass of the body) is proportional to the force impressed;

3. that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Newton's law of universal gravitation states that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This law was based on both empirical evidence and mathematical reasoning. Using mathematical reasoning, he proved that the force that kept the moon in orbit around the Earth was the same force that kept the planets in orbit around the Sun. Newton used his previous discovery of calculus to solve problems related to gravitational attraction. He calculated the gravitational force between two masses and then extended his calculations to the larger masses.

The publication of Principia immediately elevated Newton as the leader in natural philosophy. Newtonians began to spring up around Great Britain and the rest of the world. Using the mechanics described by Newton, mankind was now able to understand the “why” and “how” of motion in nature, using definable equations.

Impact

Sir Isaac Newton continued his work as well as other roles right up until his death in 1727 at the age of 84. Per usual, it is difficult to summarize all of what he did, what he got right and wrong, and his work in other mediums – such as alchemy – in 15 minutes. I fully expect Jon to ask me about such things during our discussion, and as always, I invite you, our amazing audience, to submit your questions and join in.

Jon once told me that becoming fluent in German meant that he could understand that part of Europe in a genuine way. To converse with someone in their language enabled him to connect with them in a way that simple translation could not. I cannot help but think of Newton’s discoveries as a language with which he directly communicated with creation itself. He once said, “We know is a drop, what we do not know is an ocean.” His interest in both the why and how of the natural world provoked his pursuit of what he could define, to help him understand what he could not define.

The study of mathematics and understanding nature as it relates to space and time is literally seeking to understand the nature of everything. In the Age of Enlightenment, Newton is classified as not contributing to existing philosophy but rather creating his own. Though he coined the phrase, “I have stood on the shoulders of giants,”, he was able to pull from Descartes and other great thinkers’ views on the natural world, and derive his own path. He paved the way for a better understanding of the world around us using mathematical languages that allowed a fluent conversation between us and the fabric of life. In this, Newton did not simply change the world. He opened a dialogue that fueled our better understanding of nature, and as a result, each other.

“Gentlemen, when the enemy is committed to a mistake we must not interrupt him too soon.”
―Horatio Nelson

He was on the quarterdeck when he realized it. The smoke was thick between the two ships and it was hard to make any sense of the melee. His men pushed forward against the other crew as grenades and musket fire came from the masts. The sun was low on the horizon and the impending dark blended into a sea of undefined movement. The world was noise. One of the enemy sailors slashed at him. He parried the blow and drove the man’s sword into the deck of the ship. Turning the blade upward, he cut across the man’s gut and kicked him aside as he focused on the fight in front of him. The chaos slowed and his senses focused, giving him almost perfect clarity.

He immediately turned to his second in command and ordered them to keep engaging. He jumped onto the railing of his ship to bypass the hordes of men and ran across it before jumping back to his deck and going into his quarters. He burst into the main room and peered out the window to the other ship, gauged the distance, and then broke the windows of the cabin until all the shards were gone.

He backed up, took a deep breath, and ran to the window. Jumping through it, he crashed through the glass of the enemy’s captain’s quarters. Immediately after hitting the carpet, he did a forward roll, sprang to his feet, and surveyed the room. After a moment, he saw the other man standing in the corner, his eyes wide, his sword drawn.

He drew his own sword and pointed the tip at the man in the corner.

“You sir, are a coward.”

Not another word was spoken. And when he left the cabin and entered into the wider battle, he left nothing behind.

Early Life

Horatio Nelson was born in 1758 into a poor family of 11 children. Being poor automatically put him at a disadvantage, but due to a distant relation to a former Prime Minister, Nelson had the potential for preferment within Georgian society. His education was specific to grammar schools until the age of 13 when he entered into naval service through his uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling.

Nelson’s initial service existed within the extremes of routine and adventure, with the latter taking the form of voyages to the Arctic where he fought off a walrus, to the West Indies where they conducted patrols. These experiences fueled his resolve to excellence. Tempered by his Christian faith, this resolve grew as a result of the convictions and moral code he adhered to for the rest of his life.

Such convictions served him well during the early years in his naval career and fueled the optimism that brought him out of a deep depression following a recovery from Malaria. The illness was devastating to the young Nelson, confining him completely to a bed for several weeks. The result of his newfound optimism was a continued drive for excellence and to prove himself amongst those with whom he served.

First Tastes of War and Leadership

In 1777 he passed his Lieutenant examination. The promotion took him to the West Indies and directly into the theatre of war with the American Colonies, where he participated in the Battle of Fort San Juan and the Battle of Grand Turk. There, at the age of 20, he was promoted to Captain and put in charge of a frigate. The war with colonies was short-lived – because God Bless America – and though the British fleet saw victories, all of them came at a high cost both to men and ships.

Once the war with America ended, Nelson returned to England for his next command. During this time, a Navigation Act was created to prohibit trade with the newly founded nation, which Nelson strictly enforced. This made him many enemies, from merchants to British authorities, who still profited by disregarding the law and trading with America. It’s speculated that this led to his five-year unemployment, which according to Nelson was “a prejudice at the Admiralty evidently against me, which I can neither guess at nor in the least account for”.

His time of unemployment was eventful. He met and married his wife, constantly pursued old shipmates for news and opportunities for work, and attended to family affairs. In 1793, the French Revolution intensified, and King Louis XVI was executed. War with France imminent, Britain recalled Nelson to full service and put him in command of the Agamemnon, a 64-gun ship of the line.

The Battle of the Nile

Nelson was assigned to the Mediterranean to ward off French Revolutionaries by supporting land operations and engaging the French at sea. As Italian ports and bases began the fall, Nelson engaged in skirmishes at Corsica and Ca Ira, the latter of which being devastating to the French. Conversely, the French continued their success with land operations to push the British across the continent.

Sir John Jervis was assigned to the fleet in 1797 and Nelson was put under his command, which was assigned to monitor Spanish movements of Cape Vincent, in the southern end of Portugal. Jervis made the call to engage with a spotted enemy fleet and began to maneuver his lead, issuing orders to the other ships in the line to do the same. Nelson had already seen the enemy fleet, and upon receiving his order, maneuvered the Agamemnon directly at the line of Spanish ships. This was in direct violation of his orders, and upon reaching the enemy he realized that the other members of the fleet were still out of range and could not provide support. Not caring about this, Nelson fully engaged with the Spanish, firing broadside after broadside, splitting the line apart, and fighting as many as seven ships at once before support arrived. Once Jervis and the other ships caught up to him, Nelson ran alongside the San Nicolas and decided to board her exclaiming, “Westminster Abbey or glorious victory!”. As the day wore on, four of the Spanish fleet surrendered, and the rest retreated. Though Nelson had disobeyed his orders, Jervis liked him enough not to include this in his official report.

For his efforts at Cape Vincent, Nelson was awarded Knighthood and promoted to Rear Admiral. Shortly after, he was injured in his arm during another skirmish and had to have it amputated below the elbow joint. Upon his recovery, he was given command of the Vanguard, another ship of the line, under the leadership of the Earl of St. Vincent. Their orders were to monitor a French fleet that was being reprovisioned that was planning to embark on an expeditionary force elsewhere within the European theatre. As the French fleet came into sight, a monstrous gale blew Nelson and the other ships off course and hindered their pursuit. After recovering and giving chase, the British fleet finally caught sight of the French in Aboukir Bay, within the harbor of Alexandria on August 1, 1798.

Nelson immediately hoisted the flag of the Vanguard and engaged. Finding the 13 French ships which formed a defensive line anchored and immovable, the Vanguard and other ships of the line were able to target each French warship individually. The ships being anchored meant they could not maneuver or move to support the other ships under assault. Though the battle raged all night, the English retained the advantage throughout the engagement, sinking every ship, and annihilating the French fleet.

The Battle of the Nile was devasting for Napoleon. For his efforts at the Nile, Nelson was celebrated as a national hero, with church bells being rung in London, feasts and balls being held in his honor, and him receiving the title of Baron. Even as these celebrations continued, Nelson continued fighting and engaging with the French. He also began an affair with Lady Hamilton, much to the chagrin of the Admiralty. Though the different engagements continue to prove Nelson’s worth in battle, his continuous disregard for orders and insistence on doing things his way made his relations with his superiors less than ideal. As a result, they ordered him home in 1800. He returned, but to a hero’s welcome and as a result, was promoted to Vice Admiral.

Copenhagen and Stardom

Early in 1801, Nelson was assigned as second in Command to Sir Hyde Parker, an elderly commander who was in command of an expedition to the Baltic. Their first objective was Copenhagen and at first, Nelson had little influence over his new leader until the conflict was certain. The Danish resistance was in the harbor at Copenhagen and bypassing the supporting artillery on an adjacent slope, Nelson spotted them and engaged. At the onset, losses were high for the British, as there was no room to move.

With losses mounting, Parker signaled to Nelson to disengage, which he outright ignored, saying to his flag captain, “You know, I have only one eye. I have a right to be blind sometimes. I really do not see a signal to retreat.”. Sir Parker anticipated this, having said at the onset of his signal to retreat, “I will make the signal for recall for Nelson's sake. If he is in a condition to continue the action he will disregard it; if he is not, it will be an excuse for his retreat and no blame can be attached to him.”

Though losses on both sides were massive, Nelson and the British won the day and Nelson’s status as a national hero was elevated to unimaginable heights. Over the next four years, Nelson would have many more engagements and returning to England, went on tour as a national hero. Though he enjoyed the celebrity status, the uneasiness of comfort and lack of battle would begin to wear on him. His calling was the sea, his life to purpose, his aim leadership, and his focus, combat. In 1805, he found them all.

The Battle of Trafalgar

In the years preceding 1805, Nelson had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet and given the HMS Victory with its 104 guns, as his flagship. With the best ship of the line and his newly assigned fleet, Nelson embarked on missions to find the French, working towards a definitive engagement with the whole of the enemy navy. From the start of 1803 until 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte was planning the invasion of England. Combining his French fleets with those of the Spanish, he continually broke through British blockades and ravaged allied ports and trading routes in order to create an unbeatable fleet that could spearhead a route across the English Channel to land over 350,000 invading soldiers.

On September 2, 1805, Nelson received word that the French and Spanish fleets were combining at Cadiz. At the news, he ordered his and other ships to make ready so they could join the full fleet near Cadiz, went home to get is affairs in order, and boarded the HMS Victory, with no plans to return. From his home to his ship, Nelson was saluted and cheered. People bowed to him. The whole of England seemed to sense what he was about to do, knowing the consequences if he and the rest of the fleet were to fail. By this time in his life, Nelson’s name and reputation were far beyond stardom. In the conflict against Napoleon, he had become a saint, made and praying for war. He was a savior of the English people from the tyrants of Europe, from Bonaparte, from the legions of those who would take what was never theirs, against the will of free peoples, to make the world in their image. The populace saw Nelson as a barrier to this enslavement. It was a desperate moment, and the country responded with desperate hopes.

Nelson joined the rest of the British fleet on September 27 and shared his strategy for the attack. Usually, British ships would follow one another and form a line directly parallel to the enemy line. Each side would then fire broadsides at the opposing line until the ships surrendered due to damage, sank, or retreated.

This time, Nelson wanted to do something new. Instead of a single line of ships firing broadsides in parallel to the enemy fleet, Nelson instead planned to form two columns that would drive straight into the enemy line. Calling it “crossing the T”, the two columns of British ships would cut the French and Spanish in the middle, overwhelming each enemy ship with superior firepower and encircling the enemy line.

Forces for the French and Spanish totaled 33 ships versus Nelson’s 23. Despite this, he was confident in victory. Early in the morning on October 21, Nelson ordered the Victory to turn towards the enemy fleet. As they neared the first ship, Nelson singled that the message, “England expects that every man will do his duty” to the entire British force. The fleets engaged and the strategy laid out by Nelson unfolded. The Victory engaged the French flagship as two other enemy warships closed in on his position and opened fire. The supreme skill of English gunnery and seamanship allowed the Victory to hold the position until support caught up to the melee. Sharpshooters and grenadiers from both sides targeted officers and other seamen throughout the battle as the cannon smoke filled the air and became a fog.

Mid-day through the battle, Nelson ran onto the quarterdeck to reengage with his crew when a musket ball penetrated his left lung and lodged into his spine. He was taken below deck, hearing enemy ships surrendering, but knew he was done for. His last words to his flag captain were, “Now I am satisfied. Thank God., I have done my duty.”

The British fleet defeated Napoleon’s forces at Trafalgar and destroyed any plans he had for invading England. When the news of Nelson’s passing reached home, the nation went into the morning. His body was stored in a barrel of brandy to preserve it, and upon arriving in England, was paraded with honors through the streets before being put on display at St. Paul’s Cathedral before being entombed there.

Legacy

Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount, 1st Duke of Bronte, and Knight of the Order of Bath, is remembered as one of the primary heroes in English history. His accolades and engagements have grown over the centuries into historic legend, with scenes and stories of his heroism filling books, and newspapers, and being cited as examples of genius. While the tales about his life grew in stature and prominence, the actual actions and engagements needed no embellishment.

As expressed at the beginning of this season, we choose those that history has defined as heroes to let you, our amazing audience, make your own decision on whether such a title is deserved. That said, and to use a less than academic description of the man, this dude was off the chain.

One does not need the details of every engagement to know Nelson’s place and impact on history, both in England and throughout the world. His actions and organization were directly responsible for defeating enemies of England, namely Napoleon and his intention to make the British Isle and empire, his own. From the War of Independence to the Napoleonic Wars, Nelson lived a life of unequivocal dedication, resolve, and determination. His was truly a life of high adventure.

“The whole world will vilify us now, but I am still totally convinced that we did the right thing. Hitler is the archenemy not only of Germany but of the world. When, in few hours' time, I go before God to account for what I have done and left undone, I know I will be able to justify what I did in the struggle against Hitler. God promised Abraham that He would not destroy Sodom if only ten righteous men could be found in the city, and so I hope for our sake God will not destroy Germany.”

- General Henning von Tresckow, after the failed assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 -

The factory worker's back ached as he sat with his wife and daughter eating a meager breakfast. No enemy raids last night, so the family had actually slept well. His son entered the kitchen with the morning's mail in his small hands. His father took the stack from his boy, passed a letter to his wife from her mother—God protect her, he thought—and then opened the first envelope. His eyes widened as he read the words and then flickered to the door; he half expected Gestapo agents to burst through it. "Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be ‘governed’ by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government." The man folded the paper and put it back in the envelope, then tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. But that night, in a candlelit cellar, he read every word. It spoke of German history, of morality and ethics, and cursed the Führer's regime to the hell from which it had emerged. His eyes were wet with tears as he read its final words, lines of poetry from the great German writer Goethe: "Now I find my good men | Are gathered in the night, | To wait in silence, not to sleep. | And the glorious word of liberty, they whisper and murmur, | Till in unaccustomed strangeness, | On the steps of our temple | Once again they cry in delight | Freedom! Freedom!"

In the popular mind, both then and now, the economic and political crises of Weimar Germany swept Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists to power in 1933 on a tide of universal hope. But almost from the beginning, the Nazi dictatorship faced opposition in the country and crushed it mercilessly wherever they found it. The Gestapo maintained a vast network of spies and informants that monitored suspicious activity, both inside Germany and, when war came, in the newly-conquered Greater German Reich. Many fearless men and women gave their lives in the struggle against Nazism, and countless more risked their lives to shelter those whom the Reich had labeled "undesirables," sabotage the German war machine, or help the Allies liberate their homeland. But inside Germany, where watchful eyes were ever-present, the regime's opponents worked mostly in the shadows. There were some open attempts at subversion, and a few came close to success. In this season on heroes, we want to share some of their stories and honor those who stood tall when commanded to bow down.

Political Resistance

After the Reichstag Fire in February 1933, Hitler received emergency powers and either silenced or imprisoned most leaders of opposition political parties. The German communists were nearly wiped out and the survivors sent to the Dachau concentration camp, and the other parties either disbanded quietly or made deals with the Führer. Sixteen months later, many who had thought themselves safe were murdered in the "Night of the Long Knives" that cleansed the government of any who might be disloyal. Dissidents who survived both purges were either very good at keeping silent or else gradually lost their National Socialist zeal and came to see Adolf Hitler for the monster he was.

Two men who fell into the latter category were Dr. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the mayor of Leipzig, and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, a judge and scion of one of Germany's most respected families. Goerdeler had a background in finance and worked with the Reich government to fund its rearmament program. He soon realized that the Nazi ideologues in Berlin had no interest in long-term economic growth—they were arming for war. The mayor spent time abroad negotiating trade contracts, and he also shared his fears and any information he had with British and American representatives. Goerdeler also balked at the many anti-Jewish decrees coming from the Führer's lackeys. He complied with some that stripped away Jews' economic rights but soon came to loathe his leader's antisemitism. Interestingly, his breaking point was an order to remove a statue of the fully-German composer Felix Mendelssohn from a Leipzig concert house because—and forgive my quoting of a hateful stereotype—a local Nazi activist objected to the size of the statue's nose.

Moltke's opposition to the Third Reich was more ideological and less personal. His privileged place in Germany's aristocracy protected him from much of his countrymen's suffering. But as a jurist, he bitterly opposed the travesties of justice taking place in German courts and the concentration camps. Like Goerdeler, he passed information about the regime's policies and weaknesses to anti-Nazi Germans living abroad. He also met regularly with likeminded individuals at his home in the Silesian town of Kreisau. This "Kreisau Circle" became a talking shop that, its members hoped, would one day replace the Nazi government. They spoke of a future without the Führer, of a Germany free from tyranny, and of a Europe at peace.

Resistance in the Army

In 1870, the mighty "Iron Chancellor" Otto von Bismarck had unified Germany by spilling French blood and wielding the sharp iron of the Prussian Army. In the decades since that glorious day at Versailles, and despite the calamity of the Great War, the aristocratic Prussian officer corps had survived. So had its traditions of service and an arrogant surety that only one of their own could lead Germany. So when a "Bohemian corporal" replaced the Prussian Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg as president, these men recoiled in horror at having to follow his orders. Most did, either to save their own necks or after receiving cash or large estates as bribes. But resentment festered in some hearts and turned to resistance in a few.

After Germany's blitzkrieg smashed the hated French enemy in 1940, all but the most fervent anti-Nazis in the officer corps bowed to the Führer's genius. Of those who did not, four deserve special attention. General Ludwig Beck, chief of staff of the German General Staff until his dismissal in 1938, was far-sighted enough to see that Hitler would eventually overreach himself—which he did in 1941 by invading the Soviet Union and declaring war on America. Beck joined up with Goerdeler, Moltke, and the Kreisau Circle to plot the tyrant's downfall. So did soldiers still in the Army. Hans Oster, deputy chief of military intelligence, passed information to his former boss General Beck and other resisters until his arrest in 1943. He also gave field commanders inaccurate information that led to several disasters on the battlefield, including the disastrous losses at Kursk against the Red Army shortly before his arrest. General Henning von Tresckow, an early supporter of Nazism, disrupted communication between field armies on the Eastern Front while maintaining the facade of a loyal German officer. He was no saint—nor were any of these men—and he signed an order only months before the resistance moved against Hitler to send thousands of kidnapped children into slave labor in Krupp factories. (It would be interesting to know how Tresckow accounted himself to God for that act of inhumanity.)

Certainly, the best-known German officer to modern audiences was Claus von Stauffenberg, the one-eyed, one-handed organizer of the failed July 20th plot. While recovering from injuries sustained in North Africa and reading news about the coming Allied invasion of "Fortress Europe," Stauffenberg had grown certain that Hitler had to be removed in order to save Germany from total annihilation. He entered resistance circles through his cousin, a member of Moltke's Kreisau Circle, and put steel in their spines with his love of the Fatherland and willingness to sacrifice even his own life to save it from the demonic Führer. His first attempt on Hitler's life failed at the tyrant's home above Berchtesgaden, and the second nearly succeeded. While Beck, Goerdeler, and others readied themselves in Berlin, Stauffenberg smuggled a bomb into the "Wolf's Lair," Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. The detonation killed several people at a military conference, but fate protected the Führer. He suffered only minor injuries and moved quickly against the plotters in Berlin, who had taken their time in locking down the government quarter. Stauffenberg died with the words "Long live sacred Germany" on his lips only hours after returning to the capital. Hitler's retribution was swift and merciless, and the others mentioned in this podcast along with five thousand other suspected resisters either took their own lives (Beck and Tresckow) or were hanged (Moltke and Oster).

Christian Resistance

Early in the Nazi takeover, the government banned priests and pastors from commenting on politics, and Hitler soon created a "Reich Church" to replace Christianity with what can only be described as "Führer-worship." (Time does not permit me to say more here, though I'm confident Joe is making a note to ask about this cult next week.) Despite these blasphemies, many Christian leaders spoke and acted against the regime. From the Vatican, Pope Pius XI condemned Nazi sacrileges in his encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, "With deep anxiety," which all of you should read after you finish this podcast. Protestant pastors like Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer paid a terrible price for their criticism of the Reich Church and the government that propped it up. Sadly, many professing Christians supported Hitler even when confronted with his many crimes. I can offer no reason why except, possibly, fear or blindness to the Truth. But those who stood against the satanic darkness spreading from the Führer's every speech should give courage to anyone facing tyranny anywhere in the world.

In my opinion, the most inspiring and heroic people in the resistance movement were not politicians, soldiers, or clergymen. I do not mean to take away from their bravery, but they had a support system of friends and colleagues in large organizations. The same cannot be said of the White Rose, a small group of students at a Munich university. These fearless young men and women were in the "belly of the beast," the most pro-Nazi school in the literal birthplace of Nazism itself. Supported only by one professor, Kurt Huber, and with whatever money their parents sent them each month, five near-children—Hans Scholl, Sophia Scholl, Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorell, and Christoph Probst—wrote and distributed six anonymous leaflets calling on the German people to remember their collective Christian heritage and reclaim their country from the Nazis. The four men had all seen atrocities on and off the battlefield. More tragic was Sophia's first exposure to Nazi cruelty. Her older sister Inge who survived the war recounted a moment when she and Sophia saw a large van being filled with mentally- and physically-handicapped people from a local hospital near their school. The girls asked one of the attendants where they were going. Perhaps to spare the children nightmares, the woman replied, "They are going to heaven." (These poor souls were part of Hitler's Aktion-T4 euthanasia program.)

In February 1943, weeks after Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad, a Gestapo informant caught Hans and Sophia distributing their last leaflet on campus. They and the others were taken into custody and interrogated by the secret police. Robert Mohr, who questioned Sophia, kept meticulous notes that survived the war, and he noted the strength of her convictions and belief in God that drove her to act. Days after their arrest, the Scholls and Probst were hauled before the dreaded People Court, where they were forbidden to speak in their own defense as the vile Nazi judge Roland Freisler hurled abuse at them. Each one remained calm under examination, and only when the Scholls’ parents burst into the courtroom demanding to see their children did Hans and Sophia’s composure break for a moment. Their sentences were never in doubt, and after a half-day’s proceedings, Freisler gleefully declared them guilty. After a few moments together for the last time, the three students were led, one by one, into the basem*nt of Stadlheim Prison, where they died by guillotine. Graf and Schmorell, along with Professor Huber, were tried months later and also sentenced to death. But their words lived on when Allied planes dropped thousands of their final leaflet, entitled “The Manifesto of the Students of Munich” all across Germany.

I confess it's difficult finding a way to end this podcast, so I will simply close with two quotes. In her play "The White Rose," Lillian Groag included a monologue by Sophia Scholl that gave me chills when I first read it: "The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don't like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It's the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the bogeyman won't find you. But it's all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn." To me, that is what it means to be a hero. And in her own words, Sophia captured the essence of heroism very simply: "Stand up for what you believe in, even if you are standing alone."

Back by popular demand, mostly Jon’s, is our “What to Watch” series. This time, I got to review the good ones, while Jon suffered through the bad ones. We’re also recording this one together, so expect some words of affirmation, and maybe, disgust.

Military History

Good - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

I don’t know what’s happened in Hollywood that has brought many good WW1 movies to reality, but it’s one of the few things from that industry I applaud. Based (in some fashion) on the novel, it shows a view of the war from the perspective of a German soldier. Like many who found themselves caught up in the propaganda of the Great War, the decline of the main character from the upbeat, excited young man to the hopeless, lost soldier who dies killing as many French as possible before the ceasefire is reflective of many stories from the horror of the trenches.

While not directly based on any one historical account, the author of the book served in the trenches. He, therefore, was able to construct an authoritative perspective on what it was like for a person to descend into madness. The film carries this perfectly. From the introduction of the tank to warfare to the rats to the flamethrowers to the utter hopelessness you feel with the main character, it provides a complete picture of what the war may have been like.

Never mind slasher films or tales from the dark side. Do you want horror? Watch this historical representation of what true horror is. War is hell, said Sherman. Watch this and affirm the statement.

Note: This category was a hard choice between the one I picked and 1917. Please watch both.

Bad - The Last Samurai (2003)

This film has all the ingredients of a great story. It's inspired by real events, it has swords and guns, and it's got Tom Cruise! During the late 19th century, several East Asian governments invited industrial and military experts to help them accelerate their march toward modernity. The United States sent help to China, while several European countries aided Emperor Meiji turn Japan into a powerful state on par with the West. The Last Samurai blends the lives of several of these men into a single story and is set during the last armed uprising against the Japanese government. The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 ended the noble samurai class in Japan, who disliked Meiji's reforms and hoped to cling to the past. Their defeat set the Japanese on course to becoming a great power in the Pacific Rim (and, incidentially, toward conflicts with both Russia and the United States).

The story is interesting, the battle scenes and costume design are amazing, and Tom Cruise does his usual fine job of acting. But The Last Samurai fails on a number of levels. First, as is common with American films (and has been discussed before on this podcast), the screenwriters chose to emphasize American actions over those of other countries. Very few Americans worked with the Japanese on industrialization and military reforms - most of that work was done by the French and Germans. The fights between Ken Watanabe's samurai and the modern Japanese army are what we'd expect from Hollywood, but these warriors' appearance are about a century out of date. The samurai no longer wore their traditional armor for one simple reason: it slowed them down while being useless in stopping bullets. And most important from a historical point of view, the movie depicts the samurai as bravely fighting a corrupt government but ignores their many horrific abuses of defenseless peasants (a flaw also found in many stories about knights in Europe's Middle Ages). The Last Samurai is not necessarily a bad film - much like my runner-up in this category, Braveheart - but it is not great history.

Social History

Good - Far and Away (1992)

Jon is laughing at me for choosing this but I’m doubling down. This film is not strictly based on any one character or event in history, but rather does a fantastic job of showing the migration of the Irish to 19th-century America, the hardships encountered along the way, and the flight to the land grabs in the West. While the story is admittedly a bit shallow, Cruise and Kidman manage to portray the reality of what the Irish experienced during this time.

Landing in Boston, many immigrants were forced to work in labor houses and factories in an attempt to earn their way out of the city to proceed West. Many failed, but for those who succeeded the land they found was boundless and open, much to the chagrin of the native Americans who had already occupied it. The process and ongoing failures of the main characters within the film are only eclipsed by the breathtaking scene of the Oklahoma landrace that the filmmakers were able to garner through a wide lens that was groundbreaking at the time. The camera on Cruise as he rode and wove his ultra-fast horse through the masses of humans gunning for free land has stood the test of time. It is awe-inspiring.

Did I tear up seeing such a scene? Maybe. Excuse me for feeling the swell of pride in seeing historical characters in poverty suddenly find themselves on a piece of land they could call their own. Was that fulfilling the American dream? I think so.

Bad - Amadeus (1984)

I love this movie. I saw edited portions of it in elementary school and it is part of why I enjoy classical music so much. It also has one of my favorite actors, F. Murray Abraham, playing the villainous Antonio Salieri. The movie got a lot right, from the costumes and sets to Wolfgang Amadeus' tortured soul and ridiculous laugh. It also portrayed the embryos of German and Italian nationalism in an argument over which language to use in Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio, as well as the nobility's fear of a coming revolution in France. There's a lot to like in this movie, but its history is flawed.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was probably not the lecherous wretch seen chasing women at a party on screen, while Salieri almost certainly was. He did commit his life and body to God like the movie shows, but he also had several opera singers as mistresses. More importantly, Mozart and Salieri were not enemies, and they may have even been friends. Surviving letters between the two include warm greetings and kind words, and Mozart invited Salieri to several openings for his operas. Of course, every good story needs a bad guy, and Abraham plays Salieri brilliantly. But unfortunately, his reputation and that of his music has suffered because of Amadeus. Some of his pieces are quite good (though Mozart's are better), and they deserve more attention than they get today.

Cultural History

Good - Dances with Wolves (1990)

Another three-hour film, Joe? You betcha. It was the 90s and people thought that film duration equaled some level of epic.

Seriously though, Dances with Wolves shows the account of a character named John Dunbar, an accidental hero in the Civil War who requests to be stationed out on the prairie before, in his words, “It’s completely gone.” The migration of the character from the battlefields of the east to the dangerous wild of the western prairie is entertaining and informative by itself. However, it’s not until we see him embrace the frontier and learn to communicate with the Lakota tribe that we get a deep sense of the character and the challenges he faces. Dunbar narrates his experiences from the perspective of his journal, where he details everything through words and illustrations. A favorite from the film is the buffalo hunt, where the audience is treated to a scene of what the herds of the big shaggies once were; literally like sand on the seashore. The score, beauty, and eeriness of the western prairie becomes more and more pronounced in the film as it goes on. For Dunbar, he is, in the end, swallowed by it in the best possible way.

It's difficult to conceptualize what life was like back then. It’s even harder to show and get buy-in from an audience regarding interest in that time period, especially now. If you make the plunge into this epic tale, prepare yourself. You will be immersed.

Bad - Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

Oh boy, talk about a disappointment. I saw the trailer for Elizabeth: The Golden Age and was so excited to see the Spanish Armada go up against the Royal Navy at the dawn of England's mastery of the seas. Then I saw the film, and I got a ridiculous love story, a confusing political scheme, and about four minutes of naval warfare. About the only accurate part of this film were the costumes - everything else is contracted for time, expanded for drama, or just plain invented by the screenwriters. Walter Raleigh never had an affair with Queen Elizabeth, and he was organizing English defenses on land during the Battle of Gravelines against the Spanish. Mary, Queen of Scots, did not speak with a Scottish accent or conspire openly with her courtiers to murder Elizabeth. The Babbington Plot conspirators never got close enough to Elizabeth to take a shot at her, and Francis Walsingham's brother did not exist and thus was not part of the plot. Building the Spanish Armada did require plenty of timber but did not strip Spain bare of trees. And King Philip II of Spain, though zealously Catholic, was more interested in protecting his treasure fleets from English pirates than deposing "the devil" Elizabeth and replacing her with Mary.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is also riddled with anti-Catholic imagery. Cathedrals are dark and foreboding, while the Protestant queen's chapel is light and breezy. Priests chant menacingly as the Spanish Armada departs for English shores. And crucifixes and rosaries float in burning seas after the fleet's defeat. Several Catholic friends of mine expressed disgust at these scenes, as did many Catholic film critics, especially since the shots did nothing to advance the muddled and disjointed plot of what should have been a great film.

Religious History

Good - The Mission (1986)

We’ve covered Spanish conquistadors on this podcast in the past, and this film shows you some of the horror they brought as they sought to enslave human beings. The Mission stars Robert Deniro as Rodrigo Mendoza, a slave trader who is converted to Christianity and seeks penance for his sins, both in slave trading and for a murder. The Jesuit priest, played by Jeremy Irons, convinces him to join them as they go back to the mission located in the jungles of Argentina. The penance takes the form of Mendoza carrying his armor and sword as a burden through the jungle. Initially, the natives (who know Mendoza from capturing their people) are afraid and attack him. As they walk with him and understand his remorse, they are the ones who cut his burden away and forgive him for what he has done.

The film proceeds along this storyline until other slave traders seek to attack the tribe, and Mendoza is forced to decide if his resistance – inspired by Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Katniss Everdeen 30 years later - will be active, or passive.

I chose this film because it outlines the work of the Jesuits in a way that shows the dangers they faced, while including a story that illustrates the road to redemption. You get a sense of brutality of the slave trade, the horror it brought to the world, and the heroic actions of those who stood against it.

Bad - The Da Vinci Code (2006)

In the first decade of the 21st century, we witnessed an interesting dichotomy in Western artistic circles. A certain group of religious extremists threatened, attacked, and even killed artists for daring to blaspheme their faith by showing images of their prophet, and the world was united in horror and rightly condemned these crimes. But at the same time, a writer and then a filmmaker turned another religion's savior into an unrecognizable mockery, and their peers lauded them as heroes of free speech. The Da Vinci Code is pseudo-religious garbage of the first order, but this is a history podcast, so we'll bypass that until next week (and you can send me your comments or complaints to 15minutehistorypodcast@gmail.com). The film also corrupts history to an unimaginable degree with claims that religions worshipped images that they factually did not, that men and women did things we know beyond question that they did not, and the events occurred where and when they did not. The Israelites did not worship the "sacred feminine" alongside God. Constantine did not try to merge the historical Jesus of Nazareth with Gnosticism. And the Knights Templar did not find the Holy Grail in Jerusalem and protect it for the next few centuries.

As a thriller story, The Da Vinci Code is, well, okay. I think Tom Hanks is pretty wooden as Robert Langdon, and the brilliant Audrey Tautou is entirely tree-like as Sophie Neveau. Ian McKellen does a great job as the nutty-turned-psychotic academic Leigh Teabing, but then I listened to his words. My historian's skin crawled as he warbled on about the Priory of Scion being the secret guardians of truth against the evil Catholic Church for over a thousand years. The Priory was invented in the 1950s by a disturbed French artist, while the Catholic Church, despite its flaws, had fed, housed, and educated more people than any other organization in history. Then Teabing went on to mock - nay, murder - the history of the early Church, and I knew The Da Vinci Code was top of this list.

Political History

Good - John Adams (2008 Miniseries)

Based on a 2001 book by David McCullough, this HBO series faithfully showed the story of John Adams from 1770-1826. Through a series of seven episodes, the audience is treated to the first 50 years of American history through the eyes of one of the founding fathers. Steeped in history, based in fact (kind of), the story is a masterclass is the portrayal of history in an interesting way.

Bad - Game Change (2012)

First religion, and now politics! The 2008 presidential election will always stand out in my mind - the first woman with a real shot at a major party's nomination, a car-crash Republican primary that I thought could never be topped in its divisiveness, and the election of the first African American president. All a historian and government teacher's dream! I read the book Game Change and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a (mostly) fair summary of events in the two parties' campaigns with some fascinating insights into the election that, I thought, ought to have been revealed before we went to the polls.

The Game Change movie should have brought the drama of 2008 to life, but it missed the mark entirely. The book is 23 chapters long, but the film covers only three of them. The book tells the story of four presidential campaigns: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and John McCain. The film is entirely about McCain's, and only after he won the Republican nomination (which, I thought, was the most interesting part of the book). Game Change is really about Governor Sarah Palin's role as McCain's running mate. Her time on the national stage was certainly a political game changer that, from a historian's viewpoint, prefaced the events of 2016 by almost a decade. The film highlights the very real struggles Palin endured on the campaign trail and her staffers' mostly-unsuccessful efforts to help her. But it would have you believe that a transformational and controversial woman suffered numerous meltdowns before "going rogue" while side-stepping the objectively-positive effects of her candidacy. And it completely ignores the fascinating three-way contest between a community organizer, a former first lady, and a sleazy North Carolina lawyer on the other side of the political aisle. It could have been so much better.

Alternate History

Good - Watchman (2009)

This one was a hard category to just pick one. The choices are limitless and depending on what kind of alternate history we reference, our options can literally be out of the world. With this in mind, I tried to pick a story that was as close to the real events as possible.

Set against the same historical events as ours, this timeline shows what may have happened if superheroes were real. In the story, almost every “hero” has some level of special ability, though it’s never clear if those are unique, special, or super. Instead, we are forced to believe that the heroes in the story are all somehow extraordinary. There is one exception, Dr. Manhattan, whose literal god-like powers cause massive changes in the timeline. From ending the Vietnam War in victory for the Americans within 48 hours to being THE nuclear deterrent for against the Soviet Union, the character serves as the pinnacle of power to the very end. To that end, the audience realizes that of all the heroes, there’s only actually one, and he pays for it.

This is a good movie only because of the alternate timeline. In reality, it’s kind of depressing, and though it was good filmmaking, I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it again. It does have strong female characters that were thankfully inspired by Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Katniss Everdeen almost a decade later, so there’s one bonus, but overall, while interesting and thought-provoking, it’s not something to watch for fun on Friday night. Also, the adult themes in the film are off the charts, so definitely not for kids.

Added Note: I know this isn’t a movie, but one of the most entertaining alternate history stories is the Hard Magic series, written by Larry Correia. Check it out.

Bad - The Hunger Games (2012)

Maybe I'm out of the mainstream on this, but I don't find movies about children killing children appealing. The Hunger Games is one of the dozens of alternate histories written for teenagers about our world being destroyed, a tyrannical government rising to power, and a strong female protagonist fighting for freedom and finding love. If you want a good alternate history, watch V for Vendetta or [Joe's choice]. Jennifer Lawrence may have been the first woman ever to star in an action film, but the poor girl can't act her way out of a cardboard box. The story is a paint-by-numbers teen drama with a forbidden love triangle and cartoonish villains straight out of the Met Gala with no depth beyond being evil, all set in a world so boring that I was hoping another nuke or plague might finish it off. Maybe the books are better and the filmmakers had to cut out all the interesting stuff. I wouldn't know; I couldn't get through the first chapter because it felt like reading a teenager's diary. Katniss Everdeen may be the "bestest girl-boss ever," but she's still killing kids.

Honorable Mentions

Good Movie I Hate - The English Patient (1996)

Great acting, sure. Pacing? Yes. Score? On point. Story? Meh.

This film won countless awards, was lauded by critics and audiences all over the world, and was talked about at every middle-class table for weeks. In my subjective, probably wrong opinion, but by the end of the film I found myself jealous of the character receiving the lethal dose of morphine. This film for me was like The Notebook, but in WW2, in a love triangle that took away from the backdrop, which in almost every scene, I cared more about.

I fully expect to be told I’m wrong. I invite the pushback. Shower me with your criticisms. I just didn’t like this and sometimes, there doesn’t have to be a reason why.

Terrible Movie I Love - Deep Blue Sea (1999)

I have a newfound respect for Joe writing two of these lists - doing just one has been depressing. So let's end with a film that is just awful but I adore: Deep Blue Sea. The story is about scientists trying to cure Alzheimer’s by harvesting tissue from sharks' brains. But then, shudder-gasp, the sharks get smart! They get loose in a flooded ocean research lab, and it's Jaws-meets-Alien. The acting is mostly dreadful. Saffron Burrows (a woman bizarrely cast in an action movie thirteen years before Jennifer Lawrence) and Thomas Jane have about as much romantic chemistry as two half-eaten fish. And the sharks look terrible, though I'd rather be eaten by one than hear Michael Rappaport's screechy voice.

So why do I love this movie, apart from watching Rappaport get eaten? Three reasons. First, the legendary Samuel L. Jackson gives hands-down the best inspirational speech in any disaster movie. Second, LL Cool J killing a shark with his kitchen oven while quoting Scripture and arguing with his pet parrot is cinema gold. And third, I have great memories of showing Deep Blue Sea to my sister for the first time. At the moment the shark jumps out of the water, I threw a rolled-up sock that hit her right in the face. She screamed to the ceiling, I fell off the couch laughing, and mom thought the house was on fire. Terrible movie, but good Streeter family memories.