a sort of movie, sort of history podcast
https://www.patreon.com/GladioFreeEurope
The podcast Gladio Free Europe is created by Gladio Free Europe. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
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The story of the Haitian Revolution is well-known. From the oath at Bois Caiman to the large-scale slave revolt which birthed the nation and subsequent war against the Napoleonic invasion force, the revolution is filled with cinematic moments of great poignancy. But what happened next?
Usually the story ends with Jean-Jacques Dessalines taking power, but with the help of our Haitian-born and raised friend Sebastian, we take the story further, and explore just what happened to this Caribbean nation for the remainder of the 19th century. We take aim at Haiti's troubled economics , political system, and internal racial politics.
The story is told through the lens of the many colorful personalities who took the reins of power while styling themselves monarchs. From Henri Christophe to Faustin Soulouque, Haitian history is filled with figures who sought to emulate French political forms despite the antagonistic relationship between these two countries.
The imperial moniker was partly a signifier intended for foreign consumption, but it had a ring of truth to it as well, as these rulers built palaces through corvee labor, minted aristocrats, and sought to impose their authority over their Spanish-speaking neighbors in what is today the Dominican Republic.
So what went on in Haiti? Listen to the episode to find out.
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See Sebastian's Substack Kaskad for more contemporary Haiti analysis.
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"And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need." King James Bible, Acts 2:44
"And when they found them not, they drew Jason and certain brethren unto the rulers of the city, crying, These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also." King James Bible, Acts 17:6
Liam and Russian Sam are joined by once again by Jackson (@GraceCathedralPark) for a two thousand summary of American radicalism and the utopian tradition. Since ancient times, religious and moral conviction has compelled the most pious among us to leave this sinful world behind.
Jewish groups like the Essenes and the Ebionites were joned by the earliest Christian monks in their complete rejection of secular society, preferring to live in intentional communities organized toward complete observance of religious commandments. These groups, who may have included the first followers of Jesus, held their property in common and believed they could lead mankind by their example toward a new moral world.
By the European Middle Ages, Christian institutions had taken on all the venal and violent obligations of the state. Reformers seeking to challenge the worldly power of the church were met by centuries of brutal oppression. By the 16th century these contradictions had become too much to bear, with the eruption of the Protestant Reformation and the flowering of idealistic sectarians. Some of these groups, like the Anabaptists and the Diggers, sought to upend the material hierarchies of man and make all equal before God. When these groups were also hunted down, even by their fellow Protestants, the dream of a new beginning survived across the sea.
Religious settlers like the Puritans and Quakers saw the wild American lands as a blank slate for their moral dreams, while more materialistic colonists used the New World to engineer new systems of extraction and domination unimaginable back home. Many of these groups created communes in the wilderness, some surviving for months and others for centuries. As Enlightenment writers argued for the equality of man based on reason rather than scripture, and the American and French Revolutions called all political secular communitarian projects also began to emerge. Most significant of all of these was New Harmony, the utopian experiment of reformed capitalist and lifelong idealist Robert Owen. Though New Harmony would not be a particularly long-lived commune, it cemented Owen as one of the most famous men of the early 19th century and a father of the socialist movement. Like many parents, Owen would see some of his children turn away from him, yet his lifelong agitation would lay the groundwork for more enduring transformative projects. While we now understand the utopian movement to have failed, Owen and his two thousands years of forebears succeeded in inspiring mankind to build a new moral world.
Listen to the end of this one to hear about Jackson's own radical utopian dream: BYU for Owenism.
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2000 years ago, Roman began a campaign of suppression against the defiant sages of barbarian Gaul. Yet millennia later, these druids survive. Their memory would inspire generations of alchemists, aristocrats, alternative-spiritualists, and eventually the creators of Britain's most iconic horror film.
On this week's episode of Gladio Free Europe, Liam and Russian Sam continues their survey over the druids, moving from the practices and beliefs of the ancient holy men to the generations of occultists and eccentrics who have sought to recapture their arcane knowledge. The strange road of neo-druidism winded its way to inspire The Wicker Man, the immortal 1973 picture set on an island of new-age recluses who revive their ancestral beliefs with murderous results.
For over 500 years, scholars and hobbyists have pored over the scant surviving references to the pagan priests of the ancient Celts, convinced that Western Europe's first recorded wise men were key to understanding the history of modern peoples in Britain and Ireland. These scholars, looking through a kaleidoscope of ideology, all believed they could use the secrets of the druids to advance their own spiritual and political agendas. Figures like Conrad Celtis, Iolo Morganwg, William Stukely, and Margaret Murray wore the robes of the druids to advance the cause of Christianity, anti-Christianity, Jacobinism, Jacobitism, freemasonry and deism. Neo-druidic belief and ritual has been used to promote a unified British imperial identity, and to defend regional Celtic cultures against English domination.
Listen to this week's episode of Gladio Free Europe to see how a half millennium of European history has shaped and been shaped by memories of the druids, the world's most enduring counterculture.
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Unique among the barbarians of ancient Europe, the Celtic tribes of Britain and Gaul were led by a sophisticated priesthood. The druids, who left us no writing of their own, fascinated and frightened their literate neighbors in Greece and Rome. Described as both brilliant philosophers and murderous bloodletters, these ancient sages were fundamental to the classical understanding of the pagan world, and widely discussed even after being suppressed and outlawed as a dangerous cult. But the druids could not be defeated so easily, as scattered references persist until the middle ages, and they continue to captivate the minds of historians and occultists to this day. Pick up your sickle and venture into the sacred grove, and join Gladio Free Europe as we glean the secrets of the druids.
Liam and Russian Sam go on a deep dive of virtually all available information on just who the druids were, from the classical texts of Julius Caesar and Pliny the Elder to medieval Irish poetry and startling discoveries in modern archaeological. Listen to this episode to learn all about Celtic human sacrifice, Indo-European horse worship, and St. Patrick's epic rap battle of history against his druid slave-masters. Because this is Gladio Free Europe, our episode could not be complete with a quick return to one of our favorite topics, the bog bodies.
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Ready your crossbow as we venture up high into the Swiss Alps, a tyrannous bailiff might be nearby! This week we explore the William Tell, a national symbol of Switzerland, and the very real history which inspired his story. Join us as we venture back into a time before the Swiss were neutral, before they were known for their chocolate, and before they were even a state. How did this plucky assortment of cantons cohere in the first place, and how does the truth of Swiss history compare with the idyllic land imagined by Orson Welles when he quipped that in 500 years of democracy and peace they produced little more than the cuckoo clock.
Through all of this, the legend of William Tell was born and reborn regularly with a new message, a new intended audience, and a new platform, but always with the same goal: the pursuit of liberty and the battle against injustice. From the Swiss Rebellion of 1654, led by the Three Tells themselves risen from hibernation, to the Napoleonic Wars when William Tell became a symbol of the Helvetic Republic, to the pan-Germanic William Tell imagined by Friedrich Schiller in the eponymous play, William Tell has lived more lives than most.
Hop on our ski lift for one last look at William Tell’s winding journey, through medieval revolts, Napoleonic upheavals, and Schiller’s literary magic. Is he a flesh-and-blood freedom fighter or a cunning invention of Swiss lore? Grab your gear, the slopes are calling.
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Every aspect of our modern lives is commodified and decimalized, from the minutes of our labor to the food upon our table. All goods and services we consume are produced and handled by professionals, who spend their lives developing their mobile arsenal of mental and tactile skills because they can outsource the production of food and shelter to other workers. Yet until 300 years ago, this way of life was completely alien to everyone outside a small population of urban merchants and artisans.
Liam and Russian Sam are joined once again by Jackson @gracecthdralprk to explore the city before capitalism, when urban people were small, ambitious, and literate minority distinct from the peasants and princes who lived outside the city walls. This episode of Gladio Free Europe dives into early modern city life, and particularly the artisan system that was the engine of pre-capitalistic production. Drawing on the works of Yuri Slezkine, Sean Wilentz, and E.P. Thompson, this discussion looks at the early relationship between city and country, and the development of an artisan political consciousness, especially in the early United States.
As the 19th century progressed and wage labor began to take hold across industrializing economies, the artisans recognized that their way of life was collapsing and refused to go without a fight. Artisan radicalism would fail, their early 19th century militancy laid the foundation for later working class agitation. The values and aspirations of these ambitious craftsmen would come to define the logic of the entire world.
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Brains. Rot. A shambling gait. Everyone knows the tropes that make up zombie, but how did this strange cocktail come to be? Liam and Russian Sam paddle through dark and torrid waters in this week's episode of Gladio Free Europe to chart the origins of the zombie from Afro-Caribbean folklore to today's Hollywood monstrosities.
Possibly the most enduring creature of the classic era of horror cinema, zombies continue to petrify moviegoers in ways that mummies and wolfmen and even vampires do not. But unique among this pantheon of monsters, the zombie is rooted in African religious traditions that crossed into the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade. In fact, the word "zombie" first appears as an appellation of a slave rebel centuries before it was associated with the undead. But by the 19th century, the term reemerged among practitioners of vodou, the unique religion of Haiti that blends Catholicism with traditional West African religions. In the context of vodou, a zombie came to mean the most horrible product of black magic: an empty corpse brought back to life by being filled with the soul of another, always in order to do that person's bidding.
Modern movie zombies have little in common with Haitian folk religion, drawing as much from European stories of ghosts and vampires as from vodou. But elements of vodou and the folk memory of the brutality of slavery survive in unexpected ways in zombie lore. The fear of zombies may be so resilient because they remind us of the brutal domination of man over man. The act of zombification thus represents a fear that lurks in all of our hearts, and a fear that became reality for millions of Africans in the colonial era: that a simple change of fortune could strip of us our will and personhood, and that we could be forced to exist with our humanity stripped away.
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Humans have been consuming alcohol for as long as we've been human, yet the identification of alcoholism as a chronic addiction is startlingly modern. The history of alcoholism, and the various ways to solve it, provide a great look at the shifting social attitudes around addiction. Many of these disparate ideas come together in the controversial 12-Step Program made ubiquitous by Alcoholics Anonymous.
Liam and Russian Sam are joined once more by their good friend Jon to discuss the past 10 million years of alcoholism, beginning with the earliest known consumption of fermented fruit by our simian ancestors and moving through the 18th century gin crisis and the Victorian temperance movement. Across the 19th century, physicians and preachers clashed over the concept of addiction as a medical condition or a personal moral failing. While the former understanding is now taken for granted, moralistic interpretations steeped in Protestant theology survive in many addiction treatments, including the 12-Step Program.
Jon walks us through the origins and practice of this program, laid out in the 1930s by the enigmatic "Bill W," an alcoholic who turned to both Carl Jung and Lutheranism to help with his addiction. As his program mushroomed into a global movement, his eccentric ideology became scripture for millions of people seeking treatment. Jon describes his own experiences with this philosophy and recounts some of the more controversial aspects of Bill W's life 12-Step Programs writ large.
Jon's Substack: https://dfg.substack.com
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The United States has a fairly long and established history for a state, long enough that the country is approaching its 250th anniversary in just a few years. Much has changed in that time, while other things have failed to progress far enough. To look at this history of continuity and change, we decided to dive into the American centennial and bicentennial celebrations, as well as the history surrounding them.
Although 1876 and 1976 seem distant, the two years actually have a fair bit in common. Civil rights, nefarious government overreach, economic downturn, labor militancy and more were in the forefront of American minds during both periods. Whether in the Gilded Age or in the period dubbed by some "American Glasnost," the United States continued to battle demons along similar lines, and the powers that be hoped that the festivities surrounding the country's birthday would bring to mind the glorious past and future rather than the lackluster present.
But whether the celebrations in Philadelphia were framed by the World's Fair or a giant concert, whether they were presided over by Emperor Pedro II of Brazil or Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, the celebrations could not drown out the grittiness of lived experience. Join us as we put that grit under a microscope and explore the bacteria found within.
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Many podcasts were conceived during the pandemic, but few have proved as long-lasting as our humble broadcasts. After over three years of honing the craft and sharing so many stories, the whole gang reunites to assess our body of work. Liam, Abram, and the Sams have an engaging chat about what Gladio has meant to us and recall some of our favorite episodes.
A special shout-out goes out to our listeners. You have given us the resolve to keep putting these out and I hope that you find our work engaging and entertaining. Here's to a hundred more episodes!
Mentioned Episodes:
E01 Yegor Letov and the National Bolshevik Party
E14 Les Rallizes Dénudés ft. Zach
E58 Cyrus Teed and Koreshanity
E87 The Meiji Restoration and Hokkaido ft. John Bellamy Poster
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Liam and Russian Sam continue their exploration of the fall of the Roman world, as described by revolutionary historian Henri Pirenne. Writing between the world wars, the great Belgian scholar used cutting-edge research methods to analyze changes in the economy and society of the 6th century, describing a Roman world in Western Europe that lumbered on without Rome. According to Pirenne, the greatest shock to this unstable system was the rise of the Islamic Caliphate in the early 7th century, which broke off contact between east and west, turned the Mediterranean into a "Muslim lake," and gave the Eastern Roman Empire a challenge far greater than the Goths or Persians of old. Across the next 200 years, the once-Roman world would adapt to this great new change. The ensuing turbulence in the west would lead to the rise of the Carolingian Franks and the new Empire of Charlemagne, which would bring Western Europe out of antiquity and truly into the Middle Ages.
This episode of Gladio Free Europe is a roller-coaster across the 7th and 8th centuries, featuring colorful personalities such as the gold-nosed Byzantine Emperor Justinian II and the legendary feuding queens Fredegund and Brunhilda. Come listen to see how arcane questions of the nature of Jesus led to bloodshed across the Mediterranean, and decide for yourself whether or not the fall of Rome happened with the collapse of the Roman empire in 476, or the birth of a new empire on Christmas Day, 800.
Further Listening:
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On September 4, 476 the barbarian general Odoacer deposed the last Roman emperor in the West and proclaimed himself king of Italy. After 500 years of existence, the Western Roman Empire was gone. But if you were living there at the time, would you have even noticed anything had changed?
Liam and Russian Sam return to one of their favorite historical subjects, an area that has energized and terrified generations of scholars for 1500 years: the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire. Considered to mark the end of classical antiquity and the start of the middle ages, this event was traditionally understood to be the fundamental cataclysm of the history of Europe, perhaps even the history of the world. But on the eve of the Second World War, aging Belgian historian Henri Pirenne proposed an alternative view: that the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of the barbarian kingdoms only amounted to a change in management. The real transformation of the Roman world into the medieval world would not happen until centuries later, when the empires of the Muslims and the Carolingian Franks built new political and economic systems that replaced what had been left by Rome.
This is the key argument of Mohammed and Charlemagne, Pirenne's most famous work published posthumously in 1937 and one of the most revolutionary texts in medieval history. Still hotly debated today, Pirenne's thesis upended a seemingly adamantine tradition of scholarship established by the Italian humanist Petrarch in the 14th century, and elaborated by later historians such a Edward Gibbon, which viewed the medieval period as a detestable Dark Age that had to be redeemed by the discovery of Roman glory. While not rejecting outright the notion of an early-medieval Dark Age, Pirenne put forward a strong argument for continuity across the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries, interrupted not by the invasions of barbarian peoples but instead by the later rise of the Muslim caliphate. New religious divisions severed the arteries of trade and communication that united the Mediterranean world. And when a new Roman Empire emerged in the west the following century, Pirenne argues that this realm of Charlemagne did not restore Roman civilization as once was believed, but instead created a new imperial system just like their Arab contemporaries.
Listen to this week's Gladio Free Europe to decide for yourself if the end of the Western Roman Empire did or did not mark the end of the Roman world.
Further Listening:
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Liam and Russian Sam tunnel beneath the hills of Mexico to uncover the remarkable history behind the 1948 film "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and its creators.
Based on a 1927 novel about three American gold-hunters torn apart by greed, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the only modern novels whose author is effectively unknown. Attributed only to the mysterious "B. Traven," a German residing in Mexico, speculation over the writer's identity takes us through the German Revolution of 1919 and rumors of secret illegitimate sons of industrialists and Kaiser.
Celebrated in its time for its stark depiction of human brutality, the novel ascended to immortality when director John Huston adapted Traven's story in an usual western in 1948. Starring Humphrey Bogart and Huston's father Walter as prospectors, the film is regarded among the greatest riches of classic Hollywood cinema.
Listen to this episode of Gladio Free Europe to dig through the dirt of deception and intrigue surrounding both the novel and the film, and decide for yourself just who was B. Traven.
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Further Listening:
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Liam, Russian Sam, and Turan Explorer continue their journey across the vast steppe of Hungarian Turanism in this episode on Ármin Vámbéry, the all-time Orientalist white boy whose remarkable wanderings were fundamental to the development of the Hungarian obsession with the East, and the rise of a political movement that would convince millions of Central Europeans that they were in fact Central Asians deep down.
Coming from the humblest of beginnings in Slovakia, Vámbéry overcame abject poverty, brutal antisemitism, and Hungarian Slovakia entirely due to his remarkable language learning abilities and unyielding perseverance. After being hired as a language tutor at the age of 10, he found friends in the local elite of Hungary, eventually pursuing his dream of visiting the Ottoman Empire as a young man. Quickly becoming a favorite of the Turkish aristocracy, one of the only non-Muslims to be called "Effendi," Vámbéry then traveled even further east while posing as an Islamic Dervish, first to Persia and then to the much more remote lands of Central Asia, to cities like Bukhara and Khiva that had not been visited by any European for centuries.
After his return, Vámbéry was celebrated across Europe as one of the 19th century's most prominent orientalists. His research and memoirs were of great interest to the British and Russian governments, who each had their own imperial designs on the regions he visited. But in his homeland of Austria-Hungary, Vámbéry's research inaugurated a national obsession with Central Asia, believed to be the homeland of the Hungarian people. By the end of his life in 1913, this Turanist movement had become the most powerful force in Hungarian nationalism, and Vámbéry its prophet. Just as theories of white supremacy were taking hold everywhere else in Europe, Hungarian nationalists proclaimed brotherhood with the peoples of Turkey, Uzbekistan, Japan, and many other nations abroad.
After his death, the dismemberment of Hungary following World War One caused a rise of ultra-nationalism throughout the nation, and a subsequent failed revolution led by communist Bela Kun shifted Turanism in a violent anticommunist direction. Turan Explorer covers the ways Turanism adapted to the increasingly antisemitic climate of the 1920s and 1930s, even though many earlier Turanists, including Vámbéry, had been Jewish themselves. Last, Russian Sam explores the ways that Hungarian Jews adopted a form of Turanism as a nationalist mythology specific to their own community. Though now-debunked, the popular Khazar theory envisioned Jewish Hungarians as the blood relatives of their Christian neighbors, and shows how this strange obsession with the East could unite disparate groups as much as divide.
Turan Explorer is on Twitter, Tiktok, and Youtube. He also has a podcast, available on Spotify and other platforms.
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This week, we have a very special guest coming to us from the steppe via transfer in Central Europe. This episode is all about the constitutive elements of Hungarian Turanism, the ideology that traces Hungarian origins back into Asia and often comes with a political program for what to do with that knowledge. In this multi-part series, we set the stage for a later exploration of Turanism as a doctrine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But before we go there, we must dive into the murky origins of the Hungarian people as derived from linguistic and genetic evidence, and how Hungarians of the medieval and early modern period conceptualized this migration. We have medieval chronicles deriving a biblically-based genealogy of the Hungarian people, we have early modern legal thinkers of the aristocracy constructing a doctrine of racial supremacy over their class inferiors, this one has it all!
What relationship do the Hungarians have to the Turkic peoples? Are the Hungarians descended from the Huns of Attila? Was the progenitor of the Arpad dynasty sired by a bird? Find the answers to these questions and more on this episode of Gladio Free Europe.
Turan Explorer is on Twitter, Tiktok, and Youtube. He also has a podcast, available on Spotify and other platforms.
Closing song: Gabor Szabo - Galatea's Guitar
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There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. Vladimir Lenin surprisingly did not say these words about 2014, a year that saw monumental pivots in culture, technology, and world events and arguably never ended at all.
Liam and Russian Sam are joined this week by their good friend Jackson or Grace Cathedral Park, a longtime advocate of the concept of "The Long 2014." They discuss how the last years of the Obama administration inaugurated a lasting vibe shift, from rise of Netflix to the brutal emergence of ISIS, or the ways that the parallel development of Black Lives Matter and the odious GamerGate galvanized masses of young Americans into extremely different forms of political rebellion.
Join Gladio Free Europe for our most recent historical exploration yet, and decide for yourself whether the Long 2014 has yet come to a close.
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The Dune series has gone through a revival of late thanks to the film adaptations of Denis Villeneuve, but what are we to make of it? In this episode we explore Dune through the lens of its author, Frank Herbert. His beliefs defy easy political classification according to today's preconceived notions, making him difficult to situate. Herbert was a libertarian who was deeply uneasy with market forces, a localist with great sympathy for indigenous and anticolonial causes, and a dyed in the wool environmentalist who voted for Reagan, on top of being a fiend for psychedelics and an inveterate JFK hater. What are we to make of all this?
In addition to Herbert's personal beliefs and political philosophy, we explore the many different real-world influences that filled in the details of Herbert's world. Although the series is set some 20,000 years in the future, traces of currently existing human cultures persisted and gave color to this world, from the martial spirit of Caucasian and North African liberation fighters to a liberal mishmash of Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, and other beliefs which continue to inform the faiths and actions of the peoples of this world.
So just who was Frank Herbert, how did this inform his writing, and what went into the worldbuilding of the Duniverse? Find out on this week's episode of Gladio Free Europe.
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Since the 17th century, nearly 10 million Irish people left their homes for an uncertain life abroad. While stories of Irish settlement in the United States and Canada are well-known, the lives of tens of thousands of Irish people who settled in Latin America are much more obscure.
In the first Gladio Free Europe solo episode, Liam runs through the long history of the Irish presence in Latin America. As early as the time of Shakespeare many Irish people began pledging their service to the formidable Spanish Empire, out of desperation, defiance, or duty to their Catholic faith. These Irish volunteers, later termed "the Wild Geese," were deployed on Spanish military adventures across the entire known world, but saw their most notable success in the American colonies. Some Irishmen would settle in Latin America as members of the colonial elite, while others would shake the foundations of the Spanish empire and push toward independence.
The Irish experience in Latin America would have its most brilliant moment in the middle of the 19th century, after Spain had been evicted from the American continent and a new hegemon emerged. At the start of the Mexican-American war, a group of mistreated Irish recruits and survivors of the great famine defected from American service to join the enemy. Driven by both Catholic and republican ideals, these men would form their own unit to defend the Mexican state against United States aggression. Although the San Patricio Battalion would be short-lived, they played a crucial role in halting the American advance and their sacrifice is a testament to over two centuries of Hispanic-Hibernian cooperation.
Ending song: El Caballo by The Chieftains
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In 1675, the Puritan colonies in North America were fighting for their lives. A brilliant young commander named Metacomet assembled a Native American coalition that upended a half-century of colonialism, pushed the English back to the coast, and would come very close to obliterating settler life in New England.
In this episode of Gladio Free Europe, Liam and Russian Sam return to colonial New England to cover King Philip's War, a conflict that is little-known today, but provides one of the greatest "What Ifs" of American history. The psychological terror of Metacomet's revolt, and the brutal English reprisals that followed, would have enormous implications on the development of racial hierarchy and the expulsion of indigenous peoples. And while Metacomet was not even 40 when he was drawn and quartered by the English, he would live forever in the nightmares of the Puritans and the memories of Native Americans, as one of the greatest icons of resistance and rebellion this continent has seen.
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Related Episodes: E59 Indigenous New England and the First Thanksgiving
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In November 1622, the great diplomat Squanto died while leading a trade expedition with his English allies. Only a year had passed since he formed a treaty between the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the indigenous Wampanoag people. While the early years of English-Indian relations were marked by cooperation and accommodation, including the famous Thanksgiving feast, Squanto's passing marked a descent into a period of slowly ramping hostilities, culminating in the first war fought between English settlers and Native Americans.
This episode of Gladio Free Europe explores the continuing history of colonial New England, across the 1620s and '30s as the English population rapidly swelled, in large part due to the establish of the new Massachusetts Bay colony which would quickly overshadow Plymouth and the original Pilgrims. While the Pilgrims and Puritans maintained warm relations with some native peoples, such as the great Mohegan chief Uncas, competition over land and resources drew them into conflict with others.
Though little known today, the Pequot War would have particularly grave consequences on English-indigenous relations, as it set the precedent for mass slaughter of Indian women and children and ended with the enslavement of the entire Pequot nation. Massachusetts and Connecticut are not remembered as slave societies, but captive Native Americans formed an essential role in the colonial economy and helped normalize the institutions of slavery and racial segregation across the English colonies.
Listen to understand how the peace of the First Thanksgiving collapsed into the bloodshed and subjugation that defined the American colonial experience, and try to uncover how the consequences of this turn towards violence shaped our country for the worse for centuries to come.
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In 1615, just days before the New Year, famed astronomer Johannes Kepler received the news that would change his life. His mother Katharina had been accused as a witch. Over the next 6 years, the Keplers would battle these charges with every means at their disposal, just as the world around them began to collapse into the carnage of the Thirty Years' War.
Gladio Free Europe continues our foray into the dusky world of European witchcraft with our account of the witch of Katharina Kepler. Liam and Russian Sam explore how at the cusp of modernity, one of the figures most responsible for heralding changes in science and reason found himself battling against the forces of superstition. While a belief in witchcraft is now rightfully considered archaic and irrational, many people in this time attempted to reconcile theories of black magic with modern techniques of logic and rhetoric. This makes Katharina's charges, and her son's attempts to fight them, an amazing chapter of the history of both science and magic in Early Modern Europe.
This episode touches on so many topics and themes explored on this podcast in previous years. The story of Katharina Kepler is a incredible skeleton key for understanding the changes that erupted out of Germany over 400 years ago and, in that bloody process, gave us the modern world.
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Each Christmas season, the mountain peoples of Europe are beset by monsters. Fearsome figures like Krampus, Perchta, and the Kuker descend into quaint hilltop villages, sometimes to spread holiday cheer, sometimes to hasten the coming of spring, and sometimes just to sew chaos and discord. These figures are all part of similar winter celebrations found across the Alps, stretching from their western foothills in France all the way to the Dinaric Alps of the Balkans. Due to the primal nature of these traditions, in which men and women wear the skins of beasts and the faces of demons, scholars and churchmen have wondered for decades if these Christmas festivals could really be a remnant of much older traditions.
On this week's episode of Gladio Free Europe, Liam and Russian Sam explore the history of these Christmastime monsters, and the widespread traditions of people wearing their costumes to parade through the streets. While drawing a straight from Krampus to ancient Alpine paganism is not particularly easy, some of these figures offer interesting parallels to what we know of the traditional pantheons that Christianity supplanted.
Historians today are much hesitant to attribute modern beliefs to paganism than they might have been in the time of the Brothers Grimm. But it's clear that these traditions are among the oldest in Europe, with interesting to the development of witchcraft lore and even the spread of deadly witch hunts across medieval and Early Modern Europe.
Join us on a trip to the snowy highlands of Austria, Germany, Slovenia, and Bulgaria and decide for yourself if these winter monsters may be our last remnant of the pagan world.
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This week, friend of the pod John Bellamy Poster commandeered a gunship and made his way onto Gladio Free Europe to discuss 19th century Japanese history in the backdrop of the unique historical manga Golden Kamuy.
Exploring the pivotal moments that reshaped Japan, John takes us through the monumental arrival of Commodore Perry's black ships, an event that broke Japan's 220-year-old policy of isolation and precipitated a domino effect of change. We delve into the Meiji Restoration, an era of rapid modernization and westernization, which saw the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate and the reinstatement of imperial rule. The Boshin War, a civil war that symbolized the end of the samurai era, is examined through the lens of its influence on Japanese society and politics. Lastly, we traverse the rugged terrains of Hokkaido and discuss the beginning of its colonization, shedding light on the cultural and economic impacts this had on the indigenous Ainu people, as well as Japan itself.
Interspersed with references to the gripping saga of Golden Kamuy, John explains how this historical manga offers a visceral narrative that intertwines these significant events with the lives of its richly developed characters. Join us on Gladio Free Europe for a journey through the transformative epochs of Japan, brought to life by history and manga alike.
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We return to the dark foothills of the Carpathians in our continuing history of Transylvania. This episode focuses on Europe's most infamous countess, Elizabeth Bathory, accused of torturing and killing up to 600 hundred young girls gathered from across Central Europe. While it's now agreed that Elizabeth Bathory was not a vampire, and didn't even bathe in anyone's blood, whether or not she was a serial killer has led to some interesting debate.
Join us as we lay out the facts of the Bathory case and decide for yourself if this enigmatic nobleman woman was Transylvania's Jeffrey Dahmer or the innocent victim of a Habsburg conspiracy. Afterward, we chart the the development of the 19th century interest in both vampires and Eastern Europe, beginning with Lord Byron and culminating in Bram Stoker's 1897 masterpiece Dracula—not only one of the most influential novels ever composed, but also an amazing window into the imperial anxieties of late Victorian Britain.
Protect your neck, kid! We're back to Transylvania.
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Americans are known for many things. Geographic insight of Eastern Europe is not one of them. Yet every American over age six can tell you which Romanian region is the home of Count Dracula. Thanks to the incredible popularity of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Transylvania has a unique place in the American and British popular consciousness, totally beyond that of any other province in this part of the world. To see how this came to pass, we have to understand the ways that Dracula is a snapshot of Victorian fears, fascinations, and colonial psychoses and explore the real history of this long-contested region.
In this two-part series, Liam and Russian Sam pore over the ancient tomes to uncover both the history of Transylvania and the strange, circuitous path that gave this region its uniquely macabre reputation, from the first invasions of the Magyars that terrified Christian Europe, to the establishment of German colonies that may have inspired by the Pied Piper legend, and ultimately the blood, brutal career of Vlad the Impaler. Although he never actually ruled Transylvania, the real-life Dracula's persecution of German-speakers became one of Europe's first media spectacles, giving this proud eastern boyar an afterlife that he still enjoys today.
Don't forget the garlic as you join Gladio Free Europe on this excursion down the Danube, as we venture into the land beyond the forest.
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In 1869, the Meiji Emperor declared the northern island of Hokkaido to be sovereign territory of Japan. In a process direclty inspired by American colonization, Japanese settlers were brought in to "civilize" the territory, a process which would have terrible consequences for the indigenous inhabitants -- a non-Japanese people known as the Ainu.
Japanese colonists and western onlookers derisively viewed the Ainu as isolated primitives, at best isolated remnants of the ancient Jomon people ancestral to the mainland Japanese. This is nonsense. The Ainu and their predecessors have a rich history of interaction with the peoples of Asia, including the Japanese, and have an illustrious history that goes back many hundreds of years.
This episode of Gladio Free Europe charts the course of Ainu history before the conquest of Hokkaido. Using archaeology and archaeogenetics, cover the ancient mingling of various Northeast Asian peoples who populares the island and investigate longstanding claims that the Ainu are related to various outside groups. Chinese early Japanese sources also give us incredibly insights into early relations between Hokkaido and the outside world. We discuss the fearsome Emishi people, a medieval community that has long been associated with the Ainu, who feature prominently in the film Princess Mononoke, and recount how the expansion of Ainu people into mainland Siberia led to a long war against the Mongols.
By the Sengoku Era, feudal warlords began competing for access over the growing Hokkaido trade, which led to the establishment of Japanese settlements on the island. In this period, the Ainu came under Japanese occupation without falling under the protection of Japanese law. This exploitative situation had profoundly negative consequences for the indigenous people, leading to two major revolts against the settlers.
While the Ainu remain colonized by Japan today, their survival exposes the myth of homogeneity central to Japanese nationalism.
Please join us for this discussion on one of Asia's most intriguing and inspiring peoples.
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In 1936, acclaimed German exile director Fritz Lang made his American debut: Fury. The ripped-from-the-headlines story of a deadly false accusation was acclaimed by critics as the best drama of the year, but audiences and studio executives shunned the film for its dark content and uncomfortable social commentary: particularly how Lang shed light on the crimes of his adopted country, including the brutal crisis of lynching.
With Spencer Tracy playing the accused, and by setting the film in the Midwest, Fritz Lang would fear for the rest of the life that he was a "coward" for not addressing the inherently racist character of lynchings in the South. But this film was based directly on a true series of murders, and one which — though lacking a racial angle and committed outside the South —helped spur the fight to end lynchings everywhere.
These murders began with the disappearance of Brooke Hart, a popular San Jose 22-year-old whose bright future was cut short in 1933 when he was kidnapped and held for ransom. Before any money could even change hands, the police traced the ransom call to two locals with a shady past who confessed to not only kidnapping Brooke Hart, but killing him that same night. Incensed, everyday citizens of Bay Area, including many respectable professionals, stormed into the local jail and subjected the two suspects to horrific torture before hanging both men from a tree. This event, often hailed as the "last lynching in California," was not condemned but celebrated by members of the press and even the governor. This blatant murder of the two suspects, a complete miscarriage of justice, eventually made its way into the national press. The early American Civil Liberties Union led a push to raise awareness of the killings of these men, an awareness which helped fight the broader plague of lynchings in all parts of the nation.
This episode of Gladio Free Europe explores those three San Jose murders and the production of Fury within the broader cultural context of the 1920s and '30s. Although these killings may not resemble our idea of a lynching today, they were part of a centuries-long American tradition of rabid violence in the name of revenge and domination. Fritz Lang's film helped shed light on these atrocities, and remind Americans that this was not a problem isolated to the South. Since the 18th century, lynchings have been committed in all parts of the country. And some of the most brutal lynchings, many of which were just as racially motivated as the reign of terror in the South, were committed in Hollywood's backyard.
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Put on your rubber boots, we're continuing our exploration of Southeast Asia as we excavate the deep jungle ruins of the Classical Age. From the Khmer Empire to Champa to Srivijaya and beyond, the early medieval period of Southeast Asian history is marked by the emergence of incredible states and empires whose histories, though tantalizingly obscure, hint at great narratives of conflict and cooperation.
This episode of Gladio Free Europe travels across the kingdoms and trade federations today comprising countries like Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Of particular interest is the figure of the deva-raja, the god-king, who could command the ability to construct enormous monuments to Hindu gods and the principles of Buddhism beyond the scope of anything in Europe at this time. Join us to learn about the pirate-kings of Java, the Burmese King Arthur, Malay sea-cossacks, and how the far-reaching journeys of Austronesian merchants led to the introduction of Southeast Asia's most popular religion, Islam.
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For thousands of years, voyagers from all across the known world have docked their ships in the harbors of Southeast Asia. The diverse countries that make up this region have played an essential role in human history, witnessing the first waves of migration out of Africa, the development of the earliest oceanic trade networks, the synthesis of political and religious ideas from both China and India, and the birth of overseas colonial empires. But to most people in the west, the history of this region is entirely unknown.
This episode of Gladio Free Europe charts the course of early Southeast Asian history, starting with the miniature early humans of paleolithic Indonesia and ending with the formation of the great ancient civilizations of Cambodia, Myanmar, and Vietnam. Liam and Russian Sam dive through the deep past to uncover ancient migrations, lost kingdoms, the marriage of indigenous traditions with foreign ideas, and the beginnings of a trade system that would connect the farthest points of Eurasia and transform the entire world. Listen to this week's episode to find out why Southeast Asia may be the most interesting place on earth.
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It's October 1910 and Los Angeles is on fire. The California labor war had reached its highest level of violence with the bombing of the LA Times Building, and now the world wanted to know who was responsible. Some thought radical anarchists planted the bombs while others thought the LA robber barons had lit the fuse themselves to defame the worker's movement.
Liam and Russian Sam they recount the riveting manhunt and ensuing trial, full of larger-than-life figures like grandstanding detective William Burns and crusading labor lawyer Clarence Darrow.
Join us this week on Gladio Free Europe as we dive into the aftermath the deadliest terrorist attack in US history up to this point, and how the outcome of this highly publicized trial would set the course of California society for the next hundred years.
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On September 30, 1910, the L.A. Times declared that anarchism has been defeated in California. The city of Los Angeles would be rid of trade unionists. Less than 12 hours later, these same anarchists and trade unionists would strike back in the grandest act of terror thus committed in the United States. This deadly bombing launched a nationwide manhunt and one of the most publicized trials in American history, while also pushing both capital and labor in increasingly radical directions.
Though not well-known today, this event in 1910 is an essential element of the prehistory of California politics and the formation of the American radical left. In this episode of Gladio Free Europe, Liam and Russian Sam delve into the brutal world of turn-of-the-century class struggle to learn what drove the labor movement to carry out this cataclysmic attack and how the captains of industry responded.
On one side of the labor war was the militant trade union movement, dominated by the radical Ironworkers. Their allies included radical allies like Emma Goldman and passionate liberals such as famed lawyer Clarence Darrow. At the front lines were working men and women who had taken too much for too long. Los Angeles meanwhile was occupied by the most viciously reactionary economic elite of any American city. Colorfully repellant robber barons like General Harrison Otis fought organized labor with tooth and claw while spending their free time promoting white supremacy and eugenics.
Ultimately, this labor war would end with capital triumphant. But the cinders of 1910 would not cool. This explosive Los Angeles night would foreshadow a turbulent century of further class struggle, posing painful questions that are still not resolved.
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By now much of our audience may have heard of PMC Wagner, the mercenary group that marched on Moscow earlier this week in what appeared to be an abortive coup against the Russian government. Wagner infamous for its many alleged atrocities, and has been proven to be the most effective force in Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But this notorious private army is all the work of larger-than-life dog vendor Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Liam and Sam B recount the rise of Russia's most bizarre oligarch, nicknamed "Putin's Chef" for his insistence that his only business was catering. A failed athlete and former burglar, Prigozhin who fought his way to the top of St. Petersburg's brutal post-Soviet economy while striking up an advantageous friendship with a young Vladimir Putin. Long rumored to have ties to organized crime, he took up a side hustle as a warlord through his association with mercenary Dmitry Utkin, the apparent Neo-Nazi for whom PMC Wagner is named. After being outed as the leader of Wagner despite years of denial, Prigozhin has taken the stage as the fiercest critic of Russia's strategy in Ukraine. He gained attention for his colorful, vulgar front-camera video rants tearing into the military brass, particularly Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu. And just days ago, the world watched this trash talk escalate into an armed attempt to remove Shoigu from power.
On this week's episode of Gladio Free Europe, we explain why Yevgeny Prigozhin is both a figure from another time and also a guy who is inextricably of the president. Listen and find out if this St. Petersburg sausage seller really is the End of History on horseback.
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On Easter 1918, Georgian painter Nikolo Pirosmani passed away in a hospital bed before he could be examined by a physician. This enigmatic naive artist whose works graced the walls of half the taverns of Tbilisi was only mildly famous in the avant-garde world when he drew his last breath. But after this corporal death, Pirosmani would live on, reaching a mythic stature. Songs and stories of the mad painter of the Caucasus have spread widely across the past century, to the point where it is difficult to separate the facts of his life from the stories which followed. So just who was this man, and how did he come to be recognized as THE national artist of Georgia?
This week on Gladio Free Europe, we will be looking at Pirosmani: the man, the legend, his exalted place in the Georgian heart, as well as Giorgi Shengelaia's 1969 film documenting all of this, Pirosmani. Upon its international release, American critics were entranced by its visuals but largely confused about its contents. We'll be setting the record straight on this film and the man who inspired it, doing our small part to bring recognition to an incredible artist who is an icon across the former Soviet world but still obscure in the West.
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At the close of 18th century, the Mississippi River ran dark with blood and whiskey. This great artery of North America was a lawless frontier contested by Spain, France, Britain, the United States, as well as indigenous governments like the Choctaw and Chickasaw that had no intention of vacating land that had been theirs for generations. But there was one more ingredient in this cauldron of conflict. River pirates took advantage of this chaos, playing all these sides against each other in pursuit of gold and glory. From the time of the American Revolution up until the 1830s, the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers were dominated pirates just as ambitious and exciting as the buccaneers who ruled the Caribbean a century before.
On this week's Gladio Free Europe, Liam and Russian Sam give an overview of the unique political and social situation that existed on the frontier, with some discussion the nature of outlawry as well as the surprising amount of support the Spanish Empire lent to the American Revolution, particularly on the far-western frontier. Join us for a look at the old old west and the river pirates who once were the true masters of the waters. Characters include gentleman thief turned frontier warlord Philip Alston, Gaelic-Chickasaw freedom fighter James Colbert, the psychopathic hillbilly Harpe Brothers, and an ambitious young pirate named John Murrell who tried to incite a nationwide slave revolt to overthrow the planters and allow his pirates to dominate the South. Expect double-crossings and back-stabbings, a surprising amount of polygamy, and too many severed heads to count.
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What do pocket watches, Korean prisoners, and samurai armor have in common? All of them help explain the close relationship between Portuguese merchants and Japanese warlords in the late 1500s. In this episode of Gladio Free Europe, we see how Portuguese Catholics entered the inner circles of Japan's most powerful men before a sudden change of heart turned this glamorous foreign religion into an underground cult.
This episode focuses on the ways different feudal daimyo responded to the sudden arrival of Christianity. A few noblemen converted outright. Some welcomed the missionaries just to get access to their foreign guns. One very important warlord distrusted the Jesuits, would set Japan on a course to ultimately eradicate Christianity in the islands.
While accounts of early East-West contact typically focus on European merchants and missionaries visiting Asia, this period saw people and goods and ideas move in both directions. We'll We go over the career of early Japanese Christians in Europe, such as a mysterious figure named Bernardo as well as an official diplomatic mission sent by three Christian warlords to the Papal States. And we can't forget the famous African samurai Yasuke, who arrived with the Jesuits only to become a close ally of the great unifier Oda Nobunaga. He and another Catholic would be a witness to Nobunaga's shocking betrayal, which would ultimately spell the doom of the Japanese Catholics.
Stay tuned for our upcoming final episode of this series, chronicling the long period of Christian persecutions that ended with a brutal last stand in the city of Shimabara.
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In 1549, a Portuguese priest and a Japanese pirate disembarked on the port of Kagoshima with one purpose: to bring Christianity to the islands of Japan. They would be remarkably successful. Within 50 years, hundreds of thousands of Japanese people had been baptized, from lowly fishermen and merchants to powerful noblemen at the center of the shogun's circle. Yet after 100 years, almost all trace of this foreign religion had vanished.
This episode is this first of a series covering the history of Christianity in Japan, which is going to explore how this faith, once praised by no less than the great warlord Oda Nobunaga, came to be persecuted with a fervor rivaling the Spanish Inquisition being carried thousands of miles away in Europe. Liam and Russian Sam explore how the 16th century brought political and religious upheavals to both Japan and Europe. In the east, this came in the form of the Warring States Period, or Sengoku Jidai, when samurai, shoguns, and Buddhist warrior-monks fought for control of Japan. In the west, the Protestant Reformation split Europe apart and led to the formation of the Jesuits, a well-connected order of priests commanded to spread the power of the Catholic Church by any means necessary.
What caused the civil war that tore Japan into pieces? Why were many Japanese people so accepting of a foreign religion? And where do the pirates come in? All this and more in this week's episode of Gladio Free Europe.
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England has a new king, and the realm has come down with a terrible case of coronation fever. You may have seen the ridiculous merchandise, the extravagant robes, or the swords and other odd utensils used in the ceremony, but you asking yourself — what does this all mean?
Well, Liam and Russian Sam sat through the coronation of Charles III so you don't have to. This week's episode of Gladio Free Europe is a run-down of the various aspects of this solemn ritual, which as it turns out is much less ancient than you might expect. Listen to find out what Penny Mordaunt's Sword of Mercy has to do with the Halo games, why Charles chose to be crowned in his mother's clothes, and how a rickety graffiti-covered chair became Britain's most sacred throne. We end the episode with a brief history of the Stone of Scone, sometimes known as the Stone of Destiny. Stolen from Scotland in the 13th century by Edward I, this rock seemed doomed to remain in England forever before a plucky group of young Scottish patriots busted it out of Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, 1950.
Apologies for the audio trouble on this one. We can only assume this is our punishment for besmirching the divine right of kings.
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After a couple weeks of adventuring across Japan and the Caucasus, the hosts of Gladio Free Europe are back in the States. Liam shares his experiences seeing the traces of the violent Sengoku period all across Japan's main island Honshu, and explains how this trip finally brought him to his "white guy into Buddhism" phase. Thousands of miles away, Russian Sam visited the ancient nations of Armenia and Georgia and got a front-seat view of how influences from east and west continue to vie over these countries today.
We'll be back very soon with full episodes on the history of Japan, Armenia, and Georgia, beginning this month we dive into the chaotic finale of Japan's Warring States Period, when a period of intense international ambition gave way to the famous centuries of isolation.
In 2011, the US National Archives released 12,000 pages of documents relating to the activities of the Public Health Service in 1940s Guatemala. This report conclusively proved that a team of doctors led by John Charles Cutler, previously involved in the notorious Tuskegee Experiment, knowingly infected patients in Guatemala with syphilis and other venereal diseases.
Our friend Krebbs joins Russian Sam for a discussion about this deeply shocking episode in the history of US-Latin American relations. Under the pretext of a program to study prophylactic methods for STDs, thousands of Guatemalans were infected without their consent. The victims included some of the vulnerable members of Guatemalan society, including psychiatric patients, prisoners, prostitutes, and orphans. The methods by which these patients were infected exhibited a sadism that rivals the medical atrocities of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
The US formally apologized for these horrific crimes in the Obama administration, but the grievances of the victims remain without redress. Join us as we explore the history of syphilis treatment and other brutally unethical medical experiments to understand why this official apology remains unsatisfying. As we explore how white supremacy and imperial violence underscore human medical experimentation, we have to ask if this atrocity in Guatemala was really about preventing disease at all.
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This week, we talk about centaurs, demons, and self-filling pots of food. That's right, we're talking about saints and their hagiographies! This unusual genre stands at the crossroads between the Late Antique and Medieval worlds, and despite their often strange contents, they have a lot to tell us about the world in which they were written. Finally, we look at a firmly modern saint, a martyr who perished in the 1940s, and consider the ways in which the passage of time has likely sanitized many of the saints, many of whom were probably far from saintly by contemporary standards.
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With Argentina, 1985 having been in the running for Best Foreign Language Film, we are joined by our good friend Kevin as we delve into the history of the Argentinian Junta and its genocidal campaign of disappearances, extrajudicial murder, torture, and the kidnapping of children. The latter crime is the subject of The Official Story, another Argentinian movie which actually was made in 1985 and approaches the crimes of the period from a more personal angle.
Using these two films as a jumping off point, we tell the harrowing story of this dictatorship and the long struggle to bring the participants to justice. Who were the junteros and how did they seize power? What was the P2 connection? How were they ousted and why was the legal battle against them such an uphill battle? Finally, what do these movies get right (and wrong) about the events depicted, and what do they have to say about the state of Argentinian society at the times of their making? All this and more on this episode of Gladio Free Europe.
Gladio Free Europe received a frosty transmission this week from the icy waters of the Bering Sea. Writer, prophet, and friend of the pod Jon called in to talk about life in Alaska. We run through the past 300 years of the 49th state, beginning with initial bloody encounters between indigenous Yupik and Inuit peoples and the Russian Empire and the ensuing colonial contest with Britain, the United States, and even Spain. By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly what makes Alaska so different from the Lower 48, the reason American merchants were so set on acquiring the territory, and why famous sled-dog Balto is a damned fraud.
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More and more people are talking about bog bodies! Due to great feedback on our most recent episode we're following up our bog talk with an overview of recent developments in wetland archaeology and an overview of some of the most interesting bog sites in Europe. We dive into our favorite finds that we didn't have time to cover in our last episode, like the morbid battlefield of Alken Enge and the beautiful bog dog of Saxony. We expand our scope to bog bodies outside the Iron Age, exploring corpses deposited in bogs from 9,000 BC up to a late medieval murder mystery. Linked below is the new meta-analysis of hundreds of bog remains we draw from in this episode.
Tune into Gladio Free Europe this week for one more dip into the murky mire.
Bogs, bones and bodies: the deposition of human remains in northern European mires (9000 BC–AD 1900)
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We get knee-deep in the peat this week to examine the bog body phenomenon. Due to their unusually anaerobic nature, bogs across the world have a remarkable ability to preserve any animal matter that falls into them. The cold and wet climate of Northern Europe has proven especially fruitful for the preservation of human corpses, many of which date back to the iron age and beyond. Generations of scholars have been enchanted by these enigmatic and unnerving corpses, whose flesh and faces are so well-preserved that they look like they could have died next week. Moreover, individual bog burials like the Egtved Girl and the Tollund Man offer unparalleled insights into the lives and typically violent deaths of individual people from the deep past.
The existence of these bodies gives a voice to a people who could not read or write, and whose culture is only known from potsherds and petroglyphs and the occasional footnote of a Roman text. At the same time, any true understanding of their lives will always remain beyond our grasp. On this episode of Gladio Free Europe, we show this paradox has tantalized artists, archaeologists, and propagandists for hundreds of years. Join us to see what happens when the dead live again.
We are now on Patreon! We are not setting up a paywall, but if you would like to support Gladio Free Europe, we'll be thankful for your contribution.
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The Golden Age of Hollywood was a rough time to be an actor. Overdoses, suicides, and secret abortions were routine, but always escaped the papers thanks to the hard work of the studio fixers. In the 1930s to the 1950s, Hollywood studio heads hired thugs and corporate spies to maintain control of their employees and keep scandals under wraps, and these fixers often used blackmail and brutality to enforce the studio's will.
This week, Gladio Free Europe discuss Joel and Ethan Coen's recent classic Hail, Caesar! which follows a day in the life of one of these fixers, a fairground bouncer turned movie executive named Eddie Mannix, played by Josh Brolin. Although the movie depicts him as a deeply conflicted family man, the real Mannix was a world-class scumbag who abused and manipulated may actors, particularly young women, and may have even murdered those who got in his way. Liam and Russian Sam recount some sordid stories about real Hollywood fixers, especially Mannix, and go into the unlikely origins of America's film industry and its early leaders such as Louis B. Mayer. The studio system was both awful and awe-inspiring, an institution that relied on terrible exploitation and enabled shocking abuse, but also produced many of the greatest cultural achievements America has ever seen. Men like Eddie Mannix made all of that possible.
This episode includes some graphic descriptions of abuse.
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In 1768, hundreds of Greek peasants were brought to Florida by an ambitious British businessman in hopes of creating a classical paradise in America. Within just three months, New Smyrna would be the site of a full-on worker's revolution and this utopian dream would go in flames.
Liam and Russian Sam go back to Florida this week to chart the early history of the Sunshine State, starting with the first European explorations of the soupy, steamy peninsula by Ponce de Leon and ending with its ultimate annexation by the United States in 1821. In between, Florida changed hands many times and was the site of many different spectacular colonial failures. Storms, sickness, and starvation wrecked every European adventure into Florida, while at the same time allowing communities to Native Americans and freedmen to thrive undisturbed. Grandest of all of these colonial failures was New Smyrna, a beach town that still exists today. Scottish merchant Andrew Turnbull established the colony to be a homeland for Greek refugees from his wife Gracia's native country, but by the end most of the settlers were actually Catalans. Intended to be a model alternative to plantation slavery, New Smyrna was nonetheless the site of brutal forced labor.
From start to finish, the New Smyrna was a dismal failure, but the history of this colony encapsulates so much that makes Florida unique, and possibly the most cursed corner of America.
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This week, we are joined by archaeologist Anton Larsson to discuss the other English-language movie about the Thirty Years War: Queen Christina, a historical romance starring the famous Greta Garbo. We discuss the multifaceted legacy of Sweden's famous philosopher-queen who oversaw the end of the long war waged by her father Gustavus Adolphus before ultimately converting to Catholicism and abdicating the throne.
We use this 1933 film to trace frenzied rise and fall of the Swedish Empire, the onetime bane of Central and Eastern Europe, which reached its apogee during the era of Christina. Surprisingly few Swedes today realize that their country was once the center of an overseas empire, but their neighbors sure haven't forgotten. Sweden, seemingly existing on the periphery, provided a continuous stream of both trade and warfare in a surprisingly vast swathe of the world across many different eras. We look at (hopefully) the last of these while also chatting about the film and looking more closely into the life of the real-life Queen Christina.
Hosted by: Liam, Russian Sam, Anton
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The one and only Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House stopped by in our little valley to bring us the latest updates on the Thirty Years' War. We ventured into an overview of the history of the war, when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse roamed the Earth, the 1971 James Clavell flick The Last Valley starring Omar Sharif and Michael Caine, and Matt's upcoming series Hell on Earth where he and producer Chris Wade dive into the terrifying world of 17th-century Central Europe. Is building a monkey house enough to secure the heart of your beloved? Was Ferdinand II literally Hitler? How did the grooming of one prince change the course of history? What does all of this mean for the world to come? Which personality from the Thirty Years' War would win in a gladiatorial match? All this and more on this week's Gladio Free Europe! Hell on Earth premiers on January 11.
Christman Interview begins at 14:50
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Bring out your cudgels, the midwestern barbarians are afoot! This week we delve into the massively underrated 1942 Christmas film The Man Who Came to Dinner starring Bette Davis and Monty Woolley, the story of the cranky proto-podcaster Sheridan Whiteside who seemingly breaks his hip on a speaking tour and is forced to recuperate in a podunk Ohio town. To contemporaries, Whiteside was obviously based on prolific critic and radio personality Alexander Woollcott, whose appraisal could make or break careers at the drop of a hat, even though his heft has largely been forgotten.
In this episode we explore the life of Woollcott as well as the famous social circle that surrounded him: the Algonquin Round Table, a collection of particularly gifted, galling, and gay young writers and comedians who met for lunch every day across the 20s and 30s. Members included Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker, even Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. This extended circle of friends dominated the American culture industry in Hollywood's early days, and this movie is an amazing window into this period, filled with nods to many different members of Manhattan's "Algonquin Round Table", alternatively known as the "Vicious Circle." By the end of this episode, you'll see why The Man Who Came to Dinner deserves the highest seat in the holiday movie pantheon.
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Was your grandmother a Neanderthal? Did the English language originate in ancient Iran? What's a haplogroup anyway? These questions and more will be answered in our Q&A with returning guest Natasha, a molecular biologist with great insight into what recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA can and can't teach us about our past. This episode goes over the broad strokes of archaeogenetic research, using a few famous case studies to explore discoveries made through genetics as well as potential ethical pitfalls and dangerous misapplications. Plus, we make sure to dive into the hottest gossip and scandals currently tearing the field of ancient DNA research strand by strand.
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Thousands of years ago, the Egyptian princess Scota gave birth to a child who invented the Gaelic language and led his family on a journey through the desert for 440 years. Their descendants would move to Greece and then Spain, before becoming the first humans to finally conquer Ireland from a race of elves called the Tuatha Dé Danann. Meanwhile in Britain, 33 wicked Greek princess each married the Devil and gave birth to 33 terrible giants. Two exiled Trojan princes, Brutus and Corineus, would slaughter these giants and divide the island into two kingdoms called Britain and Cornwall, ruling for thousands of years until the arrival of Julius Caesar.
Join Gladio Free Europe this to find out why medieval people believed these stories just as strongly as Americans believe that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree. In this episode, Liam and Russian dig into the phenomenon of legendary ancestors: mythical and often supernatural heroes and villains once thought to be the ancestors of entire kingdoms. We recount a few of the most interesting and far-fetched of these stories and explore what this reveals about how medieval people understood their place in the world. Although nobody talks about figures like Scota and Brutus today, their medieval legends played a huge role in the formation of early modern identities and even have unpleasant echoes in nationalism today. Last, we go over why all of us are more likely to be descended from kings and heroes and mythical snake-women than we might think.
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Every kid in America grows up hearing about "The First Thanksgiving" featuring Squanto, the Mayflower, and the surprising nutritional value of dead-fish fertilizer. But this patriotic narrative offers only a tiny glimpse at the astonishing and agonizing history of contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples of New England, who called themselves the Ninnimissinuok. Our multi-part series on 17th century New England begins by examining the beliefs, culture, rapidly-changing politics of nations like the Wampanoag and Narragansett hundreds of years before religious disputes on the other side of the ocean would send English interlopers into their land. We'll also look at colorful figures like George Waymouth and Ferdinando Gorges who were involved in exploration and even failed colonization in New England long before the Pilgrims, as well as the unbelievable stories of indigenous people like Sassacomit and the Tisquantum who were stolen from their homes and brought to Europe, yet managed to make it back in one piece. Last, look into how and why an obscure but probably real celebration between some Pilgrims and Wampanoags became an essential part of our nationalist mythos.
NOTE: The first 5 minutes of audio are lower quality due to an issue with Liam's mic. This Thanksgiving, Gladio Free Europe is thankful for your patience in dealing with this technical issue!
Outro music: Honor Song, a song of the eastern Algonquian peoples including the Wampanoag and the Mi'kmaq
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At the turn of the century, thousands of Americans believed they had met the messiah: Cyrus Teed, an unassuming doctor from upstate New York.
In this episode, Liam and Russian Sam explore the dead religion of Koreshanity, a short-lived but influential cult that sought to establish a celibate utopia before the end of days. Fascinating, occasionally frightening, but always uniquely American, Cyrus Teed and the Koreshans are like a skeleton key to understanding this country's spiritual history.
After an electrifying near-death-experience convinced him that he was bound for greatness and would never die, Teed began preaching an elaborate religious doctrine he called "Koreshanity." Blending Biblical scripture and medieval hermeticism with modern ideas like socialism and feminism, he quickly amassed a devoted following across the United States and promised to build a "New Jerusalem," the largest city the world had ever seen. After his utopian commune ran into trouble in Chicago, Teed and his disciples moved to Florida where they sought to prove one of the central tenets of Koreshanity: that we're all living on the inside of a hollow planet.
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In the heart of Old Prague, in the attic of the Altneuschul Synagogue, lies the inanimate body of a golem, or so the legend goes! We watched the 1920 classic of German cinema The Golem: How He Came Into The World to explore the strange history of this iconic creature, its ancient connection to the mythology of the Ancient Near East, and later Judaism. How did an entity so rooted in traditions of Jewish mysticism come to resonate with people across the globe, Jew and gentile alike? Why are automata such a captivating topic from the start of the Industrial Revolution all the way through today, and how did the golem come to inspire staples of American culture such as Frankenstein, Blade Runner, the Terminator, and beyond? All this and more on the second annual Halloween episode of Gladio Free Europe!
From Godzilla to Game of Thrones, dragons dominate today's pop culture landscape and play a monstrous role in the modern imagination. But how did this obsession with fire-breathing reptiles begin? For this week's episode, Liam and Russian Sam follow the cultural history of dragons across Europe and Asia. We explore why so many cultures imagined their own colossal serpents, diving into paleontology, mythology, and evolutionary psychology to figure out why these scaly creatures delighted the minds and haunted the dreams of our ancestors for thousands of years.
Hosted by Liam and Russian Sam.
The Magnet is almost here! The GFE team will be republishing Ramón Sender's legendary book Imán in English for the first time in almost 90 years, and all of you get a front row seat! In this special sneak preview, we present a brief analysis of the Rif War as a catalyst for Spanish fascism and the proto-existentialist bent of the novel, followed by excerpts from the book describing the conditions of the poor peasantry of Spain and the painful realities of war.
Hosted by Liam and Russian Sam.
Further listening: E51 - History of Morocco P. 1, E53 - The Barbary Pirates, E54 History of Morocco P. 2
We're back in Morocco! We pick up with the reign of Mawlay Muhammad III, often called the "architect of modern Morocco." In addition to building up several new cities, Muhammad reformed the state through a sweeping decentralization of power. Although effective at dealing with the challenges of his own time, Muhammad's reforms would have negative ramifications down the line. We catch up with his rowdy half-Irish son Yazid and his never-ending series of rebellions, as well as his other son Suleiman, whose tenure would be marked by near constant turmoil.
We also take a deep dive into the foundations of Moroccan society, and the many internal dynamics which defined the country. From taxation to religion to agriculture and the divisions between self-identified Arabs and Imazighen (Berber) peoples, we go beyond personalized explanations for the problems which would plague Morocco both internally and in its relations with the outside world.
We cap the episode off with a riveting conclusion to our Barbary Pirate saga, and the ways that the United States would for the first time wage war halfway across the world. So hop on our brig as we sail to the distant shores of North Africa and enjoy the show!
We return to North Africa this week to explore some of the most infamous and intriguing characters of early modern history: the Corsairs of the Barbary Coast. What compelled Dutch sailors and English knights to "turn Turk" and sail under the Ottoman flag? What does Miguel de Cervantes have to do with a famous mosque in Istanbul? And were pirate attacks on Ireland an inside job? We going into all this and more in our episode on the notorious pirates of the Mediterranean.
Hosted by Liam, and Russian Sam.
CIA agent Everette Howard Hunt, Jr is notorious for involvement in the 1954 Guatemalan coup, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the break-in at the Watergate hotel. But not many people know about most heinous crime: his decades-long side hustle as a hack writer. In this episode, we try to stomach his paranoid 1972 thriller "The Coven," in which a straight-laced attorney uncovers that Black Panthers are colluding with liberal elites in occult ceremonies in the shadows of Washington, DC. We explore what this book says about Hunt's personal anxieties, why his boss Richard Nixon thought the world could be divided into "Orthogonians" and "Franklins," and what the famed G-Man may or may not have been doing in Dallas on November 22, 1963
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Abram.
We’re finally launching our exploration of Moroccan history, the most important country that Americans have hardly heard of. This episode will be a crash course on Moroccan history up until the early modern period. We follow rise of the 'Alawi dynasty that still holds power today, exploring how they came to power, kicked out the conquistadors, and established a massive army of slave-soldiers who helped turn a medieval kingdom into a modern state.
In coming weeks, we’ll explore how French and Spanish colonialists imposed themselves on Moroccan politics and what effect these imperial incursions had on the colony and the metropole. These episodes will correspond with our upcoming republication of the works of Ramón J. Sender, a Spanish antifascist whose 1930 novel The Magnet chronicles imperial blunders in the 1921 Rif War.
Hosted by Liam, and Russian Sam.
We continue our journey into medieval Sicily by following the rag-tag band of Normans who carved out a tiny foothold on the Italian peninsula. In less than 50 years, these French-speaking adventurers and grandchildren of the Vikings would unite Southern Italy and established themselves as the overlords on the advanced and prosperous island of Sicily. We’ll explore how these adventurers like Robert Guiscard and the warrior-queen Sikelgaita were able to defeat popes, emirs, and even Byzantine Emperors and discuss how these new Norman rulers would join, and not destroy, the existing Arab civilization of Sicily.
Hosted by Liam, and Russian Sam.
And we’re back! Liam and Russian Sam return to the early middle ages to explore the unique and unbelievably fascinating history of Medieval Sicily. A true crossroads of civilization, this sun-soaked island has been influenced by cultures from every corner of the Mediterranean and beyond and is an amazing microcosm for the entire history of Europe and the Middle East as well. The first of a two-part series, this episode recounts many incredible stories of Sicily’s Islamic period. Get ready to hear about how Sicily drew Arab adventurers into the cutthroat politics of Italy’s city-states, why you should never accept a dinner invitation from Emir Ibrahim, and how these Islamic newcomers gave us the one Sicilian word that everybody knows.
Hosted by Liam, and Russian Sam.
1100 years ago, the power of the Normans stretched from the British Isles to the Mediterranean. They had become one of the most powerful clans in Europe. Yet their recent ancestors were lowly pagan Vikings. In this episode, we go over the swashbuckling history of the Normans to figure how a group of barbarian pirates were able to fight for their seat at the table of European politics and leave their unique mark on world history.
Further Listening: E30 The Lion in Winter and Medieval Christmas, E36 The Franks, E24 Kievan Rus', E15 The Last Kingdom
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
As the Zodiac Killer was tormenting San Francisco and captivating the rest of the country, Dirty Harry, a movie about a hard nosed cop who takes down a serial killer called Scorpio, was released. We talk about it, why people may have convinced themselves there were more similarities than there were, and the general topic of escalating violence within society and cinema.
Play it again, Russian Sam. The gang takes a deep dive into the circumstances that produced the most celebrated picture in Hollywood history: Casablanca. We explore how a distant Moroccan port became a cosmopolitan haven for Europe’s refugees, delve into the notorious Vichy French government that ran wartime North Africa, and explain how the most beloved American film almost didn’t happen in this week’s episode.
Note: Sam mistakenly mentions the First and Second Agadir Crises. This was a mistake, these were rather called the Moroccan Crises and the first one is named after Tangiers and happened in 1905-6, while the second one is the Agadir Crisis of 1911.
Hosted by Liam, and Russian Sam.
Everybody’s been talking about The Northman, so we decided to talk about it even more. We break down the meticulous research Robert Eggers put into this movie. From Norse mythology to the details of Viking slavery, Scandinavian state formation, and material culture, we cover the bases to allow our audience to appreciate what a truly alien world this was.
Hosted by Liam, and Russian Sam.
Our interest in 1960s radicalism has lead us back to North Korea, this time by way of the Black Panther Party. Using Eldridge Cleaver's memoir Soul on Fire as our guide, we discuss the links between Black radicalism and Cuba, China, and North Korea.
The documentary about Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria is available on youtube.
We meet with lifelong New Yorker Derek Putin to discuss Serpico, a story of sleaze and scandal in the 70s NYPD. We talk about the iconic 1973 movie starring Al Pacino and the man who inspired it, a rare good cop who's crusade against corruption earned him a bullet in the face.
This episode explores other scandals that plagued the NYPD across the late 20th century and how they've shaped the force today, ending with Frank Serpico's own words on policing and what, if anything, can be done to fix it.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Derek.
Kevin rejoins us to tell the story of Mandate Palestine through the travails of international diplomacy, as well as the regional developments that unfolded once the British embraced the Balfour Declaration as policy. We explain the workings of the mandate system, the escalation of violence between the Palestinians and Zionist settlers in the early 1920s, and more.
Part 1 of our Mandate Palestine discussion
Hosted by Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Kevin.
We take a look back at a time when the ghosts of men were possessing spirit mediums all over the country to tell tales of life on the other side. From Mark Twain writing a new novel, to Thomas Paine endorsing spiritualism, to Jesus writing an autobiography, it was a time when it felt like everyone was coming back from the dead and getting a book deal. We talk about it, as well as how Spiritualism came to be, what it meant, and some encounters famous figures from the era had with Spiritualists.
Our friend Kevin is back to discuss Palestine for our Interwar Series from the late Ottoman period, to the first World War, to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
Further Listening: E20 - Zionism, E34 - The Time That Remains
Hosted by Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Kevin.
Our good friend Jern joins us from Ohio for a discussion about the interwar reanimation of America’s most notorious terrorist organization: the Ku Klux Klan. Jern tells the story of the working-class Ohio immigrants who formed their own secret society known as the Knights of the Flaming Circle to oppose white supremacy and kick the Klan out of the Buckeye state.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Jern.
Fritz Lang’s first talking picture, M tells the story of a town shaken by a string of serial murders by a killer who targets young girls. This Weimar era film stood out as one of the most well crafted movies to date upon release. We talk about it, the director, and the German movie industry it was made in.
In early 1919 Lenin said, “We have never been so near to global revolution as we are right now” and he was absolutely right. What he didn’t realize was that the world, or at least the West, would probably not come so close again.
We’re joined by our friend Brendan to discuss some of the various small-time revolutions and revolutionaries in Europe and the Americas, their impact on world socialism, and the response the elicited from the liberal world order.
Grab your throwing-axe because we're going deep into barbarian territory for this episode on the birth of the medieval world. Continuing from last month's discussion on the Late Roman Empire, this week we've recruited archaeogenetic shield maiden Natasha to help us understand the origins and impact of a culture who conquered half of Europe and might just be the most successful barbarians of them all.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Natasha.
In this intro to a new series of episodes, Sam B, Liam, and Russian Sam give a brief overview of the turbulence that rocked the entire planet in the 20-year span between the first and second World Wars. Topics in this episode include the unsuccessful workers' revolutions in 1919 Central Europe and the ensuing rise of fascism, the American attempt to "return to normalcy" after war abroad and social unrest at home, and the birth of groundbreaking artistic movements like German Expressionism and New Objectivity that documented the chaotic unease of the interwar period.
As this series progresses, expect in-depth discussions of interwar politics and culture, with episodes on popular topics like the Spanish Civil War as well as more obscure areas like the rise of occultism, Japan's 1936 military coup, and the way modern opera and theater interacted with the legacy of one World War and the lead-up to another.
This is a huge topic and we're planning on bringing a few friends to help us understand these issues. If you have any suggestions for episode topics or know somebody who might want to come on as a guest, be sure to drop us a line!
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
Our friend Fathi joins us to discuss The Time That Remains, a 2009 film that examines the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 through to the present day. A semi-biographic film, in four chapters, about a family spanning from 1948 until recent times attempts to portray the daily life of those Palestinians who remained in their land and were labelled “Israeli-Arabs,” living as a minority in their own homeland.
Check out Fathi’s website, Decolonize Palestine.
Hosted by Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Fathi.
Further listening: E20 - Zionism
Like all bad things, the Roman Empire came to an end. But why did it take hundreds of years for that to happen? This week, the gang guides us through an astonishingly chaotic period when Rome did NOT fall — the Crisis of the Third Century — and explores how late Roman figures like Constantine, Queen Zenobia, and Julian the Apostate created the medieval world.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
Further listening: E04 - Barbarians, E28 - Quo Vadis
Our friend James returns to give Russian Sam a crash course in Catholicism and how it differs from other Christian denominations.
Hosted by Russian Sam and James.
The New World gave birth to many colonies we know and love today, but it also birthed some colonies that didn’t quite make it to maturity. We go back to the late 1600s and take a look around the colonies of Sweden (New Sweden), Courland (Tobago), and Scotland (New Caledonia (the other one)).
Hosted by Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
Mom’s in prison, dad’s newest mistress is your fiancée, and your two little brothers are plotting to kill you! If you thought your Christmas was stressful, try being Richard the Lionheart in 1183. For this week’s episode on the 1968 film The Lion in Winter, we run through the deadly intrigue of the Plantagenet court and chart the history English Christmas along the way. Come troll the ancient Yuletide carols with us to find out whether Santa Claus has anything to do with Odin, why the 12 Days of Christmas really end on January 5th, and if King Richard the Lionheart ever saw a Christmas tree.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
This week, we popped open a bottle of Soviet Champagne to talk about Russian New Year and the 1997 film Sympathy Seeker. Why is New Year’s Eve such a big deal in the former Soviet Union? Why are there so many paintings of Lenin around a Christmas tree? Is the Soviet version of Santa really an evil spirit from Slavic myth?
All this and more as we dive into the history of holidays in the former USSR and the long history of wars against Christmas.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
We’re putting the Christ back in Saturnalia this week with an episode on Christianity in the 1st century AD. Maggie guides us through the history of the early church with the help of the 1951 Hollywood epic Quo Vadis, and explains why these ancient religious communities are so significant to Christians today.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Maggie.
Further listening: E04 - Barbarians
Japanese-occupied China was a place of immense violence and constant intrigues. We invited Carl Zha to talk about the 2007 film Lust, Caution and the real-life events that inspired the movie. We glide through the history of Sino-Japanese relations, the reasons for China’s pitiable situation at the turn of the 20th century, and the greatest real life version of “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain” of the 20th century, the ill-fated story of Wang Jingwei and his collaborationist regime.
Check out Carl’s podcast, Silk and Steel.
Hosted by Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Carl Zha.
Everyone’s favorite Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora chronicler Jim takes us to the Carpathians for an episode on peasants, poultices, and Parajanov. We discuss the director’s 1964 film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and what this classic of Soviet surrealism can tell us about the past.
Check out Jim’s podcast, The Past with Jim.
Hosted by Liam, Abram and Jim.
Further listening:
Grab your balalaika and drinking horn, because this week we’re paddling up the Volga to look at the origins of the Kievan Rus'. Russian Sam takes us on a crash course of the early history of this famous rowdy bunch, from the earliest Roman references to Slavic-speaking tribes to the impact the Rus' have on modern Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian nationalism. Along the way, we’ll learn about the Rus' often violent hijinks, why Olga of Kiev is an all-time historical girlboss, as well as their intriguing links with the Vikings, a controversial topic at the heart of a historiographical battle almost 300 years in the making.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
Previous related episodes: E04 Barbarians, E15 The Last Kingdom
Nosferatu is the 1922 expressionist horror silent film whose creation is dramatized in the movie Shadow of the Vampire. We watched both these films and discuss both their stories, and the stories of how the vampire came to be in the popular imagination.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
The Iron Giant asks us, how would American react if a sentient giant robot crash landed from space in the height of the Cold War? We discuss it, and with the help of special guest Daniel Bessner, the Cold War paranoia sweeping the nation in the 1950s and 60s.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Daniel Bessner.
Our good friend Kevin is back to help use trace the roots of Zionism as an ideology and the various religious, cultural, and "socialist" strands that existed before 1948.
Hosted by Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Kevin.
Why is Christopher Columbus considered a hero to Italian-Americans, and why did they fight so hard to give us a national holiday to celebrate him? We take a long look at the history of the Italian immigrant experience, and how that got us to Columbus Day (now co-named Indigenous Peoples' Day).
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
This Soviet made piece of art, Soy Cuba, tells four stories during the final days of the Batista regime. With the help of Russian Sam and Cuban Jaime we discuss how and why this movie was made, and the response in Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Jaime.
Charlie Wilson was a Texas Congressman whose involvement with the Afghan people and the Mujahideen was immortalized in the film Charlie Wilson’s War. With the help of our friend Kevin, we try figure out who Charlie Wilson is really, and more importantly, what war is really.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Kevin.
We’ve got a mutiny on our hands in Seven Days in May, a 1964 film that explores the idea of a military coup in America. We talk about it, the book it was based on, what JFK thought about it on release, and the general uneasy atmosphere that propelled right wing reaction in the 1960s and onward.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
Continuing on the themes discussed in E13, we go back to England and discuss the BBC show The Last Kingdom, and the topic of Viking invasions of the British Isles. Then we discuss King Alfred, the fabled man who “saved” England.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
Les Rallizes Dénudés were a pioneer of the psychedelic drone rock sound, but no one knows about them. With the help of our friend Zach, we get into their history and try to figure out what happened to derail this bands career.
Hosted by Liam, Abram, and Zach.
Further Reading
Was King Arthur an Englishman? Did ancient Turks build every civilization in history? What do ice cream men in Istanbul have in common with reindeer herders in northeast Siberia?
Liam and the two Sams answer these questions and more as they dive into the mythology of nationalism and political abuses of the ancient past.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Halal Sam.
The Internet is what gives us power. It’s an energy field created by all artificial things. It surrounds us. It penetrates us. It binds humanity together.
We talk about it by way of the National Geographic TV documentary Inside the Internet: 50 Years of Life Online, which you can watch here.
In April, 1975, civil war breaks out; Beirut is partitioned into East and West Beirut, along the Christian/Muslim line. Tarek is in high school, making Super 8 movies with his friend, Omar. At first the war is a lark: school has closed, the violence is fascinating, getting from West to East is a game. But he soon learns this isn’t a game as the war goes on, going from adventure to tragedy.
Our friend Liam (aka Hezbolsonaro) comes on the pod to discuss the movie, and the Lebanese Civil War more broadly.
Hosted by Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Liam.
To Live tells the story of a degenerate gambler and his shadow puppets. But it also tells the story of one family living through the Chinese Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.
This film and its reception would also mirror a process which has been ongoing since the beginning of Xi Jinping’s tenure: the battle against so-called “historical nihilism”. We look to the CPC, and Xi himself, to learn what historical nihilism is and how they are seeking to fight against it.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Cnut.
In 2002, S1m0ne posed the question of what would happen if we were to replace actors with computers. What 20 years ago seemed like a fantasy in the realm of science fiction has increasingly begun to rear its head in our world, and we as a society are still grappling with the consequences and implications of our increasingly virtual reality.
Computer-generated actors, models, influencers, and pop stars, we’ve got them all on this week's episode.
Hosted by Liam, Abram, and Pam.
Further reading
Beware of the Car is a Soviet-era Russian film about an insurance agent who moonlights as a car thief who steals cars from various crooks.
You can watch the full movie on Youtube.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Abram.
Hernán is a Mexican series that revolves around the story of Hernán Cortés, the Spanish Conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of what is now mainland Mexico under the rule of the King of Castile in the early 16th century.
To discuss this story, and this series, we’re joined by Paul Guinan, the writer working on Aztec Empire, a graphic novel recounting the dramatic fall of the mightiest empire in the Americas, only three years after the arrival of strangers from another world.
You can read the comic online for free at bigredhair.com
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Paul Guinan.
True Detective season 2 is pretty good. We don’t really talk about it. Instead we delve into the real life stories that inspired the show, and some events that remind us of what we watched.
Topics covered in this episode: Vernon, California, Political corruption, Voter suppression, Child abuse, Suspicious deaths, Satanic panic, Prostitution, Jeffrey Epstein, “Suicide,” and Bryan Singer.
Would you like to know more? ☛ https://gladiofreeeurope.github.io/episodes/2021-06-16-true-detective/
The Parallax View starts with a spectacular public assassination of a popular senator atop the Seattle Space Needle. In the years after, many of the witnesses to the crime have died under mysterious circumstances. An ambitious reporter (Warren Beatty) investigating the senator's death discovers the Parallax Corporation, which he thinks is the key to understanding who or what is behind all of this.
We’re joined by our friend James to discuss the movie, and the real life political assassinations this movie reminds us of.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and James.
Barbarians is a German historical drama that tells the story of Arminus, a Germanic Barbarian, who as a child is raised in Rome and becomes a Roman soldier. As an adult he is sent back to his home in Germania to aid in ensuring Rome’s control over the various Barbarian tribes.
We discuss the show, and what we know of the real history that serves as inspiration for this Netflix dramatization.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Abram.
Wag the Dog is a movie about a White House that fakes going to war in Albania to bury the news of a President’s sex scandal. Exactly one month after the movie was released, the Monica Lewinsky affair was first made public. We go into the movie and the real world events it magically foretold.
Correction: at 19:40 Liam says Green Room, but he meant Green Zone. At 1:08:00 Liam says Good Old Shoe, but he meant Courage Mom. Good Old Shoe is the folk blues song in the movie. Courage Mom is the country song.
Would you like to know more? ☛ https://gladiofreeeurope.github.io/episodes/2021-05-26-wag-the-dog/
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Abram.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley tells the story of Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy), an Irish doctor turned guerrilla fighter after witnessing the brutality of British occupying forces in his home of County Cork. He joins his brother, Teddy O’Donovan (Pádraic Delaney), in fighting for the Irish Republican Army for Irish independence from the United Kingdom.
We’re joined by our friend James to discuss this movie, the brutality Ireland endured during occupation, the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Civil War, and what effects from this period of history linger to this day.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and James.
In 1984 Siberian singer and songwriter Yegor Letov founded Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense), which went on to be the Soviet Unions most famous underground punk band, and made Letov one of its most famous musicians. Then in 1993 he co-founded the National Bolshevik Party, the now banned extremist political party that hoped to unite far right and far left forces. We discuss him, his music, and his journey from punk rock to punk politics.
Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, Halal Sam, and Abram.
Songs featured in this episode
Would you like to learn more? ☞ https://gladiofreeeurope.github.io/episodes/2021-05-12-yegor-letov-and-the-national-bolsheviks/
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.
