Speaker 1: Also media. Hey everybody, Robert here, we had a little
Speaker 1: mic error for the first couple of minutes of the episode.
Speaker 1: My audio is going to sound a little shitty for
Speaker 1: literally like three or four minutes, and then it'll be
Speaker 1: back to normal. Apologies. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards
Speaker 1: of podcasts, where I am eternally frustrating my business partner
Speaker 1: and the only person who really cares about me, Sophie Lichtermann. Sophie,
Speaker 1: why do I do the things that I do? Why
Speaker 1: do I? Why do I taught you when you're just
Speaker 1: trying to trying to help make me, make me a
Speaker 1: successful person? What's wrong with me?
Speaker 2: You like to self sabotage?
Speaker 1: I love self sabotaging.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, you do, and like I recognize that.
Speaker 3: So when you do it, I still I still help
Speaker 3: anyways because I'm rooting for you.
Speaker 1: So you speaking of self sabotaging. You know who doesn't
Speaker 1: self sabotage?
Speaker 2: God, I hope not a.
Speaker 1: Very successful person. Our wonderful guest today Amanda Montell, author
Speaker 1: of the book Cultish, which I've cited on this show.
Speaker 2: We've all read. Yeah, we've all read the book.
Speaker 1: If you have it, what are you doing inluence definitely
Speaker 1: influenced the Zizzy AND's episodes influenced a lot of my work, Amanda,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 4: Hey, it's a joy and a pleasure. And you know,
Speaker 4: so many of my sounds like a cult. Listeners are
Speaker 4: obsessed with your show. That's how I learned about it
Speaker 4: from them, So I stoked.
Speaker 1: We love cults over here. You know, it's hard. It's
Speaker 1: one of those things where it's both just objectively. Cult
Speaker 1: leaders have the highest odds of any group of bad
Speaker 1: people of being incredibly.
Speaker 4: Entertaining, right, I know, I know, especially when your definition
Speaker 4: of cult leader is as loose as mine, Lucy Goosey.
Speaker 4: Uh yeah, endless, endless entertainment. I was thinking also, like,
Speaker 4: as soon as people stop exploiting others, our podcasting career
Speaker 4: are just gonna tank.
Speaker 1: Well, the good news is I do have several generations
Speaker 1: of people, several hundred generations of people being shitty to
Speaker 1: each other to get through.
Speaker 4: Oh so true. No, your your career stability is like
Speaker 4: on Luck Nixon. Yet, Oh my god, no, you have
Speaker 4: You're you're basically a tenured professor in the program of
Speaker 4: bastard studies.
Speaker 1: I just realized I sent Sophie the wrong script because
Speaker 1: I was up til six am. But she's got the
Speaker 1: right one now, and so do.
Speaker 2: I am Robert Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: What could be better to do today when we have
Speaker 1: Amanda Motel on then an episode that's not really about
Speaker 1: a cult except for everything. I mean, I guess if
Speaker 1: you want to call the Nazis ocult, it's a little
Speaker 1: bit about a cult. But he wasn't even really.
Speaker 5: Not sure oh okay, he was.
Speaker 1: Just he was actually kind of Usually like when you're
Speaker 1: talking about like a German who is like prominent in
Speaker 1: the early thirties and you say like he wasn't a Nazi,
Speaker 1: you're saying it to be like because he was like
Speaker 1: some sort of hero, right or you know, someone who
Speaker 1: was trying to do the right thing, you know, in
Speaker 1: the middle okay, dark period. The guy we're talking about
Speaker 1: today is a man named Alfred Hugenberg, and he wasn't
Speaker 1: a Nazi in a way that makes him kind of
Speaker 1: worse than the Nazis.
Speaker 5: Holy shit, Oh my god, I'm pumped.
Speaker 4: Okay, I said this at the beginning before we started recording,
Speaker 4: but like, please don't apologize that we're not doing a
Speaker 4: coal eader.
Speaker 5: As you can imagine, I'm like.
Speaker 4: Kind a sick of it, but I'm I'm on a
Speaker 4: World War two kick.
Speaker 2: I mean, actually it's.
Speaker 5: Been an extended kick. It's been an extended kick.
Speaker 4: So I'm yeah, is it appropriate to say like I'm
Speaker 4: pumped to talk about Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Shugenberg, fellow, we love the big dub dub dos and
Speaker 1: this is Hugenberg is number one, one of the key
Speaker 1: guys in making the Nazi regime happen, although again he's
Speaker 1: not a Nazi and he hates them. He hates them,
Speaker 1: okay because most Nazis are kind of poor for most
Speaker 1: of the period time, and he is a rich dude.
Speaker 1: This is Alfred Hugenberg. Be here to call him the
Speaker 1: Elon Musca find our Germany.
Speaker 5: That's the first thing. That's the first thing that came
Speaker 5: to mind. That is the first thing that came.
Speaker 4: To fucking mind, because like Elon, you know, he's playing ball,
Speaker 4: but he you know that, he just disdains like sh No,
Speaker 4: he thinks they're pitiful.
Speaker 5: He thinks they're like small potatoes.
Speaker 4: I allegedly, in my opinion, I don't know, I don't
Speaker 4: know what's going on in that noggin of his Thank god,
Speaker 4: but that's the first thing that came to mind.
Speaker 1: No one ever has, so I guess let's just get
Speaker 1: into this because it's one of those things. And when
Speaker 1: it comes to his early life, not a super Elon
Speaker 1: early life, when it comes to his role in the
Speaker 1: Nazi regime, it's almost beat for beat exactly what Elon
Speaker 1: has done, right to the point where like Elon is
Speaker 1: now it looks like getting edged out of Doge. There's
Speaker 1: a number of reports that Trump is kind of tired
Speaker 1: of him. He said that he's stepping back. It's all
Speaker 1: like all of that, but it's going to be an
Speaker 1: interesting history of like a German piece of shit that
Speaker 1: like doesn't sound all that much like Elon. And then
Speaker 1: he's going to get in power and it's like, oh wow,
Speaker 1: these guys was he was Elon? Just like cripping off
Speaker 1: this fucker's notes, it's the same story. It's so funny.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, I'm so excited again. I'm not sure
Speaker 4: if that's the right adjective, but like on the edge
Speaker 4: of my seat, on the tips of.
Speaker 1: My toes, I get I get giddy when I get
Speaker 1: a new Hitler book in the mail. So I get it,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 5: Oh good, Okay, is that a problem?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 5: I feel I feel really free, I feel really safe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a safe place for us. Probably shouldn't
Speaker 1: say Hitler stands, but.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, I just loved Reich Knowers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I just I Any anytime someone can pull off
Speaker 4: saying the words Giddy and Hitler in one sence, I'm like,
Speaker 4: we are cut from the same cloth.
Speaker 1: My friend Hitler usually wasn't even giddy talking about Hitler
Speaker 1: didn't like being around himself.
Speaker 5: Oh that's what he needed the crowds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and this is yeah, so we'll get into it.
Speaker 1: Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg was born on June nineteenth,
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty five, in the city of Hanover, which five
Speaker 1: years or so later would become the city of Hanover, Germany.
Speaker 1: So again he predates Germany by about five years. These
Speaker 1: are still just a bunch of states, with Austria being
Speaker 1: or without Prussia being the dominant one.
Speaker 5: Russia. I was gonna say Prussia, and I was like,
Speaker 5: if that's wrong, I'm gonna sound so dumb. But it's
Speaker 5: all giving Prussian era.
Speaker 1: Goddamn Prussians and the goddamn Prussians, like as a as
Speaker 1: a general rule, are they just pants Austria? Not not
Speaker 1: far from the time that he's born, right, which is
Speaker 1: why Austria is on you know. Anyway, So the fact
Speaker 1: that Germany becomes a thing is largely the work of
Speaker 1: a fella named Otto von Bismarck, who orchestrated a series
Speaker 1: of wars, treaties, and alliances that culminated in the defeat
Speaker 1: of Napoleon, the Thirds France and the rise of the
Speaker 1: Prussian Kaiser as the emperor of all Germanic peoples, or
Speaker 1: at least like is like Austria, Hungary is still separate
Speaker 1: most of the Germanic peoples. In those heady early days
Speaker 1: of Imperial Germany, people get very excited about the idea
Speaker 1: of Germany. Right, It's like fucking pokemon when it starts off, right,
Speaker 1: You folks can't get enough of Germany there?
Speaker 6: What are they trying to catch other Germans? Right, Like,
Speaker 6: that's the go We got to get all the Germans.
Speaker 6: We got a katamari, all of the Germans into this thing,
Speaker 6: and that'll pro and well, putting all the Germans in
Speaker 6: one box seems like it'll not lead.
Speaker 1: To a series of world wars. So there's this kind
Speaker 1: of academic theory that's being promulgated, you know, around this time.
Speaker 1: And obviously it's being promulgated before the formation of Germany,
Speaker 1: but it really gets supercharged afterwards. And it's called pan Germanism.
Speaker 1: And this is the assertion that Prussians and Bavarians and
Speaker 1: Saxons and you know, Hanover Hanoverians or whatever shouldn't see
Speaker 1: themselves as different peoples and certainly not as different nations,
Speaker 1: but as one united German people who have a manifest
Speaker 1: destiny to spread not just in Europe but across a
Speaker 1: grand colonial empire that ought to because Germans are a
Speaker 1: great people, and they deserve what the British have, Right,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of there's a lot of this, like
Speaker 1: they're very insecure, the Germans in this period of time, right,
Speaker 1: and so there's a lot of why don't we have
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff the British. The British have so
Speaker 1: much stuff, any stuff?
Speaker 5: Come on, God, Well, here's a cult. Here's a cult.
Speaker 4: Parallel at a cult leader is often someone little chip
Speaker 4: on their shoulder.
Speaker 5: I was like, hey, hey, now.
Speaker 1: That is that's every Kaiser to be honest, and it's
Speaker 1: certainly auto von Bismarck. So they start they start being like,
Speaker 1: how are we gonna how are we going to create
Speaker 1: a space for us Germans that's worthy of the name. Now,
Speaker 1: these kind of nascent ideas, even though they're starting to
Speaker 1: gain traction, they're not even initially. They're not universally popular,
Speaker 1: and not even within Germany because, among other things, these
Speaker 1: different German states have been fighting each other up until
Speaker 1: very recently. Right, the Prussian Yunker class, which is kind
Speaker 1: of like their nobility, has a bunch of ancestral privileges,
Speaker 1: right that they maintain even once Germany becomes a thing,
Speaker 1: and they're not eager to give those up, right, They're like,
Speaker 1: what you mean you mean I have to give up
Speaker 1: my power over those uncouth Bavarians.
Speaker 4: No, uh, And the idea not everybody, So not everybody's
Speaker 4: down to be panned, No.
Speaker 1: No, not everybody. This is this is like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of conflict over this. Now, the idea that Germany
Speaker 1: should expand colonially, largely in Africa is less objectionable. People
Speaker 1: are very into this, but they're also not great at it. Right.
Speaker 1: They kind of get like the shit their attitude and
Speaker 1: everyone's attitude is they get kind of like the shitty
Speaker 1: pieces of Africa, Like Namibia a lovely place, but it's
Speaker 1: like not, it's like a desert, right, it's not at
Speaker 1: the time seen as like, well, it doesn't have that
Speaker 1: much stuff for us to exploit compared to like what
Speaker 1: we want to be exploiting. And they're looking at the
Speaker 1: British who own like fucking a third, like a shitload
Speaker 1: of Africa, and like what the fuck, guys, And so
Speaker 1: this is what's all. This is all what's going on
Speaker 1: as Alfred Hugenberg has his childhood now, unlike Elon because
Speaker 1: you know we've made that comparison, he is not born
Speaker 1: into wealth or into really much privilege at all. Some
Speaker 1: people will say his upbring was upbringing was comfortable. That's
Speaker 1: not wildly untrue by the standards of the time, but
Speaker 1: we would not see this as a comfortable upbringing, and
Speaker 1: in fact it's kind of close to Hitler's childhood. Alfred's
Speaker 1: dad is like a civil servant. He's a guy who
Speaker 1: works in the administrative state, and he dies when Hugenberg
Speaker 1: is very young, and Alfred is the only son in
Speaker 1: the family, which is also like Hitler, and the Hitler
Speaker 1: comparisons keep right on hitlering because both young men also
Speaker 1: spend their adolescent years aware of the fact that their mom,
Speaker 1: since their dad is gone, is incredibly financially strained. Right,
Speaker 1: they have this pension, but none of the pensions are
Speaker 1: enough to take care of a family, and so they're like,
Speaker 1: they're there, it's a tremendously difficult time. And he can't
Speaker 1: not have been aware of the fact that they were
Speaker 1: poor now, right. So there are some other similarities between
Speaker 1: Hitler and Hugenberg. Both young men were moved to create
Speaker 1: art and their early years. Hitler becomes an obsessive devotee
Speaker 1: of the opera and has ambitions as a painter. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Hugenberg is a really talented creative writer, with what biographer
Speaker 1: John Leopold described as quote a flair for literary expression.
Speaker 1: And you know, if your kid who's good at writing,
Speaker 1: that can be a great way to express yourself and
Speaker 1: to work through some of your trauma and stuff. Alfred
Speaker 1: does not do any of that, sure, which is actually
Speaker 1: a real difference. Because Hitler throws himself a whole hog
Speaker 1: into being an artist, he kind of sucks at He's
Speaker 1: not any good but like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: Oh it's definitely giving, like George W. Bush's painting endeavor. Yes,
Speaker 5: like yes, I don't know, although the order of operations
Speaker 5: was slipped, w entered painting after his political tenure, right,
Speaker 5: maybe Hitler should have done that. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I gotta say Hitler better painter than George W. Bush.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, less Bush. You know, there's a degree of
Speaker 1: where like, okay, you're trying to like creatively represent how
Speaker 1: you feel about the people you're painting. Hitler was just
Speaker 1: sort of like look at that right building building.
Speaker 5: No, they were like landscape hundred percent. He had no
Speaker 5: point of view.
Speaker 1: No, no, exactly exactly, but which probably says anyway people
Speaker 1: have people have tried to psychoanalyze that ship for years.
Speaker 1: What's interestingly about Hugenberg is that he has and he'll
Speaker 1: write some books later, but he has like a literary
Speaker 1: skill like he could have been, you know, a fiction
Speaker 1: writer or something like that.
Speaker 5: And he's Hubbard.
Speaker 1: Well hey, I didn't say he could be anywhere as
Speaker 1: good as LRH. You know, okay, okay, sorry, nobody the
Speaker 1: man who could put a fifty thousand word novel out
Speaker 1: in just seven hours of taking rents, uh, just popping
Speaker 1: pills like you. I mean, we don't have the technology
Speaker 1: for someone to be as on amphetamines as all Ron
Speaker 1: Hubbard was back then, right, yeah, so true. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it really is like quite a special time and place,
Speaker 1: so Hugenberg chooses. What's kind of interesting to me is
Speaker 1: that Hugenberg doesn't just sort of like fail to explore
Speaker 1: his potential as an artist. He purposefully forces himself not
Speaker 1: to write, right, not to make art, because he just
Speaker 1: like that's silly, and that's like artists are poor, and
Speaker 1: I am not going to be poor. So thereby I
Speaker 1: am going to make I'm going to stop myself from
Speaker 1: exploring this thing that I'm good at in order to
Speaker 1: study the things that will make me good as a businessman.
Speaker 1: Right huh yeah, okay.
Speaker 7: Very self flatullating interesting, Yes, well yeah, he very much
Speaker 7: is this Like I this is not an appropriate thing
Speaker 7: for a man who wants to be rich to do.
Speaker 1: So even those is what I want to do, I
Speaker 1: will stop myself from doing it because he wants he
Speaker 1: is going to be rich, that's his like goal from
Speaker 1: the start, and he's going to He's going to make
Speaker 1: generational wealth, right, like he wants. He wants his kids
Speaker 1: to help to part own the Reich, so he initially
Speaker 1: follows in his father's path. He studies the law and
Speaker 1: political economy in his secondary education. He is very well
Speaker 1: in school, very bright guy, and he has from the
Speaker 1: beginning a flair for money, which would have been noticed
Speaker 1: by his instructors from the jump. They also would have
Speaker 1: noticed his skill as a writer, but not for long
Speaker 1: because he again he decides to quote unquote suppress his
Speaker 1: skill in order to focus on his career. He talks
Speaker 1: about it as like I made a choice to smother
Speaker 1: the artistic side of me so that I could make
Speaker 1: more money. Now Alfred makes a couple of friends, but
Speaker 1: he has no real hobbies outside of his business ambitions.
Speaker 1: And if he had anything we might term a pastime,
Speaker 1: it was thinking about the way that the state and
Speaker 1: the economy worked and how they ought to work. Right
Speaker 1: very early age, he's thinking about why do the economics
Speaker 1: of the time function this way? And like, how can
Speaker 1: I changed them to function in what I would term
Speaker 1: is like better. So his first while he's in college
Speaker 1: effectively he gets you know, he does his dissertation right,
Speaker 1: which is his first book length publication like these are
Speaker 1: effectively books, and his first dissertation is titled Internal Colonization
Speaker 1: in Northwest Germany, which he fitishes at the University of
Speaker 1: Strasbourg in eighteen ninety one. In his book on Hugenberg,
Speaker 1: John Leopold writes, quote, the young doctoral candidate analyzed and
Speaker 1: detail the role of the state in fostering economic growth.
Speaker 1: This volume depicted three themes which always undergird Hugenberg's political views. First,
Speaker 1: the state would have to assist the farmer and totally
Speaker 1: abandon a las ai ferre approach to agriculture. Second, the
Speaker 1: farmer would have to act as an entrepreneur and form
Speaker 1: a capitalist bulwark against Marxism. And third, Germany would have
Speaker 1: to expand its empire. So a couple of things are
Speaker 1: going on here when we talk about internal colonization Germany
Speaker 1: right now, the imperial Germany includes a bunch of Poland
Speaker 1: right now. If you're thinking, think back to your maps
Speaker 1: of Europe. Poland's Poles, not Germans. These are within the
Speaker 1: boundaries of the German state, a colonized people, and Germany
Speaker 1: is sending German farmers into this occupied Polish territory to
Speaker 1: try to Germanify it right, Like that's very much what's
Speaker 1: going on, and Hugenberg's writing about that, but he's also
Speaker 1: writing about like there's not really enough Poland for us,
Speaker 1: like maybe we could get some more, I don't know,
Speaker 1: but also we need to be taking more of Africa
Speaker 1: because we need to continue like kind of shotgunning these
Speaker 1: farmers out, and we can't just sort of let the
Speaker 1: market take care of them because then they might not succeed,
Speaker 1: Like it's part of this. He's not really talking all
Speaker 1: that much in racial terms, although he is a racist,
Speaker 1: but he's very much the conclusions he comes to are
Speaker 1: identical to the ones Hitler is going to come to
Speaker 1: thinking through racial terms, which is interesting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean, do you think do you think
Speaker 4: I actually wasn't aware that Germany was sort of like
Speaker 4: jealous of Britain's colonization.
Speaker 1: Efforts, hugely jealous of Britain and hugely jealous of the
Speaker 1: US Hitler killer is obsessed with.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, okay, that's key context because if a whole nation,
Speaker 4: fledgling nation, whatever, nation that's trying to build itself has
Speaker 4: you know, uh, like popular kid in school to look
Speaker 4: up to and feel jealous of, that can create that
Speaker 4: can create to use the school analogy some kind of
Speaker 4: like in cell inferiority complex type behavior, which is what
Speaker 4: I'm getting here.
Speaker 1: This is exactly what's happening to all of Germany. Yeah,
Speaker 1: badness is we've talked about those in the show. Hitler
Speaker 1: rows up obsessed with the cowboy novels of a guy
Speaker 1: named Karl May. Sorry, Karl May is like the JK.
Speaker 1: Rowling of his day. He is a children's book author
Speaker 1: who writes these books about like his experiences in the
Speaker 1: American West, fighting alongside Indians, and they're all lies, like
Speaker 1: he's a con mad. But Hitler is obsessed with this.
Speaker 1: He like mails copies of them his generals on the
Speaker 1: Western Front. But all of Germany is, and the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds obsessed with us, like
Speaker 1: with westward expansion, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, rugged masculine expansion is a manifest destiny.
Speaker 1: But also this there's this feeling like, well, America is
Speaker 1: obviously destined to be a great nation. God has just
Speaker 1: given them this empty continent with no people on it
Speaker 1: that they get to take. They're jealous and Hugenberg that
Speaker 1: this is such a foundational aspect of German, like the
Speaker 1: German character that like, to this day there are festivals
Speaker 1: to this guy in Germany, and like people will do
Speaker 1: the equivalent of like US renfaars where they're dressing up
Speaker 1: as Native Americans in Germany. That happened, This happens to day. No, yes,
Speaker 1: it's a whole thing. It's a massive deal.
Speaker 4: Wait, I can't, I can't, I can't get the irony
Speaker 4: of like US throw the United States celebrating the European Renaissance,
Speaker 4: and Europe celebrating like some fictionalized and surely very problematic
Speaker 4: and fucked up vision of the.
Speaker 5: Early days in the US. It's truly, the grass is
Speaker 5: always the grass.
Speaker 1: Is always greener on the other side of the imperialism.
Speaker 1: So Hugenberg is not, you know, as obsessed with cowboys
Speaker 1: as Hitler, but he's very much obsessed with this idea
Speaker 1: of expansion and he sees he sees it as a
Speaker 1: matter of survival for the German race. And he writes
Speaker 1: that Germany will only quote gain power and significance by
Speaker 1: taking it from others. And when he says others, he's
Speaker 1: talking a little bit about Europeans, but he's mostly thinking
Speaker 1: about Africa right now. While I said earlier that Alfred
Speaker 1: was not a man with hobbies or a social life.
Speaker 1: He does nothing but work. I mean he's getting a doctorate,
Speaker 1: which you do kind of have to be that way
Speaker 1: to get a doctorate for a little while at least,
Speaker 1: right if any of my friends who got doctor it's
Speaker 1: there anything to go by. But he does have one
Speaker 1: extracurricular activity he starts to engage in around this time,
Speaker 1: the same year he published his dissertation, eighteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: he helps to co found a political club, the German
Speaker 1: General League. Now you won't find a lot written about
Speaker 1: this incarnation of the organization, but historian Barry Jackish describes
Speaker 1: it as a political pressure group critical of the German
Speaker 1: government's foreign and domestic policy decisions. Now that's a definition
Speaker 1: so vague it could refer to an organization of any ideology.
Speaker 1: So I should further say, the specific ideological launching point
Speaker 1: of this group that Hugenberg starts with a bunch of
Speaker 1: other guys is the idea of PA Germanism that I
Speaker 1: discussed at the opening of the episode. Jackish continues, the
Speaker 1: Pan Germans were an openly expansionist organization that called for
Speaker 1: German colonies and spheres of influence throughout the world, and
Speaker 1: the creation of a strong navy to reinforce Germany's newly
Speaker 1: gained status abroad. In domestic politics, the League supported an
Speaker 1: authoritarian monarchy and opposed the growth of parliamentary democracy. The
Speaker 1: League also sought to combat what it regarded as the
Speaker 1: pernicious influence of a myriad of un German elements, particularly Slavs,
Speaker 1: often Catholics, and ultimately Jews. So these are not Nazis
Speaker 1: because those don't exist yet, But you're seeing the Nazi
Speaker 1: in this group, right, Like it's it's not so much
Speaker 1: of a leap from this to the Nazis, right for sure, Yeah,
Speaker 1: strung notes of Nazis, right, yeah, yeah, this is like
Speaker 1: a Sega dreamcast. Isn't a PlayStation two, but.
Speaker 8: Like, oh I can see what people were like working towards, right, Yeah,
Speaker 8: for sure, this is the Sega Dreamcast of national socialism,
Speaker 8: That's what we can say.
Speaker 1: So and also they are playing Crazy Taxi, So a
Speaker 1: lot of direct elements to the Sega Dreamcast. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: guess nobody gets my Sega Dreamcast jokes.
Speaker 4: But whatever I was, I was nodding and I wanted
Speaker 4: to understand. I really it's like my partner will talk
Speaker 4: about video games sometimes. That is a video game, right,
Speaker 4: it was.
Speaker 1: It was a video game system. It just didn't it didn't.
Speaker 1: It didn't make it. It didn't make it. It came
Speaker 1: out around the N sixty four in the PlayStation and
Speaker 1: it did not last.
Speaker 5: Oh I'm sorry to hear that. Anyway, we all are, we.
Speaker 1: All are, We all are. It's a tragedy that rins
Speaker 1: at me to this day, like the death of my grandfather.
Speaker 1: So Alfred is a founding member of this group, but
Speaker 1: he's not like the singular driving force behind it. When
Speaker 1: I say founding, there's like a bunch of guys who
Speaker 1: get together to do this thing, and it kind of
Speaker 1: it's going to pretty quickly take a back seat for
Speaker 1: him because he's his career gets started, and he's just
Speaker 1: got a lot of other shit on his mind. Wait,
Speaker 1: you have a question, Sure, what does this guy look like?
Speaker 5: Uh?
Speaker 1: Well, you can pull him up in a yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'll have Sophie pull up a picture of him. Obviously,
Speaker 1: most of them are going to be when he's older,
Speaker 1: because people didn't have as many photos of them when
Speaker 1: they were super young.
Speaker 5: Eighteen sixty five.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's born in sixty This is we're now when
Speaker 1: like the eighteen eighties.
Speaker 2: You're talking about you're talking about Alfred.
Speaker 1: Yeah, boy, Alfie, you're gonna it's this is like the
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties right now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean in fairness nineties. It's the same.
Speaker 2: So I guess no, no, no, no no, the picture
Speaker 2: is worth looking at it.
Speaker 5: Vice.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, the picture okay, you got I just like
Speaker 4: forgive me, I just I need a visual here.
Speaker 1: The picture's worth a thousand words and most of them
Speaker 1: are going to be Wow, that is a German ass man.
Speaker 2: The hair is fun, the uh sash is fun.
Speaker 5: Okay, i'll describe it. Here we go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like he looks like dudes in in on my
Speaker 4: side of town in Los Angeles located.
Speaker 1: He's got that like Bismarck's style mustage.
Speaker 7: It's the way that I know exactly what neighborhood you live. Yeah,
Speaker 7: oh yeah, let's not dox me, but no, you know,
Speaker 7: I'll say this is what I'll say.
Speaker 4: His his his his mustache is shaped like squidward from
Speaker 4: SpongeBob's legs.
Speaker 5: Yes, and that's exactly it, Yes, and it's white.
Speaker 4: And his glasses are perfectly round there, Harry Potter glasses.
Speaker 1: Honestly, he's got he's got squidward legs as a mustage.
Speaker 1: Squidwards legs is a mustache, like perfectly round, uh, Harry
Speaker 1: Potter glasses and his haircut. If you've seen the movie
Speaker 1: Falling Down, he's got like an old man heightened tight
Speaker 1: like it's a remarkable combination of things. And like, by
Speaker 1: this point, this is a picture him when he's older.
Speaker 1: You had money for a barber. You were one of
Speaker 1: the richest men on the planet.
Speaker 5: What is no, this was super on purpose?
Speaker 1: That does really, that does get us back to the
Speaker 1: Elon must comparisons, because it's like, wow, neither of you
Speaker 1: motherfuckers know how to get a haircut, Jesus Christ, I say,
Speaker 1: looking the way I do today. But Jesus Christ, you
Speaker 1: a great Robert.
Speaker 5: Although similar to Elon and Alfie, the hairline, the hairlines impressed,
Speaker 5: I mean.
Speaker 1: And he did not have the ability to have a
Speaker 1: turkish man's hair transplanted onto his scalp. Yes, that is
Speaker 1: not a turkish man's hair. That's all Hugenberg.
Speaker 4: Totally, which was honestly amazing, especially considering that he was
Speaker 4: such a bad person.
Speaker 5: You would think, like, no, that would have affected.
Speaker 1: Some terrible people are graced with an incredible head of
Speaker 1: hair like Fabio. Fabio was a bad person, I'm just
Speaker 1: consulting him from no.
Speaker 2: Who knows.
Speaker 1: Given his humble beginnings, Hugenberg started his career as an
Speaker 1: entry level civil servant, so he has no nepotism to
Speaker 1: benefit from. Right, he's not getting like a head start.
Speaker 1: He's going to get ahead because he's good. He becomes
Speaker 1: a member, he gets hired for the Prussian Settlement Commission
Speaker 1: in Posen, which again is Prussia had conquered this chunk
Speaker 1: of Poland and they have a commission to help settle it,
Speaker 1: and he is helping to manage that from eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: four to eighteen ninety nine. This gives him a degree
Speaker 1: of influence in the German States. Attempts to reform some
Speaker 1: land use policies that were essentially holdovers from the medieval era. Right,
Speaker 1: they've got these kind of medieval policies on, like the
Speaker 1: aristocracy owning land that slow down colonizing it because a
Speaker 1: lot of land is just meant to be like where
Speaker 1: that where this did duke or whatever hunts And that's
Speaker 1: great if you're a duke, and it's actually probably pretty
Speaker 1: good from like a wildlife conservation aspect, but it's really
Speaker 1: bad from a farming you know. And Germany's whole thing
Speaker 1: is we don't have enough food. We can't make enough
Speaker 1: food to not die on our owns, right and this
Speaker 1: is constantly on our minds. So again Posen is like
Speaker 1: it's an eternal colony within Germany. Most of the population's Polish,
Speaker 1: but there's this small number of German farmers whose expansion
Speaker 1: was desired by the government. However, said expansion is stemied
Speaker 1: by the fact that many Polish people already had claim
Speaker 1: to the land. Hugenberg suggested ways to uproot them, but
Speaker 1: ultimately quit his job when the government refused to revise
Speaker 1: its inadequate policy towards the Poles. And again that inadequate
Speaker 1: policy is you're letting them live in their own homes,
Speaker 1: right like that, that's the issue that he has with Poland.
Speaker 1: You know what I just saw, just like because.
Speaker 4: The obviously like the use of euphemism within the Nazi
Speaker 4: regime and their campaigning is well studied and documented.
Speaker 5: But I will never get over it. And if this
Speaker 5: guy Alfhie had his roots in creative writing, I bet
Speaker 5: he was a master of you.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, yeah. Now this is Hugenberg's first foray into entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1: As soon as he quits, you know, this government job
Speaker 1: because it's not working fast enough, and he immediately really
Speaker 1: reveals himself to have a head for this kind of work.
Speaker 1: He creates a series of land co ops that allow
Speaker 1: so he goes into business independently, and he starts going
Speaker 1: to these different groups of farmers who are trying to
Speaker 1: colonize to what this territory that is like the center
Speaker 1: of modern Poland, and he starts putting them in together
Speaker 1: and making co ops, right, And the purpose of this
Speaker 1: is because each of these independently these small German farmers
Speaker 1: have no economic power and so kind of keep getting
Speaker 1: fucked over. And he forms them into co ops so
Speaker 1: that they can basically collectively set prices and bargain for
Speaker 1: better prices, right, like the very modern thing you know
Speaker 1: that he's doing here, And it works like this makes
Speaker 1: all of these farms much more successful, and it helps
Speaker 1: stimulate the growth of like more independent like more German settlers,
Speaker 1: like farming in this area. The project is successful enough
Speaker 1: that in nineteen oh four he gets hired back to
Speaker 1: the civil service in a significantly better position, right, Special
Speaker 1: Advisor for Economic Development to the East. So he's just
Speaker 1: kind of like a guy stuck in the cogs of
Speaker 1: the machine. He bounces. He has this incredibly successful co
Speaker 1: op thing for all these farmers, and it does well
Speaker 1: enough that now he's the special advisor for all economic
Speaker 1: development in the East.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: One of the thing that's going on in the East
Speaker 1: is I had insinuated earlier, is in Prussia, you've got
Speaker 1: all these younkers, right, who are these They're like the nobility, right,
Speaker 1: And these guys are also a lot of like the
Speaker 1: fighting nobility, because like Prussians are warriors, that's what you
Speaker 1: do if you're a Prussian younger. But they also have
Speaker 1: these vast family estates, often with thousands of acres of land,
Speaker 1: and they're just kind of fucking around on them, right,
Speaker 1: you know. They're the aristocracy does that every where they can,
Speaker 1: And so Hugenberg doesn't want things to work that way.
Speaker 1: He wants this land to be freed up, if it's
Speaker 1: not being farmed, for more farmers to buy it. Now,
Speaker 1: like all conservative Germans, and Alfred is very conservative. His
Speaker 1: interest is in autarchy, right. He wants the state to
Speaker 1: be able to produce all of its own necessities. You know,
Speaker 1: we just had the tariffs come down yesterday. It's kind
Speaker 1: of the same idea, right. Conservatives never quite get over this,
Speaker 1: what if we didn't need anyone else? And it's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, do you like coume quats because
Speaker 1: that's kind of critical that shays.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, fuck Jesus.
Speaker 1: It's a little more understandable in this period as a
Speaker 1: German because they're always aware of like, okay, well we've
Speaker 1: got Russia on one side and they don't always like us,
Speaker 1: and we got France on the other and they don't
Speaker 1: always like us, and then the English control the seas,
Speaker 1: so we're really easy to starve. You know, it would
Speaker 1: be great if we could grow enough food to not starve.
Speaker 1: So Hugenberg set to work applying his three principles to
Speaker 1: the problem of all these giant, useless estates going unmanaged.
Speaker 1: Being a practical guy, he came up with what seemed
Speaker 1: like a simple solution, and he published a book about
Speaker 1: his work with the farming co ops, im Posen, and
Speaker 1: how similar tactics could be used to encourage the rapid
Speaker 1: accumulation and deployment of capital to properly settle the East.
Speaker 1: Alfred insisted that the state's role in all of this
Speaker 1: was not to stick with the traditional younger view of
Speaker 1: property and instead to use its power to encourage competition.
Speaker 1: He wanted them to pass laws to confiscate large unproductive
Speaker 1: estates and resettle them with small farmers who would form
Speaker 1: co ops. I won't give Hugginberg credit for a lot,
Speaker 1: but this probably would have worked. And I based this
Speaker 1: on the fact that basically one hundred percent of the
Speaker 1: time shit like this got tried and peasants were given
Speaker 1: access to large areas of raw land to split up
Speaker 1: and manage in common, productivity increased, and it especially increased
Speaker 1: over the old way of quote letting some rich guy
Speaker 1: use it as a private park. Right, It's just more
Speaker 1: effective in a farm in terms of yield. However, the
Speaker 1: rich guys that Hugenberg wants to dispossess are the rich guys, right.
Speaker 1: These are the people running things because the Prussians are
Speaker 1: kind of the most powerful group within Imperial Germany, and
Speaker 1: they don't like that Hugenberg wants to take their shit.
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote from Leopold's book here. Confronted with
Speaker 1: strong opposition from youngers and others opposed to this proposal,
Speaker 1: state officials hesitated in their advocacy of this legislation. Hugenberg
Speaker 1: scorned their pedantic political conscience and again left the civil service.
Speaker 1: So he's like, fuck you guys, I'm going home. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go do my own thing now. I tried
Speaker 1: working through the government. It's useless. Word, yes, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not useless. You know what should be the government,
Speaker 1: the products and services that support this podcast. They should
Speaker 1: run the country.
Speaker 8: Why not they?
Speaker 1: Could they be worse? Could it be worse?
Speaker 5: Maybe?
Speaker 1: Ah, and we're back. I don't know. I think Chumba
Speaker 1: Casino would be a good overlord. It seems ethical casinos
Speaker 1: are always nice. Uh, we could all smoke indoors, you know,
Speaker 1: that's how casinos were a vibe. That is a vibe.
Speaker 1: So he bounces gets out of government again, and his
Speaker 1: dream is to make East Prussia not a backwater, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's kind of what he wants in this period of time.
Speaker 1: But he's been he's been stymied and Alfred. He's not
Speaker 1: an introspective soul, no, nor is he to kind of
Speaker 1: waste his energy being disappointed. So he right away gets
Speaker 1: a job on the board of directors for a bank
Speaker 1: and Frankfort that serves several mining concerns, and not just mining,
Speaker 1: but companies like generally in the metal business, so suppliers
Speaker 1: and producers of raw materials. And his job, his role
Speaker 1: here is reorganizing and rearranging things to enhance the profitability
Speaker 1: of everyone in this industry. Right Basically, all of the
Speaker 1: owners of these different minds and sort of like mineral
Speaker 1: concerns and whatnot are all putting a chunk of their
Speaker 1: money in like a common pile to be used in
Speaker 1: Hugenberg is managing it. He's an early hedge fund manager. Right, wait,
Speaker 1: you know it's not that bad, so, but that's what
Speaker 1: he's doing.
Speaker 4: I am so dumbfounded by this guy's disposition. Like he
Speaker 4: wanted to be a creative writer.
Speaker 5: I'm still stuck on that, and then he suppressed it.
Speaker 1: To become someone hedge funds.
Speaker 4: You said, yeah, in hedge funds. I'm just like, what,
Speaker 4: how does that? How does that make sense? Like, is
Speaker 4: he truly like a renaissance man and so adaptable or
Speaker 4: was he never truly an artist to begin with? And
Speaker 4: he just kind of like told himself he was suppressing
Speaker 4: his artistic tendencies, but really he was meant for this.
Speaker 1: He writes several books. I don't know if I'd say
Speaker 1: he was meant to be a creative writer, but I
Speaker 1: think the thing is more he is utterly obsessed in
Speaker 1: the way that poor kids sometimes wind up being. If
Speaker 1: I am not going, I am owned to be somebody, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And this is how you'd.
Speaker 5: Be an opportunist. However, whatever path will lead me.
Speaker 1: Become hell or highwater, I will fucking be somebody, right.
Speaker 1: That's this dude. So his role in this kind of
Speaker 1: early hedge fund ish position is to, like, yeah, enhance profitability,
Speaker 1: and he does. He does well enough that he gets
Speaker 1: hired on next to run a bank, like a whole
Speaker 1: banking firm, so like basically a network of banks that's
Speaker 1: run by a prosperous Jewish family. The Mertens now Huggenberg
Speaker 1: is a raging anti Semite, as is the German General League,
Speaker 1: which he's still a member of, which by this point
Speaker 1: has changed its name to the much catchier Pan German League,
Speaker 1: and they'd only doubled down on the anti Semitism since then.
Speaker 1: But this doesn't seem to stop him from being willing
Speaker 1: to work for this rich family. The Mertens. Now the
Speaker 1: League at this point, it's not a mass organization, nor
Speaker 1: does it want to be one. It's got maybe a
Speaker 1: few thousand members at this point. It's going to top
Speaker 1: out at thirty eight thousand people, which is very small
Speaker 1: for one of these. Again, by the time by the Nazia,
Speaker 1: there's going to eventually be a couple million Brown Shirts, right,
Speaker 1: So this is not a huge organization, but members of
Speaker 1: them are professional people, often with a lot of money
Speaker 1: and influence. So the Pan German League is hugely influential culturally.
Speaker 1: It punches above its weight class, right because the members
Speaker 1: of it are guys like Hugenberg. They're social climbers, or
Speaker 1: they're already rich and influential. Now, I quoted from that
Speaker 1: historian Barry Jackish a little earlier, and those quotes were
Speaker 1: from a book he wrote on the Pan German League
Speaker 1: titled The Pan German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in
Speaker 1: inter War Germany, which is a very accurate title, but
Speaker 1: not very clickable. You know, seven things you didn't know
Speaker 1: about German National. There's a lot of better ways to
Speaker 1: title it, Barry, I'm just saying, sorry.
Speaker 5: The BuzzFeed era hadn't hit yet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So here's it's a very good book. And here's how
Speaker 1: Barry describes the league's membership. The Pan German League drew
Speaker 1: the vast majority of its members from the social strata
Speaker 1: identified by the German terms bildung un Besitz, or the
Speaker 1: propertied and educated middle class. And this is where we
Speaker 1: get to a very important and very German prerequisite for
Speaker 1: the rise of the nazis one that doesn't get discussed
Speaker 1: a lot. We love to talk about and I do
Speaker 1: it on this show. The things that graph exactly to
Speaker 1: shit that's been happening in the US when we talk
Speaker 1: about the fall of Vymar and the rise of German fascism,
Speaker 1: because there are a lot of similarities, but there's a
Speaker 1: lot of differences too, which is I think are important
Speaker 1: emphasized now because I think some people get like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, we've done all these other things that are
Speaker 1: similar to Vymar, We're destined to do this. We're not right.
Speaker 1: It can go different for us. And part of why
Speaker 1: it's because like it is a very different culture. We're
Speaker 1: not Germany at any point.
Speaker 4: Wait, I actually have two questions about that. Well, no,
Speaker 4: I have a I have a comment and a question.
Speaker 4: So bringing it to colts, people do the same thing
Speaker 4: making comparisons between Donald Trump and Jim Jones, and we
Speaker 4: loved and including myself like you, I love, I love
Speaker 4: to point out rhetorical similarities the way that they weapon
Speaker 4: I thinkna, yes, but there are extremely noteworthy differences that
Speaker 4: are equally important to emphasize. And Jonestown was unprecedented and
Speaker 4: since unreplicated thing, and Jim Jones read Nietzsche and Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: I mean it doesn't read anything one thing. But the
Speaker 1: Jonestown story has a courageous US congressman risking his life
Speaker 1: and for his constituents.
Speaker 5: Again, no, honestly, that's a great point.
Speaker 4: But there there there was there was some drama with
Speaker 4: a plane, and that's that's really happened. There were a
Speaker 4: lot of Yeah, but my question related to this somewhat.
Speaker 4: And this is a really basic question. So maybe this
Speaker 4: will sound like kindergarten level, but like I don't really
Speaker 4: understand and have never really understood how German nationalism among
Speaker 4: these guys like.
Speaker 5: Hitler and Alfie. How was it so raging? Like, I
Speaker 5: don't I don't find that. I mean, I know Trump,
Speaker 5: but Trump doesn't have American nationalism.
Speaker 1: I find for one thing. I mean, Trump definitely uses
Speaker 1: American nationalism.
Speaker 5: He uses it, yes, but I don't think he feels it.
Speaker 2: In his soul.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is one of those things to an extent
Speaker 1: you simply can't understand because nationalism is a new idea then, right,
Speaker 1: The idea of a nation state and the way we
Speaker 1: conceive of it is fairly new. And also the idea
Speaker 1: of just like being being the idea that like I'm
Speaker 1: a Serb and so I should have a certain right.
Speaker 1: People haven't always thought that way, right, Like, the these
Speaker 1: are kind of new, and especially the idea again, they
Speaker 1: had to really it took a lot to convince all
Speaker 1: these different Germanic states that you're all Germans. There's a
Speaker 1: storyman of telling a little bit that I think will
Speaker 1: make some of this make a little bit more sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah, No, that's already helpful, because, like a novelty, when
Speaker 4: something is brand new, you like don't really know what
Speaker 4: it means yet, because we don't have the context in
Speaker 4: the retrospect. But yeah, sexy, it's exciting. It's like AI
Speaker 4: stuff now like in seventy years.
Speaker 1: Well, nationalism is the AI of the of the century. Yes, totally.
Speaker 1: I mean there's an extent to which, like, at least
Speaker 1: in terms of how excited people are by the idea
Speaker 1: that that's not totally wrong.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, when we talk about like why did Germany go
Speaker 1: in the direction it did, this is really where the
Speaker 1: seeds of a lot of the things that that you
Speaker 1: know culminate in the thirties are being planted. And a
Speaker 1: lot of leftists like to argue that fast evolves out
Speaker 1: of capitalism, you know, the bourgeoisie and especially conservatives in
Speaker 1: the BOURGEOISI inevitably turned fascist once their material interests are threatened.
Speaker 1: Now we'll leave out now talk about well how accurate
Speaker 1: that is a depiction of what's happening in the United
Speaker 1: States right now, But seeing things that simplistically misses some
Speaker 1: very important aspects of how Nazism got going in Germany.
Speaker 1: Because Nazism is a radical political movement. Nazis don't like conservatives.
Speaker 1: In fact, they kill a lot of them, right that
Speaker 1: they don't target them the way they do the left
Speaker 1: in any way. But they are not a conservative movement
Speaker 1: and they don't see themselves as conservatives, and they're not
Speaker 1: really very keen on capitalists either, although a lot of
Speaker 1: capitalists eventually do support them out of self interest. I'm
Speaker 1: saying this because Hugenberg is never a Nazi in the
Speaker 1: ideological sense of the word. He is a monarchist and
Speaker 1: he is a social and economic conservative. And the Pandramanic League,
Speaker 1: while there's things in it you can see as like, oh,
Speaker 1: I see how Nazism arrived from this, it's more that
Speaker 1: the soil is the same, right, and so the plants
Speaker 1: have some similar characteristics that are coming up. The Pan
Speaker 1: German League is not going after the Nazis are initially
Speaker 1: going after like the poor and downtrodden, right, those are
Speaker 1: Hitler's like earliest recruits and like veterans, disaffected veterans. That's
Speaker 1: not who the Pan Germanic League is going after. It
Speaker 1: is laser targeted at the group of people that Leopold
Speaker 1: identifies as Buildung and Besitz. And there's another term for
Speaker 1: that group, and that term is Buildung's burgertam right, and
Speaker 1: that is crudely we might say the upper middle class,
Speaker 1: it means literally the cultivated bourgeoisie. In his book The
Speaker 1: Fateful Alliance, historian Hermann Beck writes Germany owed its reputation
Speaker 1: and scholarship, administration, and technical expertise to this numerically small
Speaker 1: but socially influential, university trained elite. The buildungs Burgertum was
Speaker 1: a uniquely German phenomena on that originated as a distinct
Speaker 1: social class in the second half of the eighteenth and
Speaker 1: early nineteenth centuries. And these are the people who are
Speaker 1: who run things. They're not the people who are in
Speaker 1: charge of things, right, that's generally the nobility. They are
Speaker 1: the people who are being delegated the task of actually
Speaker 1: making shit happen, right, because they have the educations. And
Speaker 1: this is a class that in the earliest period, including
Speaker 1: the where we're up to the eighteen nineties, is a
Speaker 1: progressive and liberal class. That's going to change. They're going
Speaker 1: to become extremely conservative in the nineteen hundreds, but they're
Speaker 1: not initially. And in fact, the first man to posit
Speaker 1: what we would consider a modern view of what homosexuality is,
Speaker 1: and the first gay man to come out publicly is
Speaker 1: a member of the Buildings Burger TomEE in eighteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: the first modern like guy both too, and when I
Speaker 1: say a modern understanding of homosexuality, this guy, Karl Ulrichs
Speaker 1: comes to a conclusion that like, oh, homosexuality logically is
Speaker 1: something I'm born as. Right, this isn't a choice. It
Speaker 1: was viewed as both a choice and as like a
Speaker 1: deviant thing. Right, Carl convinces himself like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: this is like a natural thing. And as a result,
Speaker 1: we are a discriminated underclass and the laws need to change.
Speaker 1: And he comes out in public in eighteen sixty seven
Speaker 1: at a town meeting, and so he's like he's simultaneously
Speaker 1: like introducing everyone at the meeting to the concept of
Speaker 1: homosexuality and also saying, and I am one, which is
Speaker 1: wildly brave, Like he is this jam rocks Well, he's
Speaker 1: a member of the Buildings Burgertum, as is Alha Shugenberg
Speaker 1: and okay, cool in terms of like seeing how this
Speaker 1: gets how things shift. Nationalism in the late eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: is a progressive liberal ideology right in part because of
Speaker 1: what it means about sort of how pre existing elites
Speaker 1: needed to not have the kind of power that they
Speaker 1: used to have. And Carl Ulrichs is a national German nationalist,
Speaker 1: you know, previous to the existence of Germany. And normally
Speaker 1: people see that they're like, okay, well that's right wing. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: he is a German nationalist because the state, the German
Speaker 1: state he is in, homosexual sex sodomy is legal, but
Speaker 1: in Prussia it's illegal, and Prussia is pushing to dominate
Speaker 1: all these other states. And so Rix becomes a German
Speaker 1: nationalist because he's like, then we we other Germans will
Speaker 1: be strong enough to force the Prussians to stop being
Speaker 1: big ated against gay people. So when we talk about
Speaker 1: German nationalism, this is not always like a right wing,
Speaker 1: regressive ideology. There's a and in Hugenberg's earliest days there's
Speaker 1: a lot of very progressive aspects to it.
Speaker 4: It is utterly fascinating that like living through present political times,
Speaker 4: we think like, oh, you know this label that describes
Speaker 4: this particular group of thinkers, that that correlation will be perennial,
Speaker 4: like that will always mean that, but you know, it's
Speaker 4: like no, but no, it can flip changes.
Speaker 1: The Republican Party used to be a very different thing.
Speaker 1: That's eighteen sixty five or so. So from the beginning,
Speaker 1: this uniquely German class, the buildings Burgertum, was characterized by
Speaker 1: a close relationship to the state, since its strongest component
Speaker 1: came from the upper echelons of state bureaucracies and various
Speaker 1: German states. In addition to the people who are kind
Speaker 1: of like running the government, there's also a lot of professors.
Speaker 1: University professors are generally of this class, as well as
Speaker 1: a lot of prominent lawyers. Right. And the origins of
Speaker 1: this entire social class actually traced back to a guy
Speaker 1: named Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt was an educational reformer in
Speaker 1: the early eighteen hundreds who remakes the whole Prussian education
Speaker 1: system and he is a big believer in the power
Speaker 1: of the individual to reach their full potential or buildung
Speaker 1: through education. Right, among other innovations, he codifies the idea
Speaker 1: of a national school system for kind of the first
Speaker 1: time in the West that starts with primary school and
Speaker 1: then secondary school and then university education. Everyone adopts this.
Speaker 1: The foundations of our education system, such as it is,
Speaker 1: are traced directly back to Humboldt and his reform of
Speaker 1: the Prussian system. Right. He is basically the father of
Speaker 1: the concept of universal mandatory education, which is paid for
Speaker 1: by the state, and it's one of those there's a
Speaker 1: lot of modern day criticisms of the Prussian system. People
Speaker 1: will argue it only exists to provide soldiers, right, and
Speaker 1: so the schools just trying to make you into a
Speaker 1: good soldier for capitalism, and like, there's not one hundred
Speaker 1: percent wrong. These were Prussians, so that was a big
Speaker 1: part of why they wanted to educate people so they'd
Speaker 1: be useful for the state. But Humbold's also a very
Speaker 1: progressive guy for his time, and it would not be
Speaker 1: fair to categorize him as like some sort of like
Speaker 1: weirdo fascist, you know, because that's just not what's going
Speaker 1: on at this point in time. He was not trying
Speaker 1: to make students into little robots. His goal was to
Speaker 1: was his citizenry who was capable of reasoning, thinking outside
Speaker 1: of the box, and actively learning so is to better
Speaker 1: serve the state. But he wasn't trying to like lock
Speaker 1: people into a little box. And his reforms work well
Speaker 1: enough that by the time Alfred Hugenberg is getting his start,
Speaker 1: Germany has the best universities on the planet, and it
Speaker 1: is universally agreed the best doctors in scientists are German, right,
Speaker 1: And it's because they start having a modern university system
Speaker 1: between everyone else in the early nineteen hundreds. Germany is
Speaker 1: the font of learning in the West, and very much
Speaker 1: is seen as that way, especially in the medical realm.
Speaker 1: And this is that's a huge part of this class
Speaker 1: that Hugenberg is a part of the buildings burgertomy. These
Speaker 1: are they're characterized by their belief that education makes people better.
Speaker 1: And because we're educated, we're better.
Speaker 5: Right, better, like morally better, yes, or better?
Speaker 1: Yes, very much that way too. Yes, So you can
Speaker 1: see where the problems start to arise. Right, there's this
Speaker 1: good thing of like they're like, we need to have
Speaker 1: an expansive and well funded education system. Great, and also
Speaker 1: we're better than the rest of you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we're like more valid valuables.
Speaker 1: That's probably going to go in a bad direction. So
Speaker 1: as you're starting to see there's some danger in having
Speaker 1: a class like this, right, and what starts with a
Speaker 1: well deserved sense of accomplishment in their own system morphs
Speaker 1: into this overall sense of superiority. Right, if the world
Speaker 1: is copying the German education system, which it is. Doesn't
Speaker 1: it make sense that Germans should rule more of the world, right,
Speaker 1: That's really a lot of how the thinking as this
Speaker 1: progressive liberal class becomes more conservative. That's part of what
Speaker 1: they're thinking now. Yeah, so you know that's going to
Speaker 1: be a problem. It's this kind of thing that like,
Speaker 1: by the end of the eighteen seventies they've stopped really
Speaker 1: being as liberal, and by the eighteen nineties their advocates
Speaker 1: of imperialism and they are aggressive nationalists. It's no longer
Speaker 1: oh Rick's very reasonably progressive nationalism. It is a what
Speaker 1: if we just took everything kind of nationalism? Right?
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: So by early in nineteen oh nine, Hugenberg has made
Speaker 1: a name for himself as a great businessman and financier
Speaker 1: and an innovative thinker in the field of imperialism. He
Speaker 1: gets scouted by the son of one of our old bastards,
Speaker 1: a guy named Gustav Krupp, and Gustav is the inheritor
Speaker 1: of the Krupp weapons dynasty. These are the guys who
Speaker 1: had made Germany possible. Because Germany comes into being in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy when they beat the French in a war,
Speaker 1: and they beat the French because Napoleon the Third is
Speaker 1: still using brass cannons that are basically identical to the
Speaker 1: ones the first Napoleon had used, and Friedrich Krupp his
Speaker 1: people figured out how to make modern steel artillery that
Speaker 1: is just so much better at killing men.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, wait was that guy was he? Was
Speaker 5: he an art collector?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean there were very rich families,
Speaker 1: so yeah, they bought a lot of art.
Speaker 5: I think I went to an art exhibit in Zurich
Speaker 5: that was exhibiting.
Speaker 4: He probably did art collection and like trying to reckon
Speaker 4: with how those pieces were acquired.
Speaker 5: It was really interesting.
Speaker 1: The Crups, I mean, they're like Bezos level of wealthy
Speaker 1: for the time, right, because they are selling the whole
Speaker 1: world guns, right, they make the best ones. Now, Krupp
Speaker 1: is a member of the aristocracy, right, but he's looking
Speaker 1: for he is an understanding of like his limitations financially,
Speaker 1: and so he's scouting for a man of quote, really
Speaker 1: superior intelligence to become the new chairman of the board
Speaker 1: of directors for Krupp and Hugenberg. He immediately recognizes as
Speaker 1: a genius and he gives him the job. Right, So
Speaker 1: Hugenberg is kind of the CEO of Krupp Arms, of
Speaker 1: the biggest gun company in the world right ever existed
Speaker 1: up to this point and for more. He is going
Speaker 1: to be the guy running a lot of Technically, he's
Speaker 1: primarily doing the financial decisions for krup so he's not
Speaker 1: designing guns. But he is like the headman at Krupp
Speaker 1: for the decade up to leading up to World War One, right,
Speaker 1: Oh my god. And what's what Krupp is doing in
Speaker 1: this period is pushing the Kaiser to build the machine
Speaker 1: of death that is the German mobilization schedule, right. And
Speaker 1: part of what they're doing is Crupp is going around
Speaker 1: and they're they're going to one country and being like, hey,
Speaker 1: we'll sell you these guns. You rarely got to modernize.
Speaker 1: Your guns are a generation or two behind your neighbor,
Speaker 1: and like they're getting armed, so why don't you get armed?
Speaker 1: And then once they arm that country, they'll go to
Speaker 1: another and be like, hey, your neighbor just bought a
Speaker 1: bunch of You really got to get some new guns, right,
Speaker 1: And this keeps everybody's anxiety.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's just like I just sold your neighbor a
Speaker 5: stack of Bibles.
Speaker 1: But this works so well, and heerg is, you know,
Speaker 1: on the finance side of things that like dividends expand
Speaker 1: from eighteen eight to fourteen percent from nineteen oh nine
Speaker 1: to nineteen thirteen, like that's and that's a big deal.
Speaker 1: Krupp is making so much fucking money. And because Alfred
Speaker 1: is running shit, he becomes spectacularly wealthy. And the balance guy,
Speaker 1: I think hundreds of millions of dollars by the standards
Speaker 1: of his time, right, that's that's probably that's about where
Speaker 1: he is in terms of like our modern concept of things.
Speaker 1: He's not like a billionaire yet, but hundreds of millions now,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that he is making Gustav Krupp so
Speaker 1: much fucking money, the Krupts are again aristocracy, and Hugenberg,
Speaker 1: despite his wealth, is just a burger, right, He's he's
Speaker 1: not like a he's a common man, you know. He
Speaker 1: comes from like the nicer part of the common class.
Speaker 1: But Gustav doesn't really mean money. He's not going to
Speaker 1: hang with him, right, As biographer Leopold writes, though everyone
Speaker 1: was impressed with his extraordinary intelligence and obvious ability, there
Speaker 1: is no indication that Hugenberg during his ten years stay
Speaker 1: at Krups ever developed anything more than a formal relationship
Speaker 1: with his employer. The patrician aloofness of the securely established
Speaker 1: Crups contrasted sharply with a dogged determination to succeed which
Speaker 1: characterized Hugenberg. Indeed, Hugenberg seemed temple bad hang. He's a
Speaker 1: bad hang. Indeed, Hugenberg seemed typical of that class of
Speaker 1: general directors which George Bernard described as being driven by
Speaker 1: an inferiority complex because they know they are dependent and
Speaker 1: in the final analysis, are as disposable as any other employee.
Speaker 1: Lack of security made such a director continually harder and
Speaker 1: more uncompromising than the owner himself, Possibly as a psychological compensation,
Speaker 1: Hugenberg in these years emphasized the inflexibility, stubbornness, and self
Speaker 1: righteousness which would characterize his political career. So he knows
Speaker 1: you don't need me, you can throw me away if
Speaker 1: I stop making you money, and that drives him to
Speaker 1: be the son of a bitchiest of the sons of
Speaker 1: bitches in business in this period.
Speaker 5: And my god, just you know this is maybe this
Speaker 5: is gonna sound like a fucked up thing.
Speaker 2: To say, but like.
Speaker 5: Maybe he needed more love, you know, like did his parents?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know who.
Speaker 5: Away?
Speaker 1: I mean, okay, maybe later. Not a big personal life guy,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, isn't it you know? Yeah, it's just this fucking.
Speaker 1: Loly scrooge plays by Michael.
Speaker 5: Yes, yikes.
Speaker 4: He just you know, he needed one of those really
Speaker 4: really intensive like parent child therapy sessions where like, you know,
Speaker 4: a teenage boy is like forced to sit on his
Speaker 4: mom's lap and make eye contact with her for like
Speaker 4: two hours.
Speaker 1: Well you know, the downside is that they do have
Speaker 1: psychotherapy by then. But if he had gone to it
Speaker 1: at this point, he would have just been given a
Speaker 1: shipload of cocaine by Freud, Like, which is okay, this
Speaker 1: guy's a finance bro that is not gonna make shit better.
Speaker 4: No, no, no, no, he needs he should have fast
Speaker 4: forward to the Kenmine Kenmine time right right.
Speaker 1: That would have fixed him. Our ketamine billionaires are in
Speaker 1: such good health.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, wait, whoa do you think do you think
Speaker 5: that Alfie was on coke?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it was. He probably took it at
Speaker 1: some point just because it was in a lot of medications,
Speaker 1: like a lot of patent medications. There's a bunch of
Speaker 1: different shit you would be given for, like a flu
Speaker 1: that might have had some coke or some heroin in it.
Speaker 4: Right, So maybe that is a parallel again between him
Speaker 4: and Elon there. They could be both medicated rob it.
Speaker 1: Could be both medicaid. No way to know. I Alfred
Speaker 1: is very insecure because of his position, and he takes
Speaker 1: this insecurity out on his workers, by which I mean
Speaker 1: Krupp workers. He despised socialism and he found himself violently
Speaker 1: opposed to anything that smelled slightly of democracy, by which
Speaker 1: I mean unions. Alfred talked a lot about wanting to
Speaker 1: make unions obsolete. He's basical. He's one of these guys
Speaker 1: who's like, well, I'm just going to treat employees so well,
Speaker 1: they'll become members of the petite bourgeoisie. I'm going to
Speaker 1: give them stock in the company. Then why would they
Speaker 1: want to be unions. They'll be shareholders, right, and they'll
Speaker 1: be able to buy their own homes. And what he's
Speaker 1: suggesting here, this is what happens in the US post
Speaker 1: war to create the most prosperous society in history. So
Speaker 1: like within the capitalists new US, this is an idea
Speaker 1: that does work. It's going to work in the US
Speaker 1: not long after this. But Hugenberg is just bullshitting. He
Speaker 1: has no interest in doing any of this. As Leopold notes, quote,
Speaker 1: working and living conditions did not change much during Hugenberg's tenure.
Speaker 1: He ultimately did find himself forced to work with what
Speaker 1: he called yellow unions, which are trade unions that aren't
Speaker 1: allowed to strike. Right, So he'll work with these guys
Speaker 1: because they don't actually have any teeth. But as a rule,
Speaker 1: he found even that kind of union disgusting, and he
Speaker 1: starts pushing internal propaganda within Krupp that depicted management and employees,
Speaker 1: in Leopold's words, quote, not antithetical classes, but common producers
Speaker 1: of shared wealth. You know, you and Krupp, the plutocrat
Speaker 1: who owns all of this money. By pushing everyone towards
Speaker 1: World War one, you're really the same, you know. That's like,
Speaker 1: that's the propaganda. He's not good at propaganda at this stage, now,
Speaker 1: got it. Yeah, And again, the wealth's not actually being shared.
Speaker 1: And this is something Alfred and his fellow industrialists would
Speaker 1: acknowledge cheerfully. They don't think you should share wealth. They
Speaker 1: are social Darwinists. They believe the poor and working class
Speaker 1: can only be trusted with a certain amount of money,
Speaker 1: and if they have any more than that, they'll fritter
Speaker 1: it away on harmful nonsense because they're just not smart
Speaker 1: enough to reinvest it into the German arms industry, right,
Speaker 1: which is obviously what a smart man does with his money.
Speaker 1: By nineteen twelve, Hugenberg was one of the most prominent
Speaker 1: men in the entire Reich. He was awarded the Red
Speaker 1: Order of the Eagle by the Kaiser. Now, this is
Speaker 1: one of dozens of made up awards that the Kaiser
Speaker 1: would give different German over the years in order to
Speaker 1: like because you know, you need to have a bunch
Speaker 1: of fake awards to hand each other. So everybody can
Speaker 1: wear a uniform that looks fancy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's worth it.
Speaker 4: The Nexium sash, it's the sash, Yes of Germany at
Speaker 4: the stack yes, and.
Speaker 1: Alfred's Red Order medal is third class with a bow.
Speaker 1: I don't know what that.
Speaker 5: Means, Leopold, that sounds dumb.
Speaker 1: Yeah. At the ceremonies, the Chairman of the Board delivered
Speaker 1: a masterful speech criticizing the attempt to use universal male
Speaker 1: suffrage as a means of imposing class rule and the Reich.
Speaker 1: He insisted that neither voting nor legislation would advance the workers,
Speaker 1: but only a very much richer, very much greater, and
Speaker 1: very much more powerful Germany would be continue to ensure
Speaker 1: continued benefits for the industrial proletariat. And so in the
Speaker 1: speech he's saying, the only thing that can make the
Speaker 1: poor the working class more comfortable is if we steal
Speaker 1: everything from the rest of the world. That's your only hope. Guys,
Speaker 1: dam stuff. Speaking of stealing everything from the rest of
Speaker 1: the world, Sophie, can we should we show them our sponsors.
Speaker 2: I don't think we're stealing things from the rest of
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 1: You never know, I steal shit sometimes, Sophie.
Speaker 2: Like Cable allegedly, allegedly.
Speaker 1: Allegedly allegedly were we sure as hell are yes? So, now,
Speaker 1: as I said, during this whole period, one things that's
Speaker 1: going on is this cycle where crupples send their arms
Speaker 1: merchants abroad and say, hey, your neighbor just bought all
Speaker 1: these great cannons or you know, this machine gun and
Speaker 1: they're thinking of using it, so why don't you get
Speaker 1: some more guns? And one of the things this cycle
Speaker 1: of upgrades does. It's great for crup's bottom line and
Speaker 1: other weapons manufacturers. They're all taking part in this. This
Speaker 1: is not just crupt Germany. It's not just responsible for
Speaker 1: the preconditions of World War One, obviously, But one thing
Speaker 1: that this cycle that these arms manufacturers all responsible for
Speaker 1: means is that every European leader is constantly thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: right now, we've got better artillery in French, but their
Speaker 1: machine guns are a little better, and in two years
Speaker 1: they're going to have new artillery, so maybe we need
Speaker 1: to go to war now if we're gonna have a
Speaker 1: chance of beating them, right, Like, everyone's always thinking.
Speaker 5: How like manufactured escalation?
Speaker 1: Legal like this because these people own the government, run
Speaker 1: the government to a big extent.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's fucked up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great. So Hugenberg profits from this process, and
Speaker 1: he may have been more directly involved than even just
Speaker 1: like running the finances and benefiting it, because he winds
Speaker 1: up involved in a huge scandal right in late nineteen
Speaker 1: twelve to early nineteen thirteen. He's implicated significantly in what's
Speaker 1: called the corn Volzer affair. Now I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from an article by Lothar Burchart from the nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: eight German Yearbook on Business History to describe the Cornsvolner affair.
Speaker 1: A Krup employee was found guilty of bribing army and
Speaker 1: Navy officers. This proved not only to the German but
Speaker 1: also to the foreign skeptics that they were right to
Speaker 1: believe that the company would stop at nothing in pursuit
Speaker 1: of its interests. In nineteen oh five, George Bernard Shaw
Speaker 1: had already, in his play Missed Major Barbara, not been
Speaker 1: sparing with his insinuations. In nineteen thirteen, even the serious
Speaker 1: American journal The Iron Age wrote, following the facts revealed
Speaker 1: during the cornwallser affair, that Krupp was obviously recently prepared
Speaker 1: to go to any links to agitate a war, even
Speaker 1: before the First World War had really started. HG. Wells
Speaker 1: had already decided who was the real culprit in the
Speaker 1: center of this disaster, which had finally become a world catastrophe.
Speaker 1: Is Kruppism the dirty, violent trade with the tools of death.
Speaker 1: It was shortly afterwards that the often repeated but never
Speaker 1: conclusively proved allegation arose that the then company boss, Gustav
Speaker 1: Kropp Vi Boland Unhalbach had been informed by the Kaiser
Speaker 1: months in advance of the imminent war, and Alfred is
Speaker 1: directly implicated in this bribery of army and naval officers
Speaker 1: as like, because he's the manager of this guy, and
Speaker 1: it's too much to say that we don't know. Again,
Speaker 1: we don't really know if the Kaiser was literally warned
Speaker 1: months in advance of the imminent war, because I don't
Speaker 1: actually think it was planned that way. But that's the
Speaker 1: rumor going around, right, And it's definitely true that Huggenberg
Speaker 1: is aware of how tensions are ratcheting up and is
Speaker 1: using that as a way he is taking advantage of
Speaker 1: this to make money in a way that makes World
Speaker 1: War one more likely. Right, he is implied he has
Speaker 1: some of the war guilt, right, because of the position
Speaker 1: that he has. Again, there's plenty of war guilt to
Speaker 1: go around. The French aren't blameless, the British aren't even blameless,
Speaker 1: and fucking the Russian sure is shit aren't blameless. But
Speaker 1: he's one of the He's one of a small number
Speaker 1: of men who is directly implicated and creating the conditions
Speaker 1: of World War One, Right, now, yeah, given his agent wealth,
Speaker 1: there's no chance Hugenberg or too many of the people
Speaker 1: he cared about, because he doesn't care about a lot
Speaker 1: of people, we're going to have to fight and die
Speaker 1: in this war. In fact, he was very pro the
Speaker 1: idea of having a World War one. He's gotten back
Speaker 1: into the Pan Germanic League at this point, and the
Speaker 1: league is doing everything they can do to encourage Germany
Speaker 1: to go to war with its neighbors. If you're you know,
Speaker 1: if you're old enough to remember the biggest cheerleaders for
Speaker 1: the war in Iraq, that's that's what these guys are doing, right.
Speaker 1: They're coming up with justifications for like, why we have
Speaker 1: to go liberate eastern France. Right, they'll welcome us as
Speaker 1: liberators Belgian Is naturally.
Speaker 4: Yeah, did you just imply that because Alfie like had
Speaker 4: no friends and no loved ones and no family members
Speaker 4: and thus no one to lose in a war, He's
Speaker 4: just like, yeah, fucking go off.
Speaker 1: He's got nothing to gain from a war. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: nothing to lose, Yeah, well, nothing to lose. You're right,
Speaker 1: Sorry I fucked up?
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, yeah, and sounds like the right he is. Yeah,
Speaker 5: Ultimately he's doing life wrong.
Speaker 1: But he's doing life very wrong. Yeah, and to make
Speaker 1: things worse, you know, he's cajoling European powers to arm
Speaker 1: each other, both in his job as an arms dealer
Speaker 1: and through this social club that he's helping to run.
Speaker 1: And then in nineteen twelve something terrible happens is the
Speaker 1: same year of the cornballser affair. The Social Democrats win
Speaker 1: big in that year's German elections, and Germany is a
Speaker 1: parliament parliamentary monarchy, right, they have a parliament. The Kaisers
Speaker 1: I'm described as an absolute ruler and he has he
Speaker 1: can overrule most things, right, but there is a parliament
Speaker 1: and they don't have zero power. And the Social Democrats
Speaker 1: win big that year, which scares the shit out of
Speaker 1: Alfred and people like him. Right, So he starts talking
Speaker 1: to other rich reactionary nationalists and he tries to sell
Speaker 1: them on an idea he's had, which is he wants
Speaker 1: to create a cartel of the producing classes. In other words,
Speaker 1: he wants to get all of the rich business owners
Speaker 1: together and form a union of rich guys to collectively
Speaker 1: bargain in their own interests. Right, he sees what union
Speaker 1: is now, Yeah, oh yeah, gold union, Yes, exactly. And
Speaker 1: this is a thing He's not alone in thinking this.
Speaker 1: A lot of magnates in the Ruh and the Rure
Speaker 1: is Germany's industrial heartland. It's where the guns get made, right,
Speaker 1: And a lot of the guys who run and own
Speaker 1: the minds and the companies making raw materials and the
Speaker 1: companies turning those raw materials into weapons and other stuff,
Speaker 1: they're all thinking along the same lines. And so in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirteen he is hired to chair the board of
Speaker 1: directors for an organization that pools money from mine and
Speaker 1: factory owners in the area for profit. And part of
Speaker 1: the goal here, he's not just like investing it, he
Speaker 1: is spending it to benefit them. Part of the idea
Speaker 1: is you will spend a chunk of our money we
Speaker 1: all give like one percent or whatever, right, and that
Speaker 1: money accumulates and you spend it to influence the culture,
Speaker 1: right to put out news and stuff in propaganda that's
Speaker 1: positive for us. Hugenberg is going to be running that project,
Speaker 1: right because these guys, these industrial magnates, have the billionaires
Speaker 1: of their day, have come to the conclusion that if
Speaker 1: we can just change the news stories poor people read,
Speaker 1: poor people will stop trying to get our money.
Speaker 5: You know, like, yeah, wow, Okay. So when you say
Speaker 5: that he wasn't good at propaganda yet.
Speaker 1: Yet, well, also this is a very musk thing, right,
Speaker 1: Like we're coming to the key buys Twitter part. Right.
Speaker 1: So again, Hugenberg is not a skilled propagandist in terms off,
Speaker 1: he doesn't make propaganda, nor does he like write it.
Speaker 1: He's not drawing it or anything like that. But he
Speaker 1: sees the need for propaganda and he's good at hiring
Speaker 1: people who are good at stuff. So in nineteen fourteen
Speaker 1: he uses a bunch of this pooled corporate money to
Speaker 1: form a holding company called Ousland GmbH. A month later,
Speaker 1: that company forms a subsidiary named Ousland Azigen. Leopold explains
Speaker 1: what happened next, which will sound very familiar to those
Speaker 1: of you who know anything about the Daily Wire. Ouceland
Speaker 1: Azigen was established to study foreign publications and to coordinate
Speaker 1: the advertising of heavy industrial firms interested in exports. So
Speaker 1: he's sending out people to study foreign media propaganda and
Speaker 1: bring back advice so that they can create news outlets
Speaker 1: that will represent the interests of the rich. Right, that's
Speaker 1: what he's doing. Now, this is initially just an advertising thing, right,
Speaker 1: Like the idea is and we'll make that way, will
Speaker 1: make better ad propaganda. But the study of foreign ads
Speaker 1: expands to a general study of foreign propaganda, and this
Speaker 1: kind of conclusion starts to develop that, like, you know what, ads,
Speaker 1: that's not the best way to propagandize people. Journalism is
Speaker 1: the best way to propagandize people. News articles are the
Speaker 1: best way to propagandize people.
Speaker 5: Right, spon con that doesn't look like spon con.
Speaker 1: Yes, And so they're working This is what they start
Speaker 1: working on when in August of nineteen fourteen, the shooting
Speaker 1: starts on the Western Front, and we will talk about
Speaker 1: that what happens later and how Alfred Hugenberg finally gets
Speaker 1: in bed with zen Nazis in Part two. How are
Speaker 1: you feeling, Amanda.
Speaker 5: I feel amazing. I feel really glad that I it's
Speaker 5: a normal way to.
Speaker 1: Feel when you talk about Alfred Hugenberg. Yes, well, I'm
Speaker 1: America's sweetheart.
Speaker 5: Yeah exactly. I well kind of because I I feel
Speaker 5: whenever I hear stories like this, I feel like, oh wow,
Speaker 5: I'm not the worst person in history.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, you're You're a better person than Alfred Hugenberg.
Speaker 1: A low bar Russell Brand might be a better person
Speaker 1: than Alfred Hugenberg and he just got some pretty serious cris.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, that's a fun game. But you know who's
Speaker 5: a worst person.
Speaker 1: I'll say this, very few historians blame Russ Russell Brand
Speaker 1: for the outbreak of World War One. Almost never, you know,
Speaker 1: almost almost No. Honestly, would be super impressive if he'd
Speaker 1: managed that somehow.
Speaker 4: I would love to talk to a historian who's like
Speaker 4: open to discussing a working theory that Russell Brand has something.
Speaker 1: To do with, just like any of a photo of
Speaker 1: him in the background in Sarah Jevo as the Archduke
Speaker 1: drives past.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, yeah, Russell he does have sort of
Speaker 4: a time travelers styling to him.
Speaker 5: It is one of these could have been any era
Speaker 5: at all.
Speaker 1: There's some guys like Matt Damon. You put Matt Damon
Speaker 1: in like a historical movie from one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: years ago. I'm sorry, Matt Damon has as people have said,
Speaker 1: Matt Damon has a face that knows what a smartphone is, right,
Speaker 1: like you just can't get so true. But yeah, Russell Brand,
Speaker 1: if I saw him in a picture of from like
Speaker 1: eighteen forty eight, I'd be.
Speaker 2: Like, no, that's good bad.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you might belong there. Yeah, oh my god, that's
Speaker 5: so funny.
Speaker 1: With sex crimes there. But he might belong there for sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean he belongs there as much
Speaker 4: as anywhere, which right nowhere. But do you ever see
Speaker 4: people I r L in twenty twenty five You're like,
Speaker 4: whoa you do you have a face that looks like
Speaker 4: an old cepia toned like faded print from the late
Speaker 4: nineteenth century?
Speaker 5: Because I do sometimes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I get that a lot.
Speaker 5: Actually yourself, you're like every time A look in the mirror.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, well, Amanda, you got any pluggables before
Speaker 1: we roll out a part one?
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 4: If if people like hearing about cults in a cheeky
Speaker 4: tone or really just cult like organizations from the modern
Speaker 4: day site geist and want to participate in determining whether
Speaker 4: or not they are real cults, they can listen to
Speaker 4: my podcast sounds like a cult about the modern day
Speaker 4: cults we all follow, from Disney Adults to Elon Musk.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So yeah, and we have an episode coming out with
Speaker 5: you about Mark Zuckerberg. So that's going to be exciting. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and then Cultish. My book Cultish is coming out in
Speaker 5: paperback in June.
Speaker 1: Excellent well, check out Coldish, check out everything Amanda is
Speaker 1: involved with, and check out prtoon coming in like a day.
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