The Most Passive $104K/M Online Business You've Never Heard Of - Ep. #296

It's here! Hynac in Greenlight May, by Incoliday Weekend, Dublin 35X 10 Indomit Venues Thursday, April 30th Catch Madras Salah at Mary's Bar Friday May 1st Catch Tomorrow at the Button Factory Saturday May 2nd Catch Mike Skinner and DJ Seinfeld at Wingwam Sunday May 3rd Catch Currency and Lil Skag at O'Reagans Sunday May 3rd Catch Horstmeet Disco at Street 66 Tickets at Hynac in Greenlight Dada'i Get the Facts Be Drink Aware of Is a Drink Aware Dada'i It's here! Hynac in Greenlight May, by Incoliday Weekend Dublin 35X 10 Indomit Venues Thursday, April 30th Catch Madras Salah at Mary's Bar Friday May 1st Catch Tomorrow at the Button Factory Saturday May 2nd Catch Mike Skinner and DJ Seinfeld at Wingwam Sunday May 3rd Catch Currency and Lil Skag at O'Reagans Sunday May 3rd Catch Mike Skinner at Wingwam Sunday May 3rd Catch Currency at Lil Skag at O'Reagans Sunday May 3rd Catch Currency at Wingwam Sunday May 3rd Catch Currency at Street 66 Tickets at Hynac in Greenlight Dada'i Get the Facts Be Drink Aware of Is a Drink Aware Dada'i I want to welcome everyone back to the Pikenyono Show. We are back. Thomas is here. And we are starting a new series today. Thomas, take it away. Yeah, we're going to be discussing the 30 years' war, which isn't just a subject matter of trivial interest historians. It was the forum event of the European modern era until World War II. And even as recently as the 60s in the Bundesrepublic, they pulled the University-educated people from presumably different walks of life. And they said what was the most catastrophic event ever took a fall in Germany. And worse than World War I, worse than the Bubonic plague, worse than even the Vimar starvation years, was a 30 years' war. And into the third Reich, it's interesting, Gerbos, Spirer, and the Führer himself all referenced the 30 years' war consistently in public addresses. Okay. All told that it killed between 8 and 12 million people, which was a massive attrition rate. A huge percentage of which were civilians. The battle ground was the German kingdoms. And it truly was a war fought by, it truly was a European civil war, by direct intervention and by proxy. England famously and significantly set it out. But between 40 and 60,000 Englishmen went to fight for the Protestant alliance. And Hitler's take on this was interesting to say the least. He said that Germany, first of all, it was destroyed and it never truly recovered until the Bismarck era, which I think is unarguable. However, you feel about the declarant. He also said that the sort of organic distribution of truly culture-bearing elements in Germany, presumably the purist of the Indo-European stratum. He said that populations were scattered to the four winds. And there were catastrophic losses, which weren't evenly distributed, that historical memory was compromised as well as cultural habit and learning. And this is one reason why the Europeans had been set back so much relative to the nascent superpowers, but particularly America. Obviously, the Habsburg Austrian Hitler was going to have a sort of deep historical perspective on these things. But I think that that's an account of the historical record that needs to be taken seriously, whether one accepts or rejects it. So there's this concept, and thankfully there's been a lot more until the scholarship on 30 years' war, even from relatively mainstream historians. Traditionally, the way it was taught to people, even at advanced graduate level, was that, oh, well, this was just a religious war of sectarian origin. That's the wrong way to look at it. The confessional aspects can't really be extricated from high politics, particularly in that era. But something I emphasized in my own manuscript, which I always say deals with this conflict because of the peace of Westphalia. It wasn't a single tree. That's why it's called the Westphalia in peace, and we'll get to that. That's when the modern state system begins. But there wasn't a quote "pronestant church." And this conceptual misunderstanding and dorks of this day, even when people like E. Michael Jones will talk about Protestantism, like a mirror of the Roman Catholic church or something. Lutherans and Calvinists had nothing in common other than opposition to the papacy. In some localized theaters, they fought each other. This one Lutheran theologian of the era, he famously said that he basically called us the Taliban. He said that the dragon of Calvinism is as insidious as the Muhammadians. And, for example, one of the things Calvinists were prone to, particularly as emotions and confessional passions were at a high because of active warfare. Calvinists partisans, they'd smash icons to say, "See, this is idolatry. This object has no power." Otherwise, God's wrath would intervene. Lutherans would never have done something like that. I mean, there's Lutherans here this day that are actively confessional, but even those that place deliberate distance in terms of their energy and ritual between their own congregations and Catholic practices, they revered icons and relics for historical reasons. So you can't. Then there was this minority faction in Transylvania and Moldovia who identified as, they were this ethnic minority population of indigenous sloths, most of them, but they identified as unitarian. There's nothing in common with the faux church today. There were these people who rejected the trainitarian concept of God. Okay. They were obviously a minor player, but my point being, there was not this binary political or sectarian diet. Because England and Scotland, Ireland didn't play a direct role in this. I mean, they did by proxy. You play Englishman, Irishman, and Scotsman did fight on the continent, but I believe because Britain wasn't impacted, that's one of the reasons why and tragically people never truly lived a living together along sectarian line. And this didn't resolve until the end of the 20th century in Britain, which is speculative, but I think there's also something too that postulate, but that's something of a digression. But then also finally, I don't think people fully realize that agreed of Habsburg power to this day. And the present day, I mean, the Holy Roman Empire, it wasn't just a control. I don't know if there's a famous, I can't remember who the sources of the statement, but the Holy Roman Empire. Roman Empire was neither Holy Nor Roman nor an Empire. Okay, it wasn't just a ceremonial structure. It had incredible power in no small measure because the Habsburgs dominated it. Which meant the Habsburgs dominated Europe. Because the way to think of the Holy Roman Empire is that as the political nucleus of Europe was diffested from Rome. It became situated in, was now Germany. And drawing upon not just the patronage of the Roman Catholic Church, but also aiming to derive legitimacy from an understanding of historical continuity. You know, the understanding was that this is the new Rome. This is the new imperial seat. And the Habsburgs also spain at that time, the Spanish Habsburgs controlled Spain, which was the closest thing to a superpower in the 17th century. And the Spanish Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Habsburgs and the Austrian Habsburgs, the German Habsburgs, if you will, they weren't formally allied. But on all serious matters of my politics, they always found themselves. in the name of the Holy Roman Empire. Making common cause. So, the end of the truly feudal structure, there's a reason why the piece of us failure is identified as the beginning of the modern state system. And it's not just for structural reasons, or because the conceptual biases of wiggest storyens, who can kind of confedely just pastiche of progressive linear development in the historical record. You know, this really was the end of one political reality that would amount to planetary scale, and the emergence of a new one. And it's not reducible to sectarian hostilities or court intrigues of this Byzantine arrangement of Duchess and Prince of Pallys and things. Those aspects obviously played into it, but it's more complicated than that. This is an unbelievably massive topic. So, I'm going to be jumping around a bit probably, and I always take notes, extensively, some of my data points are at my immediate disposal, but I don't write out narratives, so if I'm jumping around a lot, I forgive you for that. My alibi is the nature of the subject matter. The 30 years were again, for context too, and then I'll move on from the hard and fast data record. Parts of what's modern day Germany, as we think of it, there was as high as 50% attrition, or more. So again, this was comparable, obviously not in terms of the cultural destruction, but in terms of the global political order of the 20th or 20th century. The origins, so to say there was a single origin point, and I think this is fair. The Bohemian revolt is cited as the opening salvo as the 30 years war, and the revolt itself started because of the demonstration of Prague. For those that don't know, a demonstration is a fancy word for throwing somebody out a window. Now this begs the question as the who got thrown out the window. On Wednesday, December 23rd, or May 23rd, 1618, a representative of the half-spread court named Villem Slevatta. He and a delegation from the Bohemian treasury, as well as a Supreme Court judge, and he was president of Bohemian treasury. He spent his entire political career serving the half-spread dynasty directly. In the entire kingdom, he was accompanied by another treasury representative, the Yaroslav Borita, Vann Martinez, and one other man. They were seized and quite literally thrown out the window into a ditch below. Then according to some accounts, the men were stabbed when they hit the ground. Slevatta, sword, and not been on the bubble from his belt, apparently he was also stuck with his own sword. But incredibly, all three of these guys lived. But in those days, and other things, tensions being incredibly high, they're being great concern over a looming Protestant revolt which happened. You know, it became the Bohemian revolt that was just mentioned. The initial word that traveled was that all three men had died. And this obviously provoked something of an over-response arguably by the Habsburgs. But the Ferdinand was the king of Bohemia. He was the Duke of Syria, or the Prince of Syria. I can't remember his title. But he had been something of a Lutheran stronghold. He'd crushed Protestantism within his domain very aggressively. And he was on a record of saying with time that he'd rather see his kingdom destroyed than for a heresy to be tolerated within his borders. He was elected a king of Bohemia by the electors and the Holy Roman Empire and the previous May 1617. And Ferdinand declared that he would tolerate Protestant religious freedoms, many of which were laid down by the peace of Habsburg. And we'll get into what the implications that were. But all he was doing was record of persecuting Protestantism outright crushing nascent Protestant revolts. There was a great concern over what his tenure would look like. This led to a very conspiratorial development whereby Protestant nobles, the Czech nobility of Bohemia in particular, were very very anti-Catholic in their sensibility. They determined like now was the time to rebel. They offered the crown to the man who became known as Frederick I, Frederick the Palatine. The check noble of state shows Frederick primarily because he was the leader of the Protestant Union which was a military alliance founded by his father, the charter of which or the treaty of which declared that all signatories and the kingdoms and duchies they represented would come to the aid of any Protestant community under result. They would come to their collective defense. The big hope was that when war arrived, James the Sixth of Scotland and James the First of England, King James, the hope was that he would come to the aid of the Protestant Union and bring his military might to bear not just for the sake of the faith but because he was Frederick's father in law. This was not forthcoming King James advised Frederick against taking the crown and his knowledge was you can't take over from the Habsburgs was going to lead the general state of war and you can't win that. James realized coming to the defense of a Protestant coalition on the continent may lead to open hostilities with France and Spain which are periodically emerging anyway. The main thing was it was a key hold of crusade. This led to something that during breach I think between the continents and England. I'm not suggesting any proximate cause between these events and the Germanophobia and the foolishness of people advanced to the centuries later but it's England would kind of drew into itself. These would be the continent and I think had there been more of a common front against the papacy that would have been different but even something short of open military alliance. It was on August 19th. The meaning of states declared that they were rescinding the recognition of Ferdinand's election and commandally declaring that Frederick was their king. Ferdinand was subsequently elected Holy Roman Emperor nine days later which made war inevitable if Frederick accepted the Bohemian crown and lieu of bowing out with something approaching honor. He made very well and done that as most of his advice and it is to be snobbed by his father and a lot of James almost all of Frederick's advisory cabinet urged him to reject it including the Duke of Savoy. However, who he did enjoy backing from was a Maurice of Orange and Christian of Anhold both of whom commanded substantial military forces in their own right and that dutch at that time had very full coffers and were a juggernaut in maritime trade as well as having a lot of political clout. They basically offered an open ended guarantee to the Protestant Union to purchase weapons and munitions and the thought was among the dutch as well as Frederick that this would facilitate at long last a wider support in central Europe in the Protestant lands if not in general uprising. This was not forthcoming in substantial measure because even people who had contempt for the Habsburgs even people who didn't view the de facto rain and stewardship of the Catholic Church over Europe rejecting an elected home Holy Roman Emperor that was not allowing people willing to cross regardless of their confessional allegiance and it placed one of the precarious position there was no going back from that and obviously two in a sectarian coded war one can't expect any quarter if they had to have a losing side but on top of that you'll be you and all your men will be slaughtered as brigands if you know your your your causes belly involved rejecting a legitimate legally elected ruler it just wasn't done you know let me find my place here now one of the reasons why this was significant whether he knows so much about the 30 years war and what does it mean to you? yes, it means that you are the most powerful of the world. What is that? I don't know, I don't know what it means, I have been born in the 19th century. What is your name? I am the name of the name of the name of the name. But I am a little bit of a bit of a bunch of people who have been called the most powerful of the world. The 17th century is kind of viewed as the first media revolution because that's when a media that as we can probably think of it came about even before you know the wide availability of a modern printing press there was just a tremendous amount of documentation about the battlefield situation you know by a literate people and at that time still in the continent you know monasteries and other things functioned as as repositories of literacy and record keeping well pretty much everywhere that became a battle space had a monastery or an abbey in proximity and because this conflict dried on for so long and there was so much punctuated violence in these little cows that ultimately became contested there was just a whole lot of there's a whole lot of documentation of what was happening and upon the conclusion of of hostilities what we can think of as the sort of earliest precursor the modern newspaper emerged in the form of a report on the on the piece of Westphalia and the decades subsequent the actual written piece of Westphalia with many many pages of commentary and like institutes accounts of what was underway this became the equivalent of international bestseller you know with dozens of editions and I believe that continued for about a hundred years you know probably the primary audience was people in academia and stuff but that was basically unheard of other than you know the Bible if you're talking about you know something produced that scale you know mass production was impossible then but you know this this was this was remarkable for all kinds of reasons now Now something I think is very important and isn't really fleshed out enough with a handful of exceptions. There's a couple of books that deal with it, but the Hasper experience of maintaining the continental peace, this was very much colored, I think, in a way that was counterproductive in terms of developing a meaningful picture of the strategic situation by the conflicts that Haspers have fought against the Turks. Make no mistake, the Ottomans were by no means in decline at the turn of the 17th century. The successors of Suleiman, the magnificent, weren't, they didn't have nearly his mandate nor his power, but the Ottoman is still controlled and mass of the amount of territory they had a mighty military apparatus. They were then the primary geo-strategic threat to Europe. In the first phase of hostilities in the 30 years war, almost all the Haspers officers had cut their combat teeth in what was called the colloquially the Long Turkish War, or the 13 years war. Yeah, 1593 to 1606. So the guys who'd been young officers in the Long Turkish War, at the onset of hostilities in 1618, they were men and senior commands by that point. But Haspers or the lands were, they were caused a pile of sectarian terms, okay? And particularly in the frontier, in places like Transylvania and really Moldovia, Latia and Transylvania. So the experience of the Haspers ruling these territories, there was a basic stability, even a miscultural distance and periodic tensions between these populations, okay? And there's owed to the fact of the common menace of the Ottomans. The internal politics of Transylvania, I mean, to be clear, it was a piss. It was a pitch rig of four major populations. There was a minority of Turkish peasants and Eastern Slavs, who both of whom were sort of outside of the reigning political culture. But the main population for Orthodox Romanians, Calvinist Magyars, Lutheran Saxons, the Transylvania Saxons, and some self-governing indigenous Slavic elements who were nominally Catholic but probably abided some sort of folk belief system. And the principle of Latia was, or the principle of Transylvania was basically able with a handful of exceptions to maintain these kinds of brokering agreements between groups, particularly the three nations of the Magyar nobles, the Saxon, the Saxon, German, Lutherans, and these Orthodox Romanians. This balance was somewhat enshrined by what is known in the Storgaritas, the Torda Agreement, not Torda, like a Mexican sandwich, Torda, T-Word, the A, that extended as a matter of equal rights, Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and the centuries for the Orthodox is complicated because some are in communion with Rome, some weren't. But regardless, it was a charter religious freedom that was basically observed. The Habsburgs look westward and they saw sectarian warfare being the norm in lands managed by their dynasties. And I believe they convinced themselves that their sort of progressive sensibility about sectarian tolerance and their confessional tolerance. And they're kind of enlightened. So ethics is what generate a stability in these frontier territories and not again, the geosortetic reality of the Ottoman threat. Now over time, two is the German shrine when the Transylvanian prince converted to Calvinism and he did so because an overwhelming number of Protestant nobles embraced the Calvinist faith. Well, the population, the peasantry especially, were overwhelmingly Catholic or Orthodox and the burgers and the commerce-oriented populations and the towns, who were led by the Saxons, they were overwhelmingly Lutheran. So this idea, you can have a Protestant principality that's of a Calvinist reformed orientation, presiding over a Lutheran business class and a Roman cab, a peasantry, the idea that this is workable, oh, and what's older, the Habsburgs system. Which again, nothing would be extrapolated from these kinds of outlier kingdoms. You know, and to be clear, Transylvania was so called because it's dense woodland, it's probably triple canopy. My research indicates it's comparable to the Hurtsgen Forest, if not even more dense. And only about a fifth of that lay under cultivation. So the population was concentrated in these isolated pockets that was largely cut off from the ability to reinforce. Okay, so the people had to take on this warrior, yeoman, resensibility, contra the Turks, who were a real threat. And they showed no quarter to the infidel. That's the reality in the Balkans and on the frontier like this. There's this moronic neocons, you try and make a whole narrative out of this, which is nonsense. But what I'm describing was the reality. And conditions like that are wonderful at keeping the peace between sectarian and elements and ethnic groups who otherwise would be at odds, clearly, I think. So I think the haps were going to have to have to have a sense along to this frontier experience. Not so much that they were immune to some sort of sectarian revolt, but that their system had some sort of built in mechanism whereby, you know, a general state of civil war would be kind of unthinkable. But that's the reality. the Spanish half-burgs were a mess. And the Austrian half-burgs, admirable as Franz Joseph may have been, you know, there was something clearly out of time about them and very reactionary. But, you know, in the 17th century, they were probably the best of European royals. You know, these were learned people who excelled in military command and commerce and all the other things that a leadership cast of a people should, you know, be adept at. But they saw the writing on the wall in some sense that the world was changing, you know, and particularly the politics of the continent were changing. And this sort of complex balance of feudal interests and this interplay between what Duma Zoe called the functions, you know, those who worked, those who fought, those who pray, that wasn't going to endure in perpetuity and the result of cracks being to show. So the leading members of the half-burg dynasty, they became convinced that their posterity and the survival of the system itself dependent upon restoring Catholicism as the basis, you know, of political loyalty as well as of, you know, kind of communitarian life, you know, and that wasn't entirely unrealistic, you know, not just because even accounting for places, whether it was the Catholic minority in the ruling of states, like in Transylvania, you know, there wasn't Protestantism as a house divided, like we just talked about. And also, you know, you had a deeply religious peasantry and even in places where, you know, the emerging mercantile class was majority Lutheran, you know, there was still a reverence for the historical aspects of the Roman Church. [Music] You know, there was this belief too that ultimately cooler heads will prevail among the noble of states because they've got to understand that if we go to war with each other, it's just not manageable anymore, you know, you can't have the leadership element at loggerheads and survive as a discrete polity, you know. So I think there's an understanding that, you know, any reasonable man understands that the real business that government is is plaking the peasants and devising a and sustaining a a communitarian ethos that's coded into the culture, you know, and I'm on top of that too, there's a basic understanding of the politics of the Holy See and I mean, that's not saying something bad about the Roman Church, that's the reality was, among other things, if the mirror of a regime era, the Pope became the de facto emperor of Europe as it were because nature abors a vacuum. You know, like I'm not saying the vatting didn't want that role, but it was also by necessity. You know, I think there was an understanding within the minds of the Hathburgs that, you know, a warring states paradigm will, you know, bring everything down. Why when the cycle of violence truly kicked off and earned as the Ottomans didn't assault, that's an interesting question. I'm not going to get into that this episode, but, be of it as it may. (silence) The, and it's common too, and obviously, considering my own heritage, I'm not going to be truly objective on this matter. There was a tendency, this was faded somewhat, at least in mainstream accounts. Most histories of the 30 years war from the mid to later 20th century, in particular, I've got this book, it's a really good book. It was published in 1963, excuse me. The other claims that, well, not putting blame on the Calvinist, he views the, the Calvinist participation, in these sorts of rebellious efforts within Hathburg lands to be the proverbial kerosene on the fire, because it prevented it from being a clean cut issue. You know, and like I said, there was, I think I mentioned at the outset, there was one Lutheran partisan writer, you said, quote, "The Calvinist dragon is pregnant with all the horrors of Muhammadinism." You know, there was a certain fanatical fervor that Calvinist brought to the table, into the battlefield, and led to things, frankly, like throwing representatives of the Hathburgs out the window, that it was a very, very, very, it had the trappings of a militant cult that was being propagated for, you know, as an instrumentality of rejecting the rule of law and the legitimacy of duly elected kings and empires. And, you know, that raises alarm. As it should, you know, but again, I'm with a bully and don't give me wrong, you know, again, I'm not, I'm not saying that the perspective I just described is which places a substantial, not blame, but causal emphasis on Calvinist extremism as at least an aggravating factor. And the depth and insensitive hostilities, I, it's not totally wrong, but I think it's important to acknowledge that this wasn't a purely sectarian conflict, you know, and I don't think there are any such things as purely sectarian conflicts. That's always an aspect of a greater or lesser causal relevance, but it's never an exclusive cause of a bully. And I object to it when people dismissal we refer to religious wars. There's, you know, no such thing. And speaking of which, the Calvinists for their part, after the demonstration of Prague, the propaganda that was so, sort of strongly tailored against them, you know, they were formed. They, they came to characterize the Hapsley response as a Vatican crusade against them, you know, and Calvinists are fond of pointing out that idolaters as they view it will always assault the true elected. Well, you know, the crusades on the continent were essentially always directed against pagans, some of whom were engaged in truly demonic activities and things. So this kind of narrative developed its own momentum. I mean, first of all, crusade wasn't declared against the Calvinists, even those who were in open approval. But secondly, nobody suggested, I mean, there was Lutheran, apparently, who claimed that they were in drag and like the Mohamedians or pregnant with the men of the Mohamedians. But nobody that I know of claimed that they were worshiping the devil or were pagans. But there was, you know, there wasn't the minds of some of these Calvinist partisans were about to be programmed. And as the war went on, that did happen. I mean, that happened to Catholic people too. We've unfortunately found themselves, you know, a sectarian minority on the ground. But you know, I, it's another kind of typically tragic case of potentialialities in the public mind becoming immediate realities, only to fear, you know, and it's a fascinating story. You know, that's what I got from my introduction. And frankly, I'm kind of exhausted, but I'll get into the, this has been a very hectic week. So forgive me for being a broth or what have you. And forgive me if that was too scatter shot, but I, I, one of the things I'm going to do during my downshown on the road is break down the, the, the, some of the military aspects of this. And it's kind of a fascinating era, man, you know, I think. And it's, it's what became the pike and shot era. And the pike being the primary edge of the weapon. You know, that's, I got to go conversation. One of the fellows the other day, we were talking about firearms because I was talking with the buck on 29, it has become my favorite blade. But, uh, and we were talking about the transition of infantry from blade of weapons to firearms. And I'm like, you know, and the pike and shot or a firearms review is like, like if you were a real infantry man, you, you killed people with a pike. You ran them. I mean, running somebody through the pike. I mean, that's, that's, that's pretty like their, their blood will splash in your face. I mean, it's, it's no joke. I mean, it's interesting how, uh, that kind of slow train's decision to the, the rifle, becoming the, the infantryman's stock and trade. I guess it would, I mean, one of the, the British always made a big deal. You got to retain the bayonet. I mean, bayonets are useful, you know, to this day. I know the Marines and the army brought back the bayonet after a brief fight. And, uh, it goes to Hasford's book, a short time. It was one of the chapters called the Spirit of the Bayonet. But it, that's, that's the legacy of what we're talking about is, uh, the war. What do you want to do? I want to take the land of the poor, the dead. What? We don't have the same idea. Well, it's about the year 2019. I want to take the land of the dead. Well, but I want to take the land of the dead. The war was in 1925, 1919. Yeah, the war was in 1919. Well, no, you're a kid. Yeah, you're a kid. You know, you got a, the huge room it has to be, he's got to be trained and capable of killing with cold steel. He's also got to understand the spiritual significance of that, you know. Um, I find that profound, you know, um, and I'm not at base, a military hound or something. I just, I just, I think it's significant. But yeah, no, that's, uh, I hope this was informative and, uh, if not enlightening, it'll probably send light. But I hope I, I hope I convey information in a way that is useful. All right. Good intro. And, uh, you know, I guess we'll probably pick this up back, uh, after you get off the road. Um, everybody go to Thomas the sub stack. It's real Thomas 777.substack.com and you can connect to him from anywhere into all other places from there. That's his, uh, center of operations. So, um, yeah, that's where it happens. That's where it originates. So he's done. Yeah. No, thank you, man. I'll, I'll only be gone, uh, I'll only be gone like four or five days. So it won't be like a marathon trip, like the last, like a Thomas tour. But I really appreciate it, man. And I'll, um, yeah, I, uh, I'm looking forward to this series to get some of the week. Absolutely. All right. Thank you. So I'll see you in a couple days. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekiniana Show. Thomas is back and, um, after a little hiatus due to, um, travel. We're going to continue the, uh, 30 years war series. So how are you doing, Thomas? I'm doing well. I was very pleased that the first episode was so well received because it's a huge subject matter. And I feel comfortable speaking on historical topics, but there's so much here. There's, there's, there's deep cultural anthropology here. There's ecclesiastical heritage. There's military science stuff, you know, so I was worried that maybe I wasn't presenting the material in a way that people found for a while, but there's been a lot of a fused of praise. And I, I really appreciate that because I, I worked hard this, to deliver a, you know, content that, that people actually benefit from. You know, there's a few different ways we can go and proceeding. I kind of want to, I realize this, I'm kind of dealing in broad strokes. That's because if I don't, will we, on the same subject matter for the next five years? I've whittled down what I think is most important. Isn't it during, in the 17th century, there was a revolution in military affairs. That's important. There was a power political paradigm that preceded that, that led to a, a sort of technological shock when the 30 years were arrived, because it was so different than the preceding paradigm. Also, when I think of what became Germany in political terms, you know, Brandon Berg, Prussia was utterly devastated by the conflict, but it also solidified its militant Protestant identity. You know, and that's important too. But also the way that the, the way that the modern battlefield developed, I think, is ill understood, especially because the way in which military science textbooks were written then, there was these very, very geometric models presented. And in manuals that dealt with things like infantry drill, there was exaggerated depictions of kinesiology and human motion. So for a long time, that led a lot of war college types to think, oh, well, there was this over emphasis on drill. That's not why. Especially when most people weren't literate, they were trying to convey sort of the mechanics of human motion and the difference between the parade ground and the battlefield as well as trying to convey to everybody from NCOs and, and, and, and battalion level officers to conscripts and, and, you know, infantry grants, they were trying to convey a concept in visual terms. Okay. There was actually a great deal of flexibility in the 30 years war in terms of how combined arms were, were oriented. And made no mistake, there were real combined arms. You know, cavalry, infantry, and artillery was, it was incredibly complicated to deploy these forces in concert. And there was a technological revolution underway then to whereby it became clear, particularly with respect to field artillery. These designers realized there were certain potentialities to large guns, but there wasn't, there wasn't the materials and, and the tools available to make them yet. So there's always sort of intermediary designs where the bore wasn't quite right for the range desired, but the men making these things knew that this was possible. So military science was kind of overshooting military technology. Usually it's the opposite. So I've got the minority opinion a lot at a lot of subject matters. The point where I'm sure some people are convinced I'm really a contrarian. I don't think that I am, but this is yet another case. I think 30 years more tactics that strategic orientation was light years ahead of everything before it, but they didn't have the tools to effectively deploy in totality, you know, within that complete paradigm. Also mission oriented tactics and this becomes important to the conceptual biases born of the preceding military paradigm. For one of the major powers, say like the Holy Run Empire or Poland Lithuania or the Swedish Confederation in order for them to feel an army, it would cost about 7 million golders just to raise an army that could stand in face a peer competitor and not get slaughtered. Just out of the gate and then you need to feed and pay these grunts and calrymen and artillery men, then you need to feed all these animals. So this was astronomically expensive. So what I'm getting at is that if you are to sustain that level of operational effectiveness, you had to resolve pretty rapidly, but also in the 30 years war, the way that it broke down, where you had adjacent principalities going to war with each other all at the same time, there was civil war raging within a common polity, usually with the Protestants as the element in rebellion, but not always. So you had, you had, based what amounted to war bands of zealots, kind of like Christian Muja Dine, as well as mercenaries that were deployed as essentially counter and certainty elements, and then you had the arms of the king or the reigning lesser nobility, and these guys were like a war band living off the land. You know, they were not conventional military forces. So mission oriented tech, some primitive iteration of it just became the order of the day. And this led to a lot of repain, the figure of the literal, brigandry, awful stuff happened, but even basically upright and civilized troops, you know, they had to live off the land. You know, so you were fighting not just, you know, your day to day wasn't just, you know, in operational terms, locating, closing with and killing the enemy, or if, you know, you were licking your wounds as a unit, you know, as a company, or as a battalion, you were basically moving only at night and hiding during the day until you could refit and regroup. And either one of those, under either one of those conditions, you had to feed yourself, you'd starve. And especially two of these battle spaces, it's not like normal commerce was being totally interrupted. You know, it's not like you could go to a marketplace and buy a bunch of loads of bread or something. You know, so this, this changed everything. And when I talked about the shock aspect, it wasn't just technological or historical. The way to understand Europe, really for the preceding couple of centuries, but in earnest for the preceding 50 years, you know, I made the point about the, the Turkish war that the Habsburgs fought against the Ottomans between 1593 and 1606. That was the largest mobilization of military force in Habsburg lands since the 1560s. And to be clear, the Ottomans were still a, in comparative terms, we're still a superpower. It'll be a one in decline in the 16th and 17th century. And Europeans all viewed the Ottomans as a common threat to Christiandom. And this did two things, what, and they were. That wasn't just a fiction that was exploited for, you know, political reasons. This Europe needed that external military and political threat to sustain anything approaching unity between these diverse parties. And also the Eastern European, the central and Eastern European frontier, especially, you know, we got into talking about Transylvania and Morovia and Olesa Degry Bohemia. And the last episode, it was impossible to truly fortify this frontier in a linear kind of garrison capacity. There were a large swass territory that were just impassable, you know, because they were triple canopy forest. Populations were concentrated in these scattered towns. You know, it, it didn't, it blended itself to a strategic thing that was oriented very much to countering this discreet threat. And creating what amounted to a defense and depth by garrisoning lead elements at key junctures, you know, almost like, almost like NATO did at the fault of Gap on the North German plane, because there was only a handful of avenues of assault ingress, okay. And then as a secondary defensive cordon, you know, deployment would be more linear, all right. But this informed military doctrine from top to bottom and pretty much throughout the continent. And at the end of hostilities in 2018, basically every officer and NCO serving in a Habsburg, like, like, bearing arms to the Habsburgs, it had cut its teeth, you know, in the in the Turkish war. So this fluid and diffuse pattern of combat and deployment that ensued in the 30 years war, which was one part civil war, one part, pretty conventional conflict between adjacent polities, nobody was prepared for that, you know, and so the learning curve was a trial by fire, you know, and the people who are most towards that end to the people who are kind of unsung and overlooked. And I'm sure again, people will say this is a conceptual bias of mine towards the Protestant side. But these cows and doves like, like, how it's thrown, like, horn lobe. and Mansfield, they led the Bohemian rebel element you know, in the Eastern Haspray lands and they really put a huge amount of hurt and we always viewed as kind of the top of infantry and cavalry elements of the day and this is um. this is overlooked in favor of a. you know, the battlefield is farther west where these military science times basically look at their view is basically that the Spanish style of warfare was deteriorating and becoming obsolescent and that's what everybody abided including the Hasprays then after about a decade on the Swedes intervened and the Swedes revolutionized warfare I don't accept that for a lot of reasons but you know, this this paradigm that wasn't quite unconventional but also is not at all conventional warfare and the way we think of it as was extant, you know, before or after that's important and it's not unlike in my opinion what happened in the Balkans and on the Eastern Frontier and World War II you know and so this this also had a conceptual aspect to it too because as innovation in tactics and new ways of fighting and incorporating, you know, truly effective gun power weaponry as states of like what became Prussia you know, they're claimed to prestige and their power political ambitions were facilitated by their excellent said warfare almost exclusively I mean, yeah, I there's obviously the huge amount of culture produced by you know kingdoms like Prussia as well but there but that was that was the singular most significant variable in their ascendancy and the degree to which military considerations either direct or directly or obliquely is sort of coded European development that's a hugely important point and that's one of the things that sets Europe apart and European people apart you know, and Europeans are kind of the ultimate warrior race you know, that only they can be denied you know but the and another way reason this is important and another way I part ways a lot of court historians you know, again, this this idea that for really the first decade of the 30 years war you know, it was a matter of obsolete tactics and strategy and technique being exposed as such like that's not really true either you know, innovation happened rapidly and immediately and you know, it those commanders and those elements that couldn't adapt essentially immediately upon first contact with an opposing force they just ceased to exist you know, so there's a flexibility built in to tactical doctrine by necessity that sounds total logical but that there is a there is a total logical aspect to the way military affairs play out at particularly at company or battalion level I don't think serious people dispute that you know, it's also to the you know, it's also to another thing that changed brutal is the wars with the Turks were you know, the Turks basically the Turks would probe they'd see what avenues of assaulting arrests were available and again on the frontier, especially in Transylvania and Maruovia these were few and then they exploit those breaches when they had overwhelming force on their side when they met resistance you know, that couldn't be overwhelmed they'd frequently evade and shelter behind fortifications you know, in anticipation of the counter-attack you know, in the Hungarian theater though and you know, in what became the the Bohemian theater the order that day was, I mean, this was in part, although not completely, you know, a sectarian war, a holy war, even. The objective really was to stack a body's, you know, it was it was a headhunt you know, exploit like, you know, locate clothes with the enemy and annihilate them as an end in itself was oftentimes the mission orientation you know, but this differed by the, you know, what Bale's face we're talking about and it was like a malignant mission orientation tactical doctrines, terrains, weather patterns, you know, you name it. It was a, there was probably more data. Other than the 20th century, other than the 19th and 20th centuries, and the 19th century, you know, so the American war between the states, the 20th century obviously, I don't need to level the explicate this, but other than those two examples, there was more data gleaned on the practical business of combined arms tactics and infantry war fighting in from, you know, gleaned in a 30 years war than any other conflict paradigm. I'll die on that, I'll die on that hill proverbially. Another thing that I'm going to say is that the war is a war. And yeah, the technology revolution too. It's probably like a, you know, people, it's probably become somewhat cliche, but, you know, warfare is the mother of invention. You know, even like what we're doing right now, I mean, the Internet exists because it was a nuclear war. You know, the entire telecrime revolution came out of the cold war. You know, air power, or, you know, as we know it, you know, came out of military exigencies, you know, the space program, you name it. Like I am the first person to criticize the, the rent seeking and the parasitic nature of the military apparatus. Okay. I mean, I think people who read my content are well aware of that. But this talking point that a lot of both liberals and libertarians are prone to, or they say, like, "Worth tech never produced anything," or that it's a worthless expenditure of human energies in capital. That's complete nonsense. There's warfare produces all kinds of innovations that have broad application, claiming otherwise is just moronic. You know, you know. [Music] Puyla, what do you want to get? I want to get to the world of the world. What? I don't want to get to the world of the world. I want to get to the world of the 19th century. What do you want to get? I want to get to the world. But I want to get to the world of the 19th century. 19th century. Yeah. It's not good. No, no. You're right. Yeah. You're right. You're right. You're right. And simultaneously in the 17th century There was just a lot of punctuated innovation, particularly on the side of mathematics and engineering and things. But something big that happened between handheld firearms basically appeared in the battlefield between the 1470s and about 1520 or 1530. But they hadn't really been perfected. They were largely perfected by the time of the onset of hostilities in 1618. And that led to the development of a new kind of shock deployment pattern, which is really fascinating. And I'll get more into this as we get into this series, but your firearm infantry, they would deploy basically like a fail-anx. And the Dutch developed this technique of constant fire, even while retreating. There stated simply essentially like the lead line of the fail-anx would fire and then break off. And then the second line and then the third line. And each line would reload. That line in front of them was finding their target and discharging their weapons. But this, your pikemen, those who traditionally had a defensive role because pikemen in fixed formation, toruses will not charge and throw themselves on pikes. These are really smart. And war horses are bred for those kinds of instincts and some other things. But your pikemen essentially need to protect the, they need to protect your shot fail-anx from enemy cavalry. And traditionally, when the sort of earliest combined arms, tactical paradigms developed and some of us endure the 30 years war. But it mostly didn't. Usually your cavalry assaults its counterpart. Your infantry assaults its counterpart. Having to rush your infantry or having this kind of light cavalry element, light in terms of not really being armored, but that's loaded down with handled firearms. And essentially like zig-zags in skirmish formation and then swoops in to provide extra firepower to a fail-anx that's being outgone or overwhelmed or threatened by cavalry. All these sort of innovations and tweaks to the paradigm, you know, became necessary. And productive techniques and conventionally, Transylvania was conventionally the, it was almost like crop or the scot of arms works of the middle ages in early modern period. They built really great siege engines and they built really great artillery. The Transylvanian Saxons. You know, they were these Germans who settled in Transylvania and you know, a thousand AD or even earlier. They were another population of definitely clans that after World War II and subdawnally. But productive techniques and metallurgy and things became such that you know, guns and artillery, you know, they couldn't be mass produced in the terms that we think of it, but they could be produced at a scale that was there to for basically unprecedented. Interestingly too, when this added, there's nuances of the command structure of armies in the 30 years war and military culture that are, it's an anthropological interesting is fascinating stuff. But artillery men, the loading of artillery, the, the progress of targeting, fighting as an artillery man, these guys belong to the same guild as miners because it partook of metals and things. And so if you wanted, if you wanted the artillery in your, in the army you were raising, you had to deal with the miners' guild. I can't remember who their patron saint is, but a point being, so you basically, you had to be on good terms if you were a prince or a duke or whatever with the guild under which artillery men, you know, fell and they'd view their guild as having authority that superseded that of commanding officers. And to be clear, the guild system, it, it wasn't just some glorified version of the free mage or something. The idea was that productive techniques and artisanal techniques and things, this is all part of like God's revelation, this is a sacred aspect to the preservation and maintenance and passing out of this knowledge. It's very deeply theological and it was taken very, very seriously. You know, so there was a certain prestige and fraternal insularity that attended, you know, guys who served in the artillery branch, but it also, it caused problems, you know. I mean, people think inter-service rivalry and like late modernity is like a big deal. I mean, this, this plus two, and you couple it with sectarian divisions, you know, like we talked about in the first episode. Yes, you know, the protest, the Calvinists and the Lutherans were nominally allied and you had Lutherans and Protestants serving in common formations, but there was a lot of tension there. You know, they, there, there wasn't some sort of, there wasn't, that was very deeply felt, you know, generically Protestant identity, quite the contrary. So there's all, there's all kinds of complicated stuff is what I'm getting at that we'd associate with the medieval period, you know, like what mainstream anglophone history views as the medieval era, but you know, that that was still that still held significant psychological sway over military organizations and and putting institutions, you know, into the 1600s, you know, it's really fascinating. But again, too, like I said, there was, there was real difficulty with uniformity of ammunition, as well as bores for these guns, because there's all kinds of experimentation going on, because like I said, these designers, they, they were experimenting with designs that they knew were possible, but there, there just wasn't the material or the technique perfected to make it battlefield viable yet. So this led to a lot of failures of the street platforms, because the testing grounds were literally the battlefield, but also even those that, even those guns that were viable, there was such a diversity of models that, you know, it caused combat ability issues, you know, or even if there was plenty of ammunition on deck, you know, you'd have a man who hadn't trained on whatever guns that they, you know, were able to get a hold of, you know, and things like that. So it's kind of amazing things worked as well as they did. And like I said, it, the sophistication on display and, you know, these, these tactical treaties and stuff is pretty, it's pretty incredible. But yeah, at the same time too, it, there was a self-conscious emulation of the Greek fail-anks and that kind of drill technique, you know, and a lot of that endorsed this day, you know, but it's not merely, it's not merely ceremonial and it's not merely parade-ground stuff that looks pretty. There's certain even today, I mean even as the modern battlefield is become truly fluid and what have you and in a lot of ways, you know, all prior assumptions relating to land and particularly infantry combat are no long particularly relevant but there's certain there's certain geometric realities that are constant no matter what you know when there's the added benefit with some of these techniques and practices that there's the way to tradition behind them. That's the way to understand the aforementioned you know like I can remember we were talking I was not talking to you were talking to our dear friend G. Burton about the spirit of the bayonet and how at the end of the day you know the the bayonet and the coal steel blade would not affixed to a rifle remains a a relive an implement of the infantry and of warfare generally and that will never change you know it's the same it's the same sort of principle but it also what this was further complicated I touched on the presence of pikemen and you know failanks of gunners in the battle space of the 30th war optimizing this combination was incredibly difficult and even if it could be optimized in a parade ground exercises and in training you know smoke made visibility very very difficult so in any heat of battle trying to shout orders as a battalion commander when you don't have the benefit of you know a clear visual perspective that means you've got to be able to rely upon regular movements you know and anticipating how those movements are going to break down and how they're going to adapt and how they're going to reconstitute in the midst of all manner of configurations of assault you know and it's a rare man who can do that effectively but it also meant that you know again these challenges were emerging owing to the immediate military exigency you know that this wasn't war college exercises that were then being parlayed into operational doctrines in the field you know these things are being innovated as it happened the Dutch need to be credited with pioneering a lot of what became a pike and shot battlefield doctrine the the Dutch had deployed the way we talked about a moment ago with a pike man flanking musketeers and to be cleared to most European armies even even handgun infantry were still referred to as musketeers the Spaniards in contrast and the Imperial infantry you know the Holy Roman Empire they were more conventional they favored depth elaborate depth within their formations I mean because they had demand power but also they practice something not like what we consider to be deep battle you know like the Soviets did and how the Russians do it albeit in an altered form you know which makes sense I mean forgive the digression but you know that like we talked about and like I'm not sure a lot of people know this you know the reasons why the our force the Russian Federation the reason I perform a modified goose step you know they they were drilled by Prussians I mean Klausel which was observing the battle of Moscow from Moscow you know Russian deep battle there's the DNA of you know some of these imperial infantry doctrines you know which admittedly the where was was somewhat at odds with Prussian sensibilities but you had plenty of Prussian officers who were drilling the Ivens and what amount of the half-sour techniques I find this fascinating and of course to it you know the the Imperial half-spergs of the Spaniards generally could feel more musketeers than a lesser force could and you know if you can if you can overwhelm the enemy with firepower with point of contact you know that's that's always a massive force multiplier and to be clear to there wasn't only one type of cavalry this this evolution of distinct calorie elements this preceded the 30 years war but not really by as much as you might think whether it is my calorie was king for so long it's not just because of the mystique of it and the fact that equestrian was the exclusive domain and nobles you know in European societies for the most part but there was distinct there's about there's basically five distinct roles the calorie by the turn of the 17th century there's the shock roll there's firepower and reconnaissance there's the mobile you know reinforcement element you know and there was the there's the probing element for lack of a better I'm gonna use that I mean that that fall under the within the penumbra the the scouting function but these are all very different kinds of roles you know and the way they train these horses is fascinating horses being smart you know the the battlefield is frightening you know not just for man but also for bees especially intelligent bees like horses and if horses are a mist dead things they'll instinctively go to avoid them you know like rotting corpses and stuff so the way they train war horses the the armies of the day they haven't performed these charge drills a mist piles a carrion and rotting animal carcasses and bonfires like meanwhile they have men like squeezing shots off you know so the horse that get used to you know overcome its fear of of fire and firepower as well as become habituated to literally the smell of death you know because they've been exercised in fields full of blazing straw and piles of detritus you know and they were all they were also trained to kick out and maneuver information without falling over it's really incredible but uh cavalry um przeciateria Jasan kilos Pula Mitä voinautta? Niin Ajattelin teirtä, on vihaalle terve hognain Eikäs semmoisin yönäessä, kuin kahdassa. Joo, violation on hari 12109 Mikä eraan terve caramelja? Siitä terve caughtТ 安viesselgi lin Investment Kentieta 1109 Joo, ei terve hognain. No ei, tuko hakee? En, tuun. Tuun, tuun, puut ei lon! Kut teknikkii galupet About 40 km/h With a rider waited down With armor And weapons I mean it's top speed It'd be considerably less than that But still, I mean that's insane. You know, warhorse with a mounted calryman Bearing down at you with that speed At point of contact, it will tear you to pieces You know And thus the shock element And that's why the pike developed The pikes of versatile weapon, even though it looks essentially just like a great big spear You had to be very, very physically strong To be an effective pike man. You also had to have very Steely nerves But uh And uh Even Even trained and experienced pike man who'd been in battle before There were times where their nerves failed them and the You know, the pike fail angst had fallen apart Because um Just got a fear You know, in a skilled inventory commander Or skilled calry commander He could discern When that was going to happen sometimes by literally how shaky You know, the pike formation was You know, in which case you go and insult it You know, assume, you know, one of the presumptions they'll break ranks And because horses won't throw themselves on pikes They'll break off Um And the way uh The way pike men were deployed In a fixed defensive Fail angst They were staggered such that um It was this actually a veritable like tightly contained forest of uh Of pikes You know, um, it became an, it became an insurmountable obstacle That uh, was also mobile, you know, so I mean there was Like any one of these elements in and of itself Is uh Just an incredible task to coordinate You know, intellectual, you know, let alone in you know correct uh Congress of one another um And uh Now of course The ubiquity of firepower and handle firearms that battlefield That's dramatically reduced the role of cavalry So cavalry became fewer and fewer And absolute as well as relative terms they also became more elite Interesting we In the east there were uh Hungarians as well as Polish uh Nobles still with some adaptations obviously to the reality of the Of the um A battlefield tech They retained a lot of conventional cavalry doctrines And uh they called themselves hussars You know the uh Hussars like Prussian hussars Which is actually the Totten cough comes from was the death set hussars That is a totally different meaning um in uh In German armies but famously There's the Polish othewanian winged hussars They wear full armor including with uh Faceplate But they uh they created these elaborate wings out of wooden or metal frames And uh at a full gallop uh one of these hussars These wings had become volent and uh This high pitched sort of Happily between uh what sounded like a scream and a hiss Would whistle through the apparatus um Which is incredibly evocative and just kind of badass I think Um but those are the winged hussars of uh You know of a myth and war Um Cavalrymen also obviously they they had to learn to handle firearms They had to learn to shoot They had to learn to you know take down Target's a relative range as well as in close combat And the problem was even even one of the Flintlock pistols of the day They're comparatively long you know in uh all but the lightest ones Generally even some got a standard brace in order to be steady But even though it's light enough to manage um Where they'd be holstered for a cavalrymen They'd be holstered lengthwise on either side But uh with the uh you'd have to they'd have to be drawn um cross chest Because the barrel would be facing opposite the rider So you'd have to draw one lengthwise like that The rider's the right-handed They'd uh have to tip the horse left then fire to the right And like do all this one handed you know Because obviously like fire over the horse's head is gonna The horse's gonna go dapp it's you know you're gonna It could be powder burned or injured otherwise But um you know they're an interested in addition to the wrist presented By infantry guns In the battle space you uh every every every cavalrymen had to become essentially a like a competent infantrymen as well You know it was uh just uh and in an incredibly arduous litany of skills And this is kind of you know Americans one of the reasons Americans are romantic about you know the Confederacy and stuff As you had these guys who could fight mounted but who could also were competent you know gunmen And you know had all these were competent and in all these skill sets You know like Confederate officers were And uh like a lot of these revolutionary war guys were But I mean that's basically the origins of this you know that's where Those who those who could were physically and psychologically capable I mean that's where you you know these uh The 30 years war is when men like that you know appeared on the battlefield and I find that kind of fascinating You know and um the uh the gun the rogue gunfighter The old was gunfighter he's kind of like the Ronny it's kind of like a bastard Ronny offspring of this tradition too I just I find that incredibly cool you know um I don't know if uh I don't know if other people are grabbed by it that way But um you know the uh I was going to get into the the confessional aspects of this Because you know competing rise of Christianity I think that's overstated when people assert it was you know somehow like The proximate cause of estilities but it was the most significant anthropological element And even with that not the case these confessional identities emerged in true earnest at the same time -Määtty seein. -Kiitettiin. time as this conflict paradigm began taking shape. You know, we talked about last week how the haspers and trying to revive the Imperial mandate, they very much tried to insinuate their political ambitions into a general Catholic revival. And that wasn't just cynical. And first of all, a lot of the, a lot of the Hasbrod nobles, they were believing Catholics and a lot of them were good Catholics. But it's also, you know, Calvinist and Lutheran identity was providing a serious challenge to what had been a very integral of a very important political ontology. And I, I, I, that deserves an episode until itself. So we'll get into that next time. I hope this wasn't formed in and wasn't too scattered shot. Like I said, I don't want to, I'm not trying to overly self conscious, but this is an important subject, me, I don't, not just a historical record, but for our people and for Christians, especially, you know, so I want to make sure I presented properly. And plus I, what I want to do is waste anybody's time. So yeah, I, I, I'm really looking forward to continuing this series, man. Yeah, I think the, the concentration on the different confessions definitely deserves its own episode. And this one, you know, I mean, talking about battle and talking just about, you know, how much battle it, after this would be informed by it is, is important to, to share. Yeah, good deal. If you want to subter happy, I'm happy. Yeah, yeah, sir. All right, until the next time, I'm going to ask you to go over to Thomas a sub stack. Thomas's Twitter disappears and comes back and disappears and comes back. So it may not be the best place to get him, but over on sub stack, you can get, you can connect to pretty much anywhere Thomas is and also, you know, it's got a chat over there and you can reach out to him there. So please do that. And Thomas, until the next time, me, I want to welcome everyone back to the Pikenyone show. Thomas is back for episode three of the 300, of the 300. That would be, that would be her. And just the 30 years war. Hey, you know, Thomas. I'm doing well. It's important to talk with the confessional aspect of the conflict because that was a significant element, obviously, but the way it's presented, I think, is incorrect. And even some of the, even a lot of histories I like, including one I cite a lot by this one British academic, he doesn't understand Calvinism. I mean, there's, there's some active prejudice when you read Catholic or, or a church of England coded writers, I think, but then other people who have sort of a psychotic disposition, they just don't, they don't understand the faith. You know, I'm going to run into that a lot. I mean, because it's my heritage. And I, you know, I think I'm one of the weirdest Catholics around because I understand Calvinism better than I do. I understand Catholicism because I actually want to, I actually want to school to learn Calvinism. Yeah. No, I mean, and that's, and I mean, don't get me wrong. I move to the guys in my cadre locally or Catholic, I mean, Chicago, when I, I think, Catholics are awesome. I don't, I'm ecumenical with fuck, you know, I mean, like I, I've got My's on comrades have got immense respect for I think people know I Got a lot of shit for that from simple tins and Zoggling's and a sort of other morons who you know aren't on my level But point being I don't have some bad fueing towards cat looks like the contrary and to be to be told I don't think most people in their lack of understanding of the reform faith coming from some kind of hostility or prejudice I think this is don't understand it and admittedly it is it is sort of strange to people who Have a you know a primarily kind of liturgical view of worship. I totally get that. I don't take it some kind of way or something but because it may You know One of the reasons why I think it's ill understood is There's this kind of I this is kind of sense of trying to transpose the middle ages under the modern period and There's a sense of oh well. This was just a religious war. That's the wrong way to look at it and Church affairs when I'm speaking of the Roman church creeping into politics particularly the imperial Structure and the Holy Roman Empire that was a big problem You know, I mean axiomatically there's always a political aspect to institutionalized or ecclesiastical affairs But that but we're talking about what was perceived as an active subversion of secular political affairs as a kind of power play and the Jesuits played a big role in this which is really interesting And we're gonna get into all that stuff today and then we'll get back to the hard And fast kind of power political and military aspect next time because the other big sort of a subject within this broader festees of variables is the Swedish intervention and Sweden was a tremendous military power at the time you know You've got to look at Sweden as having In part inherited what had been the The territorial imperatives of of the Danes as well as Sweden becoming the low guy of the Scandinavian power with large you know and this was a very very strong constellation effectors in their favor including mentioned material which attended towards tremendous industriousness And and all that efforts way engineering and military matters and you know a great military aptitude but You know there's this complex air play In terms of religious tensions that did play a just positive role You know the 16th century - the preceding decades one of the reasons why The Europeans could effectively mobilize against the Turks is because compared to the Middle Ages This early modern period was far far less and violent You know the Middle Ages are characterized by emperors Not just you know local gentry and lesser-known ability but emperors being deposed by vassals wholesale massacres sometimes motivated by sectarian imperatives or A literal clastervolts that's not just some sort of Marxist mythology superimposed over history but you know Man is a faith being bound up with secular disputes over legitimate authority and succession therein That wasn't really something characteristic of you know the 16th and early 17th century at all you know and The papacy had a problem You know because really One of the things they emphasize not just for stability But also to sustain their mandate such that they played a Meaningful and enduring role in the political order which again really flowed from the Holy Roman Empire There's a primacy placed on organization you know and The exclusive mandate other Roman Church to interpret the word of God for all Christians that was really the source of that organizational imperative So when Martin Luther and his followers started dressing stressing a primacy of doctrine over the medium of the church, you know, as the, as God's representative on earth, you know, that caused a real controversy at all levels of political power. That's the way to understand it. This wasn't some trivial dispute between field logins or something, as, you know, a lot of these sort of middleing university types like to present it as. But what's fundamentally important too is that, you know, Luther's Reformation, he was quite literally looking to reform the church. This was totally different than what Calvin had in mind and Calvin's successors were even more radical than he was. You know, and really what, such that Lutherans could be said to have been radicalized, when the council of Cardinals those convened, they're trying to heal the, the trend. And from the 1540s, the the 1560s, they were trying to heal the emergent sectarian rift. But what ended up happening is, uh, the 1990s. What kind of terror was that? Well, but a little bit of a little talk about the deathroids in the 19th century, the 19th century, the 19th century. No, no, no, no. You're right. And, Tom, they came out branding the standard bears the Reformation and those who have evangelized the reformist perspective as heretics. You know, it's final sort of decree and decision was defining Catholicism really as the faith of Europe. And this kind of revival of the faith within the Holy Roman Empire within Habsburg domains is what they translate to do. And devising a program quite literally to exterminate heresy through the revival of Roman Catholic life, confessional life, but also, you know, through bringing down the weight of some terrifyingly punitive measures on the enemies of the church, who again had been identified with a fairly broad brush, but it's point. Um, you know, one of the, uh, and this came the way this trickled down sort of to liturgical and, and then itarian matters and we'll get more to that later because I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but even things like the Eucharist, you know, and the dispute over the meaning of, uh, the Holy Communion and the last supper, because things like that, things like communion, there was a significance because the centrality of mass is a collective act of worship that brought not just congregational communities together, but brought them together with representatives of the Roman church, you know, the presiding priest, you know, obviously, uh, Calvin is in particular revolted against this and declared the real presence to be the idea of it to be a dollar-trust and stuff, but, you know, the, uh, the consulate trend doubled down on these liturgical aspects and, uh, these communitarian aspects of worship, because that was something that was possible through what amount of the statutory means, you know, so the treidentine mass, um, if you abided it, that signals subordination to the, to the pulp, you know, and his infallibility and his absolute authority is God's MSS area on earth, you know, and this led also to counter reformation, partisans, you know, uh, reviving the idea of the Eucharist cult and doubling and tripling down on, um, you know, belief in the real presence as a, as a testament of faith. And so these corpus Christi processions started popping up, you know, encouraged by, uh, local bishops and whatnot, you know, where people had literally walked behind the parish priest as a testament to their, you know, commitment and people who opposed to this, even people and otherwise pious, they were very much marked out as, and sometimes even branded as, you know, people who are tending towards heretical ideas. So this becomes very political, you know, nakedly so, um, you know, and this also, this also is what kind of brought Lutherans and Calvinists together in ways that wouldn't have organically happened. And this is really interesting because later when the Prussian Stem talking centuries later when the Prussian state became Prussia, the, a unified church emerged consisting of, you know, Catholic or, um, Lutheran and Calvinist congregations and in Prussia that experiment worked, which is kind of fascinating. But it's roots, I mean, by that point, there was a discreet Prussian identity and people were very self-conscious of being German and that emerged also to the 30 years of war. This like self-conscious German identity. I mean, local, humanitarian characteristics remained, but this became part of that entire equation. But, you know, it, uh, marking out people with a broad brush on the question that you could rate us then. Some other key, um, doctrinal and liturgical aspects, you know, brought people together in common political cause that probably otherwise would not have been. You know, and, um, but it wasn't all punitive in nature. A lot of the tridenti are formed. Let me ask you a question. Yeah. Do you think it, you know, people ran to the other side like Calvin famously, uh, rejected the letters of, um, Ignatius of Antioch, which were used in the first couple centuries against, um, some of the heresies by, you know, basically that Ignatius was a disciple of John the Apostle and he's arguing that the, uh, I can't remember who he was arguing against, but he was saying that they deny Christ coming in the body, Christ coming in the body. Therefore they denied the Eucharist and, you know, the body in the Eucharist. And Calvin basically went so far as to say those were forgeries, those, those letters that had been, um, I mean, do you think that it caused, you know, a, overreaction? Yeah, probably in part. I mean, I, I'll get to that in a minute. Um, but at the same time, you know, I, this, this whole, this whole idea that there's this litusized institution that is the intermediary between man and the word of God is problematic. And, you know, that's, yeah, that's, that's the last 500 years of history. Yeah. No, and I, uh, Calvin's perspective and pure form congregations, the idea is that communion, it's, it's a commemoration of the last supper and this idea that through the blessing, um, by way of a, a bishop or a priest, you know, the host literally becomes the body of Christ, the Calvin's perspective is that that, that's like Dollar Trace and pagan and arguably even satanic. And I'm not, I'm not saying that's my perspective. I don't want to get into some religious fight with, or tip, like brothers and sisters, but, you know, um, Calvin was interested in the way that Calvin treated the early church others because again, and I'll get to this in a minute. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. You know he argued that predestination is you know the earliest church fathers. I mean this is what was the perspective of what became the Catholic church. So Calvin it's important down the one hand. Yeah he basically rejected the Catholic liturgy and the most hostile and condemnatory terms but in other hand he said there's not something inherently wrong with the Catholic church. It's that the men who in his view a hijacked the mandate that they had owing to their lineage going back to the you know literal disciples of the Christ you know pagan and and and quite literally devilish things were allowed to subvert you know what's proper worship. So it's not it's not accurate I mean I know you weren't saying this but it's not accurate to say that Calvin rejected the early fathers outright. I have to look into the discrete subject matter you're talking about it. I'm not I'm strong at Bible scholarship I'm not strong on really Calvin his history other than the political aspects of the Regency and Genie and things like that but I'll I'll try to question out the best I can but to bring it back to the situation with respect to Luther and the evangelical reformers the the council of Trent they did try and address some of these problems you know to assuage the anxieties of left Catholics and you know people who you know kind of had a softer view of the of the Roman Church and the Lutheran camp you know they they expanded they expanded the curriculum of you know seminary and education set priests understood official doctrine and this tendency of individual priests to stamp their own interpretation and while passing off a church doctrine knowing to localize the intrigues are owing to you know minority viewpoints on scripture and things you know they did a point to sort of homogenize uh what was being conveyed to congregations of the localize level and bishops were required to live within their diocese so uh you know there was an understanding that individual congregants at least informal terms they had access to like the church hierarchy you know and they they didn't feel like they were just receiving you know dictates from on high or whatever you know and um they did they tried they did a lot to try and stamp out corruption too and um there was a big problem with uh with priests uh secretly getting married and uh becoming very rich you know because it's like okay so you know some young priest you know uh he secretly marries some nobleman's daughter you know because now like that nobleman he's got an in with the church you know um and this this guy in turn you know it's very wealthy and he's got a wife and his whole secret family I mean this has happened a lot you know uh and that that became a big problem i'm going to start in the fact that i mean it it makes hash with you know one is vows and things and that that's a completely cynical way of uh you know uh abiding one's vocation but it also is incredibly corrupting politically and um the modern confessional box the confession being a private affair uh that came out of these the treidentine reforms you used uh confession used to be done like before the whole congregation which obviously you know it that there was a public shaming aspect to that because people then you know use that to you know try and um exploit the weaknesses of their other personal arrivals and things and and also put a lot of people off a confession because it's you know um properly it's between the congregant and you know the priest of the representative of the church which is God's representative on earth is not supposed to be this um confrontation between you know the sinner and and the congregation obviously you know um the veneration of saints became a big deal that became kind of a defining mark of treidentine Catholicism you know uh holding up highest individuals not just as role models an example in Christian life but people who are who are directly you know kind of direct emissaries between you know congregants and god and those like local saints became a big deal you know uh it uh and one of the things that the Lutherans had going for them is uh they were very very good and kind of weaving together this understanding of a Christian life being a very German thing you know um i mean that this happened over the course of centuries but there was a communitarian aspect so we threw an evangelism you know being um the you know they're kind of the kind of Germanic reputation for truth telling and kind of openness that's what is to be a good Christian you know um and pagans and and foreigners and heretics you know they they this isn't this isn't coded into them like it is to us you know and uh local dialects you know uh like Lutheran pastors they they don't they'd sermonize in local dialects you know which was still very quite a bit you know even among people who spoke a common you know Germanic language um you know so the Catholic parishes the liturgy remained in Latin but other aspects were uh we're performed in the local language you know and uh Puyla what do you want to do? Yes, I want to tell you that you're a great man. What do you mean? I don't know how long ago you were born in 1929 What do you mean? What do you mean? But I was born in 1929 No, no I'm a great man You're a great man A lot they added in a lot of uh local customs relating to the you know the music that was performed and uh the songs that accompanied worship you know stuff intended to strengthen salad, theirity and communitarian identity that drew from ethnos you know um They also made a big deal the a big aspect of the tridentine reforms with pilgrimages you know the one of the oldest shrines and you're there's a shrined vinegarten and another had folder and that actually I think I think survived it's a well well into the modern era and then there's the black Madonna somewhere in Poland which uh I cover what it's called but that uh that tendency of orthodox iconography to have metals in city would into it and there's a specific class of uh um i-cogs that depict the blessed virgin holding baby Jesus and she's pointing and uh when the light refracts off the metal it looks as if it's emanating from her fingertip to illuminate um Jesus and uh essentially what one's supposed to derive from that is that uh you know Mary leap points the way of christian piety and uh that's uh that's an orthodox tendency but it very much mirrors the the the cult of the saints and the and the public cult of the saints that they came out of this reformist tendency you know so uh the uh so what i'm getting at is that you know the the the imperial culture and particularly the haspurn culture it became um it became an extravagant we bound up with this sort of Catholic revivalism you know um and uh this was dramatically exacerbated by the emergence of the Jesuits who became very very powerful powerful around this time. And the Jesuits were controversial then, even on Catholics. I mean, they remained so today for different reasons, but one of the reasons was, one of the reasons that Jesuits were a militant order. You know, and they were so old, it was a soldier. And then he had a vision which brought him to Christ. And, you know, they were established in 1540 by people decree. And they had a clear mission to destroy Protestantism. Well, they all called it a "epidemic of the soul." You know, and this led Lutherans and Calvinists alike. They came to view the Jesuits as the Polks' vanguard. And they're mortal enemies. You know, and that wasn't totally unfounded. You know, their job was to displace Protestants. And also, a route of Catholics were viewed as being soft on Protestant heresies. From position of authority. And then we're required, you know, enforce Catholic doctrine as part of the "tradenting schema of vitality." And the Catholic came a really political obviously, because some recalcitrant Duke or Baron or a lector, you know, the Jesuits had tired him for removal. And then suddenly the man who replaces him is some sort of half-spirited partisan who, you know, makes a show of his commitment to "tradenting revivalism." You know, you can't extrope that from, you know, a negatively political set of concerns, you know. So this was the -- this was the -- this was sort of the foundation or the background of the climate that was underway for, you know, decades before the onset of hostilities. And it was still going on, you know, by the onset of formal combat. You know, to be clear too -- and I'm not sure a lot of people realize this -- you find a lot of loyalists propaganda going back centuries, including well under the 20th century, you know, during the troubles and ulster that singles out the Jesuits as being a particularly sinister cadre within the Catholic Church. That's not -- that's not odd if you consider the context. For years, even very sort of serious people, they weren't prone to extreme, cultish tendencies within proscenism. They insisted that Guy Fox was a Jesuit agent, and that the gunpowder plot was a -- was a basically like a Jesuit operation. You know, I mean, you can -- I don't accept that, but it's not -- it's not unthinkable or something. It's not as crazy as it might sound to people in 2025. You know, but they -- you know, and the Jesuits were extreme. You know, even a lot of arch counter-reformation and counter-enlightenment partisans viewed them as skepticism. And as a potential fifth column, you know, and they kind of -- they kind of became a cult unto themselves. And obviously, too, there was the experience of the Templars centuries preceding that was very much on people's minds. I mean, that's a whole other subject matter. But they also -- they had a weird view or a heterodox view, and they were all as confessors. I think the Jesuits had do -- they'd approach princes who they felt were making too many concessions to Protestants or who were insufficiently enthusiastic about abiding the prittentine reforms. And they'd claim in their role as confessor that princes are uniquely susceptible to being tempted by the devil. And they can be deceived, you know, to granting concessions to heretics. You know, and if these concessions were puttically necessary in the short term, the Jesuit view is that God would forgive the Princeton question. So long as he confessed that he'd been deceived, you know, at home for it, and promised that he'd revoke these concessions at first opportunity or first expedient moment. And then actually followed through with that, you know, his salvation was assured. And I mean, that's really strange. You know, that goes beyond, you know, polite fictions or whatever, instead of a swage, the concerns of the pious or the righteous, you know, to accept the less than -- to accept the noble who doesn't live up to his office, you know. There's something about that that doesn't seem correct. You know, this priestly order that has substantial military power that's going around basically taking on a role that should be reserved for the Pope, frankly. So this was a problem again, even for a lot of Catholics. It wasn't -- the Jesuit was for just some boogie man that was confedantly about a Protestant -- you know, the fever dreams of Protestant radicals or something. You know, it -- and that's -- and that's one of -- this also played into the ambitions of Lutherans because one of the -- Ironic, we -- I mean, not so Ironic, we, if you know the relevant history. And if you know something about the competing theological perspectives, it was this kind of heterodoxy within the Roman Catholic Church, including within its hierarchy. That was one of the big objections that Lutherans had. You know, Lutheran in a large measure wanted to reform existing structures. He didn't want to burn down the Roman Catholic Church, then create something totally new. You know, one of his big issues was that the Pope, you know, these doctrines are inconsistent from one to the other. So, you know, these doctrines are inconsistent from one prelate to the next. And from one succession to the next. And you've got factions within the Roman Church, like the Jesuits, who don't seem to be bound by the centrality of doctrine, but are able to present their own interpretations. With, you know, while invulking something approaching their own infallibility, you know, which is incredibly problematic, you know, for any believing Catholic, you know, not just for Lutheran reformers. But, you know, and that's two Lutherans didn't abide, so let's scripture a, like Calvinists do, but Luther did view scripture as the source of all truth. You know, and misinterpretation of scripture by the papacy is catastrophic, you know, and that's always got to be the metric by which, you know, people decision making is measured. And that's really the, you know, of course, too, I mean, that that takes on a political function because if you reduce the role of priest as an intermediary, you know, that diminishes the power of the Vatican to impact the body politic in ways beyond those through the mentoring. You know, and then in Luther also, he wanted to reduce the sacraments to baptism, baptism in the Eucharist. You know, he didn't object to the doctrine of real presence like the Calvinists did, but you know, in the view of a believing Catholics, he gutted the liturgy, you know, and on the one hand, he increased lay participation in worship while selectively excluding aspects of Christian practice that, you know, would insinuate priests into the congregation and a leadership role. You know, and this is viewed as very cynical by his enemies and by a power play. In part, I think that it was, you know, he also, he wrote his own catechism. Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, obviously, yeah, I mean, obviously, I'm not going to sit here and say that I find Lutheranism to be its own thing. I mean, it's not just, I mean, obviously, I'm sure it's called by my own confessional heritage, but it, you know, but at the same time, there is something to, it's improper for people to view Lutheranism as some middle ground between Roman Catholicism and, you know, Calvinism and Decentre's because it's not that and it's got a totally different heritage intellectually. But, you know, Luther did draw a distinction between salvation and sanctification and justification for salvation. You know, and he reputed this idea that every man and woman is trapped in this cycle of sin and repentance and contrition and confession. There are confessional Lutherans, but that it's, it has a different function than in the Roman Church generally. You know, and there was an emphasis on Christian living, you know, rather than constant preparation for a good death or this sort of constant effort to balance the proverbial scales. You know, on that, but it's not nearly as uncompromising as, you know, the Calvinist metaphysics. I mean, we put it that way in satiriology. You know, but I, like I said, I don't, it's a very different tendency. I mean, that's why at the top of the hour, right, I made the point that these, the unification at congregational level of Lutherans and Calvinists and in Prussia is pretty remarkable. You know, the, but it also too, the, there was a basic fragmentation. Within the Holy Roman Empire. And again, there's always going to be a call for churchmen to try and mitigate these kinds of divisions, particularly when crisis appears to be emerging. You know, that's perennial. So even, I mean, I, I don't want to spin this off into an abstract discussion of political theory and political ontology. I accept the postulate that all politics is conceptually theological, but in terms of literal theology, it's, it's inevitable that in a situation where there's a, where there's a fragmentation of sovereign authority and the seat of that authority, upon which the entire political culture is based in, in ethical as well as structural terms. Sort of a revivalist sensibility is, there's always going to be pressure on churchmen in order to facilitate that. And in turn, that's always going to cause adherence to the minority perspective to feel that they're being in the most general possible terms, shut out, now, political processes and the most severe that they're about to be programmed by the majority. Okay. You know, and this also compromised Luther's credibility with Calvinus because Lutherans were constantly, and with themselves was constantly joined this distinction, many worldly and political matters, you know, but then he was, he was, he was incinuating himself into a ecclesiastical affairs for negatively political reasons. You know, you can't have it both the way. I don't know, I saw him trashing Lutherans. I'm trying to be objective on this and, you know, and, and, and, you know, treat these parties, factions equally, you know, I, it's just to be clear. I don't want people to get the wrong idea. You know, and Luther also, one of the things that's interesting and one of the things that did, Luther was Luther himself and most of the early Lutheran authorities within the Holy Roman Empire, they were basically honest. There wasn't a corruption problem. And the, the Roman church, uh, whans that were appropriated, it wasn't a situation like in England, um, you know, the, uh, it wasn't a quite like local words, it couldn't just help themselves to these resources. You know, it went to find Lutheran institutions that trained clergy. It went to quite literally build churches and give alms to the poor and that's it, you know, um, this change later on for the worst. So, I, for people make the case that, you know, uh, there was this looting underway by Lutherans of church wealth and that that's just not true. You know, um, and that's, I think that's important to acknowledge. It, uh, you know, the contrasting that with Henry VIII through, uh, you know, the man astic land was quite literally appropriated and sold off to, you know, to satisfy, you know, uh, state debts and expenditures and things, you know, it's unconscionable stuff, you know, um, it, uh, there's not, nothing comparable like that happened within the Lutheran hierarchy. And, uh, famously, there was, um, Emperor Charles V, um, when the doctrinal controversy was really heating up and, you know, the hostility to Lutheranism was approaching, is zenith, Charles took the sponsoring meetings between theologians, and not only does not accomplish anything, but it led to the Catholics accusing the Lutherans of stealing church property and enriching themselves and fermenting sedition among Catholic subjects or attempting to, and basically in order to steal from the church. And that's something you see, that still comes up in some Catholic histories. I mean, it's all going to be wrong. I understand people being protective of their confessional heritage. I've written extensively on that, but it's not accurate. This wasn't a looting operation. You know, and suggesting it is, is just dishonest. Briefly, I mean, at least need to impart cover the confessional aspect to another episode because our time's getting short, but to understand the Calvinist perspective on Lutheranism, as you mentioned, the book of Concordia, or I think in America, most practicing Lutheran defibrillars, the Lutheran Confessions, that's the Lutheran doctrinal standard that's viewed as a authoritative. It's the creedal documents of the evangelical Lutheran church, I believe. The author's published in Dresden in 1580. Dresden is the Cedal Lutheranism in some basic ways. And it was published on the anniversary of the Augsburg Confession, Charles V, the Diet of Augsburg. I think the authoritative Latin edition was published in the 1580s in Leipzig, but the original document was published in Dresden. And those who accept it, they believe it to be a faithless because the exposition of the Bible, you know, and the meaning of the Holy Scriptures, which are set forth in the Concordia, the Scriptures, the Soul Divine Source of all Christian doctrine. The dissenters, you know, Calvinists, they claim that this was not any different than they called it the book of discord. I think they were being funny and that is kind of funny. No disrespect, anybody's heritage. But the Calvinists claimed that this was an imposition of orthodoxy that was not any different than what the Roman church did. So the Calvinist rallying cry was for a quote, second reformation, you know, and Calvinism and the Holy Roman Empire, it was different than what it took to ruin the rest of Europe. And to be clear, Calvinism is interesting. And one of the reasons why I talk about the Calvinist diaspora in places like Ulster, in places like America, you know, in places like Australia, New Zealand, Calvinists weren't an unantommed majority on the ground anywhere in Europe. And on the one hand, this led to a kind of deep piteism that was community based and tended to strongly reinforce ethnic identity, but there wasn't Calvinists were essentially the minority everywhere they were. And generally it was common people and Calvinism appealed a lot to yeomanry. That's one of the reasons it's a brute and prussia in the way it did, I believe. But in the empire, in the Holy Roman Empire, Calvinism was basically led by princes and nobles. And that's one of the reasons why they developed disproportionate power in military terms in the 30 years war. You know, and this is one of the reasons why it was these noble types who were pious Calvinists. The term reform came from that, but because Calvinist, the term Calvinist, it had kind of adaptations of illegality and outlaw sensibilities. And because their view was that we need a second reformation to eradicate the remnants of what they called peepus superstition. That's why they're called reform. Because we're the standard bearers, they're the standard bearers of the second reformation that's going to bring that that's going to eradicate idolatrous practices that deviate from the word of God, which is the only correct exposition of Christian doctrine. So this, you know, and again, the, well, Calvinist went as far, you know, like I said, they reviewed almost like the Taliban. And I'm not, I'm not trying to be funny. I mean, they, there was instances of Calvinist burning and destroying icons. You know, they banished vestments and the high altar from churches. Calvinist zealots, they'd often smash paintings and sculptures, you know, to prove that cultic objects and icons were powerless ministers would dress, they'd either dress like common people or like professors, you know, and their notion was of a priesthood of universal priesthood of congregants, you know, any man who can, like any man who's literate and who's pious, you know, and who can learn scripture, you know, can convey the truth of the word of God to his fellow man and woman, you know, there's not, there's not some priestly intermediary, you know, between Christ and his congregation, you know, and they made a big deal, you know, and they abored the notion of the real presence. And this, this had become like we talked about a moment ago, an incredibly divisive subject meter. You know, and among other things, to Calvinist and, you know, this comes as no surprise if you've read the institutes or the Christian religion, among other things, you know, the idea of the body of Christ being consumed by a human organism and turned into excrement through the digestive system of a physical body, that's Calvinist found that utterly unacceptable for people to suggest. You know, so there was Calvinist congregations that went as far as to ban wine from communion observances, replacing it with beer, doing it clear that this is a commemorative event. The real presence is a real test wide, you know, it's really interesting. I mean, I think so, you know, I mean, I, the significance that this, these things take on is fascinating. Now, now, Calvinist satiriology obviously is the most controversial point of belief, I think for a lot of people. Calvin, again, he didn't say that the Catholic Church itself is just abhorrent from inception. There were aspects of Catholic idea is that he said, "Worth's correct." And his view was that the Roman Church had essentially been a hijacked and had fallen into heresy. You know, the early church fathers, they condemned the idea that, you know, there was any path to salvation. other than predestination. You know, the idea that God could not know of somebody's salvation, whether this could be some temporally contingent question based on willful acts and works. You know, he's very clear. I mean, St. Augustine argued that God alone determined salvation. You know, and the force is about to elect and the reprobate being determined by God alone. And God exists outside of any, you know, temporal or physical or geometric configuration or boundary. This isn't something that Calvin just came up with, knowing to, you know, going to a fascination of the early modern cultures, you know, economic culture with, with formal logic and things, you know, and yeah, your point, Calvin selected we redacted authorities from the same epoch that he considered to not be Congress with his own interpretation. And then he said to, like I said, I can't speak to the specific, specific matter that you raise because I haven't researched it in depth. But yeah, that needs to be said. But yeah, that's, I'm going to stop here because I don't want to spend off into a whole other exposition that, you know, requires more attention than an expunential. What, yeah, I hope this, I hope nobody found this unbearably dull. It's important to understand the sectarian aspect. What's really interesting is how reformed people, particularly people fleeing the inquisition related to SUNY Muslims and Ottoman territories. I think that's really interesting. There's a peculiar, confessional dialogue between SUNY's and reformed that I think is something that's not discussed enough. But yeah, that's all I got. No, that was great. I mean, I, I followed it all because I mean, that's what I had to learn. Well, no, you're a knowledgeable dude. And I think it was funny that you went to a Catholic school and I went for higher ed and I went to a Calvinist school for higher ed. No, that's, I went to a Jesuit school too. Again, top of that. And I, that was interesting, man. Like, no, I had a great time, I'll leave all of it. I mean, a guy, Tom Engerman, he was my political theory professor and he was a, speaking of Lutheran, he was a Lutheran guy. And he butted heads very much with the Jesuit administration, but he, you know, he really schooled me in political theory in a way that was invaluable and really guided my thinking and life. But no, it was a great institution, man. I, I, I look back very finally in my time there. All right. I'll pick up part four the next time and I will encourage everybody to go over to Thomas's sub stack real Thomas 777.substack.com. And you can basically connect to him from, from there to anywhere else he is. And go and support Thomas. He's finishing up season three of MindFaser, his podcast. And then I think what do you, you'll release, you release to the public season two at the end of this or how do you do that? No, what I do is when I release a new season, I, I, the previous season, you can get season one and two for free, like in their entirety. When I begin season four, season three is going to remove that from behind the paywall. And just, it's only going to be the current season episodes that are behind the paywall. That's how I do it. Just, just go support Thomas. It's five bucks a month. Yeah, you can do it. It's definitely worth it. Thomas, until the next time, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Always. Yeah. Thank you, man. Very Christmas everybody. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pikenyone show. Thomas is back and we are continuing the series on the 30 years war. Yeah, I'm pleased that this series has been well received this far. Because it's an enormous topic and it's very labor intensive to present it with adequate, thoroughness. I realize that they can include to the last episode that it was imperative to discuss the configuration of political power on the continent in the epoch, all of which flowed from the Holy Roman Empire. And the story of modern Europe is, you know, the story of European power consolidating in the German states. And this reaches zenith in the early modern period. And the reconstitution of that structure across a broad spectrum of human activity, most relevant, obviously, political organization and conceptual reality. You know, that's that process continued from 1648 until 1945. And this doesn't really make sense. And unless I describe what the Holy Roman Empire was and how it functioned. And even in relatively serious university curriculums, this isn't presented properly. And this was one of the proximate causes of the war of hostilities, at least as much as sectarian considerations and confessional loyalties. Obviously, these things are all tight together within a common nucleus of operative fact. But structural political variables and dynamic changes they're in, knowing the historical processes were at least as significant as religious motivations. And inspiring to create a conditions where war became imminent. The Holy Roman Empire was ruled by an actual constitution. And the trajectory of politics, it was shared between the emperor who was alternatively known as the Holy Roman Emperor, the king, the king of the Germans. And the Romans, but for brevity, will refer to the rank of the office as the Holy Roman Emperor. The emperor, he was the overlord in sovereign and is powered directly directly from his title as essentially Caesar more, you know, in lieu of possession of any particular fee for collection of fees. So the imperial office was above the medieval structure that was tethered the land and rank that accrued going to lordship over the land and aristocracy of the sword, which is fascinating. And that's one of the legacy institutions that ties the Roman Empire to the European political order as a developed. And how this relationship between the emperor and his vassals was defined. This said profound implications, not just for diagnostic elements that we're vying for power, or we're committed to retaining a privileged position and perpetuity for some of them on the Habsburgs, but also in terms of confessional and sectarian allegiance, this had implications that were structurally coded. You know, and there was, there's always going to be interstitial and intermediary elements that are able to, and seeing with themselves and the power apparatus, even when there is an imperial office with a mandate that is that monolithic, to be clear that the Habsburgs, they didn't didn't monopolize the imperial title and the role by right. Electors decided who was, you know, to be insinuated into the office, and it was often possible if the electors could be persuaded to accept the premogenture and an emperor could designate a successor, but the electors had to accept that and ascent to it. It wasn't ex-yomatic that a son would inherit, you know, his father's title in office. He had no claim of right to it. If no decision could be reached, who was to be the emperor, the king of the Germans and the Romans? They're being interrogated. That was governed by what's called the golden bull. We're not talking about an animal. The golden bull is a 1356 decree. It was issued by the imperial diet in Nuremberg. It fixed really for almost 400 years. Essential aspects of the Constitution of the Holy Roman Empire. It provided administrative remedies to disagreements between thieves, some of the dominion of the electors. It set about protocols for, you know, management of hostilities within imperial lands. It clarified processes which technically renounced their precluded people involvement in the selection of the Holy Roman Emperor. I mean, obviously in reality that wasn't the case, but, you know, and most importantly, it set out that there'd be seven electors, prince electors who were to vote by majority against census and the, you know, the term in who would be the Holy Roman Emperor. And it would be clear it was the majority against census. It was explicitly stated that four of the seven votes would always suffice to elect a new emperor. And a minority consensus could have no power to veto or block the election. And finally, and this is most important, these principalities that constituted the electorate, they were indivisible, which meant that they were always passed down through primogeniture. They couldn't be divided up persterpes. They couldn't be seated as thieves. They, you know, they could only be handed down to the firstborn son and in the absence of an appropriate male heir, you know, a designate. And they couldn't be divided. So it very much fixed that structure of power and imperial succession in a way that was basically insurmountable until the West failing peace. You know, so and to be clear, it's the growth of the Hasbrook dynasty and their domination of the Holy Roman Empire. It wasn't just on grounds of wealth and the capture of essential fiefdoms that in turn conferred military power and the allegiance of essential elements, the Hasbrook's were universally respected. And the understanding was that the man who selected to be the Holy Roman Emperor, he's supposed to abide a certain aristocratic sensibility and he's supposed to have a certain pedigree that is above that even of his peers. And generally, the generally the Hasbrook's qualified, at least in the early modern period, you know, they were, they were an elite lineage. Despite this cliche that aristocrats are always these inbred morons or they're always kind of second rate or they lack merit, that's really not true. Dynasty's aren't built out of nothing or based on, you know, the reputation of centuries passed. You know, they were mixed big, but the most dominant noble houses and winniages, they practiced their own sodium genics, okay. And at some point, this breaks down. And in the case of the Spanish Hasbrooks, it led to catastrophic outcomes over time. But, you know, again, that, that's the, you know, there's always the crepto that precedes, you know, the end of Dynastic Rain. It's not the whole story. But this was the CD European tower. You know, and to be clear, as we'll get into a lot of these institutions that were enshrined in the Golden Bowl. They derived from things that were emergent and truly ancient, them, of actually ancient heritage. You know, the 8th and 9th centuries AD, you know, the time of Charlemagne, when the Franks were the dominant element in central Europe. And it was what's now Western Germany and France that was the imperial seat, you know, rather than Europe central, which is really fascinating. And this is where the political culture emerged from. Now, the status of these imperial feasts that constituted the several territories of the Holy Roman Empire, there was two primary statuses that they represented. There was imperial estates, and there's what was called crese estates, both of which represented in the Reichstag and their regional assembly, and the vassals of which had de Jury comparable rights, although circumstances that had dictated the relative power that they wielded. The emperor was the personal overlord over both of them, but imperial estates, increased estates, so designated, there were was no one above them other than the Holy Roman Emperor. Okay, so they couldn't be subordinate to any intermediate lord, regardless of his wealth or his title or his proximity to the Emperor by way of his bloodline or anything else. And this was actually highly sophisticated, you know, and that's really where mixed, the concept of mixed government originates from. On the continent, you know, and that's one of the reasons I object to this conard that modern germany was characterized by this kind of overlord ship of Bismarcky and figures and you know later of course the fear and things because that makes hash with the historical record and it also selectively invokes examples of existential emergencies whereby, you know, competing elements within the sovereign apparatus or sedude. In favor of a unitary executive who needs to act with splintered power decisionism amidst them, you know, a paradigm that calls for it. Now, crease estates, they had certain obligations relating to collective defense and this became a very critical function during the entirety of the conflict paradigm against the Ottomans, you know, that culminated in the long war against the Turks, you know, immediately prior to the onset of hostilities in 1618. It made it a very concrete mobilization paradigm, you know, not just a set of legal strictures that were allegedly incumbent based on the letter of the law or ancient custom or something, you know, and that also deriving from the ancient concept of the aristocracy of the sword, although, although disabused from the person that was the Lord and, you know, his discrete characteristics or that of his title, it imposed the structural framework on, you know, whatever man held the the faith in question, you know, by virtue of structural necessity, relating to military imperatives. You know, it is, the Ottomans were for all practical purposes, a military superpower that day, if we can speak in such terms, and even the largest aggregation of allied principalities or common electorates, they lacked the military might to stand alone against the Ottoman threat, and even in times of comparative peace, they lacked the resources for any kind of independent political and economic existence, and so admittedly economics of the early modern period weren't nearly as complex as today, that it was, you know, production was localized in the household for the most parts, and everything revolved around commodities and the whims of the harvest and exegod and things, but there was a rudimentary interdependence that was essential, particularly in central Europe, where there's a basic derit and arable land, which was one of the major catalysts for the you know, movement eastward of Germanic peoples over a millennia, really. You know, and to be clear, the imperial estates, they dated from the Carolinian era, the the creases of states, the Reich's crease, which quite literally means imperial circles, you know, the metaphor suggesting a cooperative unity and a defensive parameter, you know, they really became most relevant a few centuries preceding the onset of hostilities in six and eighteen, but the imperial estates the Reich's stonth, they dated to the Carolinian era, you know, this is the 800 AD, you know, around the time of Charlemagne, approximately, you know, that's six and seven of the years prior to the prior to the uphooking question, you know, that is truly ancient, obviously. Now, what these conditions began to conspire in favor of was the rise of the impersonal absolute state, you know, offices divorced from any discreet lineage or man, or the person of the monarch, and again, although there were trappings of you know, traditional succession and primogeniture was the norm oftentimes that was customary, it wasn't fixed by law, and after a while it was no longer particularly customary, the electors by the turn of the 17th century, they often didn't even personally know the emperor, maxed a million the second in 1562, his coronation was the last coronation of a Holy Roman emperor to be attended by all the electors, plus all these minor counts and prelates and dukes, where there was this full personal recognition of them and himself by electors and vassals who personally presented themselves, you know, increasingly the process of selecting the emperor, that kind of early modern version of shuttle diplomacy decided how the electors voted, there was guys in the equivalent of lobbyists at court, you know, all the features of what we'd think of as a modern political culture or emergent, you know. And to be clear, this is a big deal. There's a reason why old-school pals, even, you know, well-in-living memory, like LBJ, they're all about glad-handing because that's important. And if you're an elector from Heidelberg or wherever, you meet other electors or you get to know the king himself, you find out that, you know, you've got common interest in hunting or art or in painting or maybe you just like to drink a lot and chase skirt. You know, that makes a difference. These personal affinities make a big difference, you know, particularly when you're talking about power-political affairs and political structures that are very much coded towards war and peace questions where people are expected to truly sacrifice. This makes a big difference, especially where sectarian hostilities are a very real phenomenon, you know, personal relationships take on outside significance. And the diminution of these things very much made hostilities possible in a way they wouldn't have been in the past, I believe, that's a constant in political cultures, ancient and extant alike. The piece of Augsburg in 1555 is essential too because technically it guaranteed religious freedom. What was laid down in Augsburg and one of the reasons why, you know, to this day, the Lutheran Churches that identify as Augsburg confessional churches, this is why. You know, it was a settlement that attended wider constitutional reforms that, you know, gave relief to poor fiefdoms in terms of tax obligations and quotas and it tried to create some kind of uniformity and currency and elements of public order and like a rudimentary kind of policing and things like this but most importantly, Emperor Ferdinand pushed through as an aspect of the Empire's fundamental legal regimen that there had to be a basic tolerance for the confessional orientation of of fiefdoms under a common lordship, you know, and this is essentially what it stale is the rule of, you know, the land belongs to the confession of the prince, with the qualifier that the minority element, you know, be a Catholic or one of the Protestant sects, enjoys a basic equality before the law and that essentially held but for about 50 years but what it did was it created, it created difficulties because in bringing together opposing confessions within and people who zealously abided opposing and imputing sectarian commitments under a common legal and political framework, it created certain conspiratorial tendencies or at least encourage them. What it did was it detonated the traditional unity of law and faith that was essential to the medieval order but also it led to intrigues where and some fiefdoms Lutherans began demanding that Lutherans be allowed to become bishops which obviously, orroam considered this unacceptable because you know, it'd be clear too, many Lutherans, they didn't object to the existence of the Roman Church. It was, you know, doctrinal, corrupted in their view but the Holy See was very cognizant of the fact that you know, there were codrays of Lutheran clergy and laymen who had strong sway within their respective congregations who had devised a strategy of, you know, conquering clerical offices with their own people and essentially making the Roman Church Lutheran. Obviously the Calvinists, they wanted to burn it down. But you can't have this kind of confessional equality, digiure, where in the absence of moral consensus, you know, it doesn't work. And all you're left with is that every venue of public administration and clerical and judicial life becomes a battleground for sectarian and thus political challenges and that's exactly what happened. So by the time of the demonstration of Prague and when the killing started, it was a foregone conclusion in my opinion. You know, this pressure cooker environment had been created by the peace of Augsburg that not only left the fundamental controversy's unresolved but it arguably nourished these divisions and allowed them to grow fat on those tensions that were feeding them until it culminated in a disaster, growing to confidence brought by conditions relative parity between the parties that you know became combatants. You know, and also, once a Dynaterian aspects of public life and political identity or hollowed out, it creates ambiguities that they have a tendency to institutionalize controversies and allow what would ordinarily be minor disagreements within consensus. It allows these things to become monumental. And you know, that's why these sorts of half a measures amidst historically untenable conditions, they often make things worse when formal hostilities do arrive. You know, it doesn't require One is need to be an auger too. recognize that. It, um, you know, and to be clear to the Lutherans played a very savvy game. I mean, I think part of this was that there wasn't some of even where Lutherans constantly the majority. They didn't do things like appropriating and looting, you know, property, the Roman church or something. There wasn't a comparable situation to what happened in England. You know, um, so there was this odd circumstance. We had Lutheran clergy and their counterparts, the Roman church who basically enjoyed good offices. If not a basic, a basic, we civilized them. Consensus. At least there's a local administration and there wasn't there wasn't the threat of, uh, at this point, you know, the Lutherans wanted to threaten being, of being programmed. Nor were, uh, the Catholics were there with a minority at risk of having church property appropriated and looted. So there's this forum that allowed for intriguing whereby tensions were intractable, but they weren't so critical that they were going to resolve and act of hostilities really until matters became totally untenable and scaled to the point where conflict was inevitable. But at that point, once the conflict diet was triggered, it was catastrophic and binary. You know, and that was my point about half of measures is they've got a tendency to curate scope and severity in ways that is self-defeating. The, uh, the Augsburg confession to one of the big, progressive aspects of it as it was viewed. And this was legitimately a good thing. It precluded, uh, it precluded the, the use of heresy laws against Lutherans, you know, by the, the Inquisition and, um, it provided, uh, mechanisms of arbitration to manage disputes across the sectarian divide, you know, and, uh, it created a, a secular framework for maintaining, um, public peace within the imperial domain. Well, at the same time, affording a basic respect and reverence for confessional identity and things. But, um, you know, that the fact, two of, uh, the relative peace within the central Europe, um, internally, bread a kind of complacency, I think, two, um, after the cessation of hostilities in 1648, there's odd parallels with the first world war, you know, otherwise learned men, opposing the rhetorical query, how could this have possibly happened? It's like, well, how could this have not happened? I mean, I mean, it was a perfect storm of circumstances. You know, I'm just someone to just that that's Monday morning quarterbacking, but I don't think so. It, uh, a big, uh, issue two became the right to emigrate, um, and fernand, uh, kind of tried to strike a middle path on that. I mean, that's, I could do a whole hour of talking about that, but, um, there was, uh, this didn't become as much of an issue as it might have, because, I'll get into why this wasn't a minute. In Protestant territories, because the Protestant diaspora, both Lutherans and, um, reformed, they tended to be more widely dispersed. They were generally the minority on the ground with a handful of exceptions, but also the Protestant cause, both Lutheran and Calvinist, it was disproportionately led by nobles, which is interesting. Um, so you obviously nobles aren't going to emigrate even if they're leading a minority element. You know, it's, it's not like you had entire blocks of Calvinist, and, you know, uh, who were, uh, a, uh, a substantial minority within a Catholic fiefdom who it is up and, you know, moving the beef up their numbers in some adjacent principality. You know, the, the demographics just didn't facilitate that, but, um, it was at the same time, um, an issue. And, you know, people were, people were tied to the land in ways then that they aren't today, just going to the reality of production schema, like even free man who weren't serves anything I mean, and even guys who were fairly wealthy, um, either going to land in title or to success in business. Um, it was a lot more complicated to, um, emigrate than, uh, in the later modern period. Um, you know, but this also, uh, this did, uh, there was a series of uncertainties to that can be called the three dubia, dubia, obviously being the root of dubious. It translates, we'll see to uncertainties. Um, that led to a kind of a collapsing consensus among the imperialist states. One of which concerned, uh, ecclesiastical lands and holdings of the imperial church. Because again, um, I mean, the, within Lutheran lands, you know, again, the Oswerp piece declared that, you know, the, the princess confession is what reigns and, uh, the incorporation of, uh, Lutheran territorial church property that had become a Lutheran owing to an absence of Catholic parishioners, but that had, you know, for centuries been territorial Roman church property. There was a mechanism by which there was compensation for, you know, takings, but, um, I view this became politically coded because, uh, it had a negatively geo strategic implication, and aside from the, principled attachments, you know, people develop owing to sectarian allegiance whereby they come to evaluate such controversy as a zero sum, regardless of what the, the stakes are, go, and even though the relative losses, even in, or well-mannly Lutheran territories, was fairly paltry, but this became a major issue of contention within the public mind. And the Catholic view was that, you know, ecclesiastical reservation of church lands was not just sacred and holy, but it was also protecting the one true faith. People viewed Ferdinand as making a cynical compromise. This in turn also led to more and more Lutherans penetrating chapter cathedrals and bishop ricks to try and seduate themselves. Sometimes in an occulted way, you know, into the church hierarchy. And obviously, this wouldn't have been possible before. These liberalizing half measures is what made it possible. And I don't intend to cast Ferdinand as some irredeemable villain or something. I mean, that's the caricature of the circumstance that existed, but also I believe the conflict paradigm as it developed was inevitable. I know that puts me to odds with most contemporary historians, even guys were a bit outside of the court historian consensus. They tend to view these things as accidental, particularly truly catastrophic, um, constellations of circumstances that, you know, lead to the most destructive wars. They view it as a breakdown of processes that is almost like a machine breaking down or something. It's, you know, the wrong remedies were involved. They weren't timely enough. I mean, obviously, I don't accept that type of thinking. But, um, you know, it also, even very radical Protestants, even those radical Calvinists, they were clinically savvy enough to not stake any claim to, um, that they had a right to appropriate Roman Catholic lands outright, you know, so generally not always. There's a, an escalation of hostilities from intriguing and, you know, um, acts of political hostility, short of violence that, uh, become normative in terms of relationships between party, combatants, and, uh, once the potentialities of within that paradigm, sort of runs its course, there's escalation by necessity and, you know, everything that was resultant from the piece of Augsburg and power-political terms, the tentative facilitate momentum in that direction. And, uh, again, I think this is clear from the historical record of, you know, one diligently, research is the relevant variables. It's, uh, it also made it easier for rulers to formally convert, um, because it allowed them effectively to span to the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church, um, in basic capacities and to purge, uh, clergy from positions of local authority within the clerical apparatus, you know, which obviously prior to the Augsburg piece would have led the direct action against them. You know, and that's another fact, they're attending towards aggravating potentialities within the burgling conflict diet. Um, you know, and these things were openly discussed, um, the set of problems called the, do be of the uncertainties. You know, it, um, but, uh, there's not, it was more rumination on, you know, the, interactability of resolving schismatic phenomena that, you know, translates directly to political hostility, you know, and it's not as if, it's not as if there's some legal remedy or some edict of a high court, even one that was, uh, like, for example, you know, even one that was confessionally mixed or even some sort of, uh, counsel of the imperialist states, you know, that wouldn't have, um, this was a, uh, situation that was very much developing locally and impacting regular people's lives in a very immediate and existential capacity, which in turn translated to power, political struggles at scale. You know, they're, and on top of that, there had been a, shattering of the unity of, you know, confessional authority and what people viewed as, uh, legitimate, um, sources of law, you know, and, uh, if, uh, the law is coded as some neutral product of reason that, uh, refuses to take a position, I'm confessional morality, like why should any man pay it any mind? He shouldn't, you know, um, and that's one of the reasons why this is relevant to the present day. Our friend Andrew Isger texted me before Christmas. He's an interesting dude. I mean, he's our friend. I, you know, that I like Andrew, but, you know, he's also a learning guy. I mean, he's, he's one of the comparatively few pastors I really respect. He made the point that there's, uh, a lot of relevant precedent to the period we're discussing to the present day. And I agree with that. It's not just a matter of needing to understand this and a deep capacity to understand the political development of Europe and thus the entire civilized world. And, uh, the paradigm I was in motion in six and eighteen, didn't truly resolve until 1945. But also, you know, there are strong parallels relating to the fracturing of moral consensus and a resurgence of confessional life can come in and with that, both of which are characteristic of the final decades of the Cold War through the 20th century to our present. So this is important. Um, I'm gonna stop here because I'm still not feeling great. And I've, I've got dinner plans and stuff. I'm going to pull myself together here, man. Forgive me for if that's a good one. brought. I don't know if you will make fun of me about being a brought. My energy level is very man. I don't mean to sound like a bitch or something, but that's the reality. No, I mean, if that's where the, if that's where the subject ends, we pick it up in the next episode. That's it. No, fair enough. I didn't, I um, I felt like I might have been leaving something out, but I, I um, yeah, I, that's fine. Thank you. If you leave something out, you always figure out you did and then you inserted into the beginning of the next episode. So, no, thanks. I appreciate that. Thank you for the good confidence and that we've seriously. Of course. Everybody go over to Thomas's sub stack. It's real Thomas 777.substac.com and you can connect to him there and links to everything and go support him too and get the, um, get his episodes there. So you can hear the, uh, he's been, uh, hitting up with the Andrew Edwards last couple episodes and his, uh, his new, you know, we don't have a lot of guys at right fiction and, uh, Andrew, Andrew does and he's quite unique in his fiction. Yeah, he's great. Yeah. So go support Thomas all right. Thank you, Thomas. See you on the next episode. Yeah, happy new year. Happy new year, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Peacanana show. Thomas is back part five 30 years of war. How you doing, Thomas? I'm all right. At some point, I want to do a proper analysis of the war journal of Peter Hagen, or this is a fascinating artifact. Peter Hagen Dorf was a, he was a pike man. He was a mercenary, but he was an officer and he was highly glitter at it. He kept a war journal for 21 years and all told because his, his diary is pretty taciturn. He fought for the Catholic League too to be clear. He was a Bavarian, but he fought in every major theater for over 20 years. So all told him marched about 15,000 miles and he was at the second of Magdeburg, which was horrific. You know, the kind of stuff that happened there was the sort of thing that happened when the, when the Red Army approached Berlin, you know, mass rape and homicide, looting at, at, at, at scale, the popular, about three force, the population were annihilated. And Magdeburg had been this a Protestant readout. And that's one of the reasons it was targeted for destruction, but the officers totally lost control of the men. And if you clear, and Hagen Dorf talks about this, you know, most, especially as the word dragged on, you had to live off the land. So you were allowed to loot, you know, like within a reason. And like, like rape was obviously a crime. And technically you weren't supposed to kill a man who wasn't under arms, even though both of those things happened a lot. But, you know, you had, you had to feed yourself. And there was whole camp followers with these huge mercenary companies. And some guys even like had their wives and families with them. I mean, obviously they were like 20 or 30 miles, like outside of like the active theater. But, you know, this, this, this became a way of life. Because when I've for so long, and Hagen Dorf, he actually lived in a pretty old, he lived in those late 70s, he became the mayor of some town. You know, he was a highly respected guy. But yeah, he was very, he was very candid about the things he saw go on. And this wasn't discovered until 1988. And obviously it's written in a German dialect that is hard to decipher, you know, slowly, but I can slowly get through modern German. I can't something like that. And if you try and put it through an AI program, it just like makes me out of it because it, you know, it's not, it's not tailored to translate that sort of a dialect. But that's, that's an important bit of documentary evidence that I consider essential. When that, that book by, I think Peter Wilson, that's considered this seminal recent history of the 30 years war, it makes a mention of it, but that's about it. I find it incredible that it's not emphasized more in English language treatments. But I'm working on finding a way to translate excerpts of it. And, more and more and I'll see what can be done. And the periphery of the 30 years war was England and Spain. And particularly, I think, I think Spanish imperial decline was approximately caused by the 30 years war, even though Spain wasn't a major combatant. They essentially bankrupted one of the Catholic cause. And the reasons for that are nuanced. You know, the Spanish half-sperms in the Austrian half-sperms were distinct lines, but obviously they had a common interest in the fortunes of the empire, especially because the Spanish half-sperms, Spain was a, even at Zena, Spain was a great military power and the extracted tremendous wealth from the Americas. But it was mostly in terms of species. There just wasn't a highly developed industriousness there. You know, there was a highly developed banking structure and the Spaniards actually sold public debt on early financial markets, which is really interesting. In Genoa and Savoy, there was a lot of this kind of early financial activity. But some of the Spaniards are really concerned about what they viewed as the integral reputation of the monarchy as the defender of the Catholic faith. They retained a crusader's sensibility. I think I carried over even into the 20th century. You know, that's why in the Spanish Civil War, I mean, there was that sensibility. Even though, obviously, the monarch is a minority fiction. Those that were under-arms are mostly carolists and other minority perspectives, representing minority perspectives, back, you know, pretenders and things. But, you know, and Spain also had the Spanish experts at holdings in the low countries, particularly in the Duchy of Orange, which was the Protestant Harland, obviously. And the Duchess of Vol turned into this military quagmire for the Spanish Empire. And it became a full-blown sectarian conflict. So, for the sake of prestige as well as credibility, you know, obviously, the Spaniards had to engage. And don't get me wrong, there was plenty of Spanish infantry on the ground, who were like actively engaged. But, you know, there wasn't there wasn't there wasn't the same commitment at mass scale as, you know, the as was the case of the, you know, the Empire. You've got to look at the Holy Roman Empire as being the the El Ahmedarral, which all Catholic military power-orbited. You know, and of course, German lands were the dedicated battleground for the most part. And there was during the, during the 30 years war, the Spaniards made an effort to settle accounts with the Dutch reformed and Hugh Gennos streamed in from France to support their core-religionists. And this, I received presented. a challenge too because the Spaniard just saw the potential for a house on mobilization and on the frontier of, you know, the Castilian Harland. So that's part of it. But, you know, um, and there was, uh, that was the primary low, uh, low guy where English men under arms, um, were engaged as well. It was in the low countries against Spanish forces, you know, in Spain and, and Spain and England were big enemies at that time, obviously. Well, you know, one of the reasons the situation in Ireland's complicated, but the Jewish strategic imperative and the early modern period for what England was doing in Ireland, a lot of a lot of it had to do with the threat of, you know, uh, Ireland becoming a, a basing hub for, uh, Spanish, uh, military aggression against, uh, Britain, which is really interesting. And that wasn't unfounded. But, uh, you know, the, um, and there was, uh, there was wild stuff to, uh, a secondary theater in the, the Orient in Japan, um, the Dutch began fighting the Spaniards, um, and, uh, you know, various show going to its allied with, uh, one, um, faction of the other, which I think is fascinating. So that this was a truly global conflict, such as these things were possible in, you know, early modernity, um, but for context, I'd posit that the zenith of that the Pax, Romana of Spain, I guess that'd be the Pax of Spaniard was approximately 1510 to about 1660. And like I said, I believe that Spanish decline was approximately caused by, you know, the 30 years war and what essentially bankrupted the Imperial coffers, they're in, um, you know, and like I said, it, uh, even though the Spanish haspers were distinct lineage, their fortunes were bound up with both houses were interstitially bound up and sometimes there are historical fortunes and interest and common intrigues infected both. And, uh, you know, Spain just got too big. And if we accept that the Spanish Empire was the standard bearer of the Roman church, that's one of the things that hurt the Roman Catholic church. It got too big and just became unmanageable. You know, that was, um, and this happened very rapidly. Um, you know, and of course they were emboldened. I think people forget. People has an idea of the recon teased as, you know, just these kinds of a handful of moors on the periphery of the I of Iberia, you know, who had to be dealt with. And, you know, it was this sort of lesser crusade and, you know, this, that happened over a couple decades. The Umean caliphate conquered all of Spain. Spain was a, um, and it is a lot of domain, you know, and, uh, it was centuries before it was reclaimed entirely for Christian, though I'm, but once it was, uh, and once the, you know, concomitantly, the Spaniards started carving out huge swaths in the Americas as their exclusive domain, you know, they, they became very complacent and he brisk and there I say decadent. You know, um, but also the, the sheer scale of those kinds of, uh, interest becomes unmanageable. It just doesn't, uh, it just doesn't work. But, um, you know, at this time too, there was the, uh, the Spanish generated this kind of deepener dependence with Portugal and Portugal had this mighty fleet. You know, and they had claims and Brazil, obviously, but also Africa and the Orient. And those possessions were thinly held. So they got the force of the Spanish army and Spanish money behind these, uh, these holdings, you know, in exchange for, you know, essentially, a veiling their fleet to the Spanish half spurs. You know, to be clear, uh, and there's, uh, the Spanish like the British like empires that work. At least for a time, they didn't believe in these mass occupations. There was only an ongoing Mozambique. There was a couple thousand Portuguese forts. Um, and that's it. You know, um, in Brazil, there was something like 30,000 white Europeans, you know, um, Contra, two and a half million or so indigenous Brazilians, you know, uh, and if you can't manage imperial holdings with that, sort of, uh, thin pro, and then if those were a vault, the Portuguese would come and they'd kill everybody. That's how you do it. You know, that the Mongols did it that way too. You know, and you know, you don't permanently garrison men just for the sake of doing it either. You know, um, I know, I know people think that I, I'm like an American hater or something. I'm not for the record, but it just the, the wrong headedness with which America proceeds, tailious, strategically, estering. There's just, there's, there's an illiteracy there that's somewhat incredible. So I, I'm not trying to insinuate those sort of conceptual prejudices and every subject matter I deal with, but I think it's relevant. You know, um, Spain, also around this time, they were, they were suffering a population decline. And Portugal itself only brought about a million or so new subjects to the, union with Spain, but it's, uh, it didn't really make sense. There was, there's something going on when your population starts declining. I mean, that's not to say that, you know, endless population growth is some sort of axiomatic good or indicator of cultural racial health. It's not. But when there begins to be some precipitous population decline, despite the fact that national wealth is increasing and quality of life is increasing, this, this, it means there's something happening, I think. You know, and that was very suddenly, you know, Spain just, just kind of started dying out. You know, um, to the point where they're having problems managing it, like literally manning the dearest ends of, of this world empire, you know, like by, and then, and about the midpoint of hostilities in 1631, there was about four million cast stillions, which might have lost approximately a million people over about half a century. I mean, that's staggering. And these people didn't die of like some play out break or something. You know, um, there was a, you know, like in the colonies, probably some of that, oh, did disease and. and just got the difficulty of living and unfamiliar and untamed environments. But, you know, in Europe, proper, that wasn't the case. And even on the periphery, that's not the whole story. You know, so something was something was happening here. You know, and it, uh, and the economic profile, like I said, Spain was incredibly rich, but it was stagnant. There wasn't value-edited innovation going on there. The spares were importing a huge amount of gold and silver, a huge amount of raw material and food. You know, um, and that was it. And, uh, after the defeat of, in some critical naval engagements, the modernized their warships in a way that wasn't impressive, but War Tech is its own thing. You know, I mean, I made that point before, the Soviet Union made very good weapons. You know, that, that, that exists independently of the, the value-edited economy. It's a different thing. And it's not just as spontaneous or any of the price mechanism, you know, um, assigning, um, the correct value to inputs. It's, it's something, it's something, it's something metaphysical, I think. But that, um, you know, and that's something too that I think, under the way, the 30 years war, in parodemantic terms, there's not economic causes of war, but national economics is a function of power, political activity. And the Dutch and other, uh, merchant nations that were ruled by Protestant aristocrats, they began, uh, crowding in on Spanish colonial trade and rising white populations of Protestants in the, in the Americas and, you know, in Asia, that played a part in this too. I, the, the Spanish wanted to crush, uh, the Dutch and the English for that reason also. And sectarianism is plays into that. As as economic competition, particularly, the sort of zero sum paradigm that characterized early modern economic activity, you know, it's a perfect storm of causes. And, make no mistake, you know, Spanish silver was what was funding a tremendous percentage of Catholic military activity. And the war effort couldn't have been sustained in critical capacities without that. And this changed its time on on and depending on what combat and faction we're talking about, it varied. But mostly, especially early on in the Catholic side, what was called the Flanders School of Warfare. It was fairly dominant in the way the Empire fought as well as, uh, the Catholic League. And this owed the, uh, the fact that the Spanish, Spanish infantry systems were tried and true in the common perception of military strategists in large part because of success in the Turkish War, which again was where pretty much every man with climate experience had cut his proverbial teeth by the time of, uh, sort of, hostilities. You know, and it was, uh, on the one hand, it was highly methodical. It didn't leave a lot of room for what we consider an early iteration of mission-oriented tactics. But it was effective at managing early ranged weapons in a way that complemented pike infantry. And that, you know, that's another example, I think, of the Spanish imprint on the pattern of hostilities, especially in terms of the praxis of infantry combat and that's highly significant for a lot of reasons. There's comparatively massive expenditures. I mean, all throughout the existence of the Spanish Empire, but, uh, by the turn of the 17th century, you know, that this exponentially increased. And by 1600, the main, the main land element, the main infantry element, a Spanish forces was the army of flanders. It had approximately 60,000 men underarms, which made it the largest operational army in Europe. You know, and that when you've got that many men underarms, and when you're, when you're expending that much capital, you know, human and material, towards military readiness and war tech, that, that that tends towards encouraging hostilities. That's not just a peacenic talking point from, you know, the early Cold War, that's actually true. You know, it becomes a self-fulfill in privacy and conceptual terms if, you know, a footing of anti-theitarian mobilization becomes normative. But also it triggers responses in all kinds of ways that then become war indicators as perceived by actual and potential rivals. And I think that's part of it too. Europe was incredibly mobilized, then there was an outsized contemplation of military affairs sort of across the board. And when the leading continental power, which at that time was Spain, has tens of thousands of men underarms, it's importing massive amounts of silver and its primary activity is all things that orbit around military readiness and innovation. that has a tendency to code institutions towards hostilities of skill. I think that's not to say that it's ex-hiamatic. And you know, these things are complicated. I think I'm more complicated than modern age, but I believe too that that was one of the reasons why the Cold War became so dangerous. And the potentiality of mobilization at scale also itself becomes a difficult to control variable because potentialities that translate to direct capabilities, you know, means that any political actor has to behave with the assumption that, you know, he can be destroyed if he's not consciously hyper-vigilant about, you know, sustaining a potential mobilization time table. It's not going to disadvantage him relative to the capabilities of an adversary, you know, who can mobilize quicker. So then that leads the situation of permanent readiness, which itself then is, you know, perceived as a clear and present threat just by its very existence. And then of course, you know, when human decision makers become increasingly sidelined, you know, as was the case in the 20th century. And there's these weapons that and weapons platforms that are very binary in terms of their, the outcomes at the yield in both battlefield and countervalue terms. And you've got conditions where, you know, the war is always likely, if not imminent, but that's kind of a digression. Also too, there was a naval component to the 30 years war, but not nearly as scaled as one might think. And I think the reason why I also, the Spaniards, the Spaniards basically had the, they had the coastal, the literal spaces and the coastal and contiguous zones, abutting critical battle spaces locked down. They had a fleet of about 60 large war ships by 1600. And they were divided into three equal squadrons, you know, patrolling the streets of the Mediterranean, you know, the coast of France, the Lisbon fleet patrolling the Atlantic. They had a small Pacific squadron that essentially protected the silver between Panama or approximately, you know, it's now the Panama zone and the continent. And that was generally adequate to deter piracy. Because the Spaniards, you see in the movies, you know, the 16th century pirates weren't going to go up against Spanish warships. But that they're the effect of, like I said, in my opinion, you know, containing a, still leads to an infantry slog. Isn't it kind of factual to contemplate the alternative? I'm not a, I'm not a, I'm not a naval warfare nerd, but it's no less intriguing. The, and there's also a concern. You know, the, the Spaniards very much, they had a most integral view of, you know, they, they embody the throne and ultrasoncability. They viewed, they viewed the sovereign mandate and the favor of providence and religious variables to be all integral aspects of the fortunes of the, of the nation and the race and, you know, the kingdom. And they were very, they were very cognizant of the potential for decline, you know, and in the 1590s, that's kind of on the first sort of comparative historiography emerged. And it was sort of the first suggestion by historiographers that there's a natural life cycle of states and nations and races. There was this concern that Spain was entering its terminal stage. However, you know, this kind of, this sort of Spanish interpretation of that potentiality was, well, that's because people of abandoned God. You know, so, if we can return to God and we can avail our mighty, our remits in the service of crusading, you know, in defense of Christiandom, as we always have, that can reverse this process and that can reverse the, you know, the, the slow death of our people, which again was literally happening. In the form of this precipitous population decline. And obviously, that sort of symbolic, psychological, characterization of power, political developments tends towards sectarian hostilities, or at least a sectarian overlay to these things. And that in turn added to or contributed to the, the siege mentality of Protestants, particularly Calvinists, who were saying from, you know, they've been insisting long prior to the event of hostilities that we're going to be pogromed. It's only matter of time. And, you know, the Spanish or Brutes, you know, who are simply the, the, the blades and, you know, the guns of the Pope and at their first opportunity, they're going to exterminate us. You know, and, um, and then those things did start happening. You know, I'm not, I'm not going to sit here and suggest there was some conspiracy to exterminate Protestants, but, you know, there were, there were, there were massacres. You know, there was a sectarian hatred that took root that went above and beyond fog of war and brutality and things. And it be fair, Protestants did horrible things to their sectarian enemies too, but it was, there wasn't the minor, lithic Protestant church. You know, it was, so there wasn't, there wasn't, you know, a sort of reciprocal enemy concept, you know, to like, uh, comparable to the, to the Vatican. And that's important. You know, not, not in moral terms, I mean, in conceptual ones. And when people think that they're, going to be ex, you know, when they think that they're being ex-extentially threatened with racial annihilation or being wiped away, only to, you know, their confessional allegiance, you know, and again, confession is ethnos that's particularly strongly felt in America, but That's the case in Europe as well. Ethnosis is just as important as race and other key core aspects of the way human identity is structured. And that the fact that absolutely magnifies hostilities and magnifies violence within the course of hostilities and renders things possible that an even normative that wouldn't be in conflicts that aren't characterized by those factors. You know, and what also too, the, the Empire, you know, the Holy Roman Empire, they didn't have the same concern for what the Spanish called Reputacion, respect to that monarchy. There's this whole complicated sort of cultural reverence for monarchy, the Spanish head. But what the Empire did, having common, they stressed the majesty of the Holy Roman Emperor, you know, there's an exalted aspect of this. And that was also some, that's one of the reasons why the Hasburgs were able to capture this monopoly on the Imperial Crown. You know, the Hasburgs and the Roman Catholic viewpoint, the Hasburgs were selected by God the rule. They were putting charge of the destiny of their subjects and of Catholic people, you know, and everything that flowed from the sovereign mandate, ultimately could be traced back to providential will. So if you're some Protestant radical, and you're going around smashing icons and you're putting priests to the sword, you are being recalcitrant and refusing to abide the new order, you know, Roman Catholics are going to look at you as being utterly satanic. That's a perfect storm of variables tending towards a remorseless brutality at scale. I don't think that can be disputed. You know, and ultimately, there was, for a time, particularly after the Turkish war, there was talk of a sort of informal union whereby Rome would be Rome itself as a city state, would be incorporated into Spain's kind of informal empire, you know, and directly under its imperial influence. You know, literally becoming the, the army of the Pope, you know, and this actually went back to the ascendancy of the Borgias. I think it was Alexander the sixth. Whoever was Pope in 1492 when Spain and Portugal, before 1994, when Spain and Portugal essentially divided the new world up by the treaty that torsed the S, the Pope began speaking this way as this kind of symbiotic relationship between the empire and the Holy See whereby, like I just said, you know, like the, the arms of the, the hard power in the, the army and navy of Iberia would, would become, you know, the, the arms of the, of the Holy See and in turn, you know, the, the, the monarchy would, would have the direct mandate of heaven. You know, and that's a lot of Protestant propaganda, even into the 20th century, you know, we talk about, they talk about the Pope as the Pope is a Roman dictator, you know, and, and the Catholic Church is, it's this, it's this pagan imperial, that, you know, is always wanted to, you know, wipe out Pius Christian Dom in favor of, of this unholy, you know, anti-Christ mandate, like that, that's where they get that from. You know, um, I mean, it runs somewhat deeper than that, like even, I mean, the point, uh, John Jay, he's my favorite of the founding fathers, and Hamilton and, and he was something of an act like a Hamilton's, but Jay and Hamilton, they both wrote in the Federalist that we, you know, we being Americans, we're an Anglo-Saxon people, we're liberating ourselves from this Latin oppressive, you know, uh, monarchy that's alien to our people, which is really interesting, but I mean, that that runs deep in Protestant sensibilities, particularly obviously the centers, you know, that like Anglican is their own thing. There, there are, reformed who, uh, abide aspects of the Anglican right, and I don't have a problem with that. I, I wasn't raised in that, but I don't, I'm not one of these people, I'm not like one of these primitive Baptists who claims that that's satanic or something, but it's, it's very much a different thing, obviously, and it's, I, uh, I don't know if Anglican's on deck, but it has a very different source, you know, but this, this understanding of what the Americans as a people, as this Germanic element that was subjugated by a Latinate overcast, um, that's deeply coated into dissent or Protestant sensibilities, you know, and always has been. Um, and I find that really interesting, but, you know, all this, all this stuff has to be considered. And the 30 years war, and I think the word, the word three kingdoms too, I think the direct line between the word three kingdoms and the word between the states and America, and I think the word three kingdoms also was kind of a microcosm of what happened on the continent, because what happens in Britain often is a microcosm of what happened on the continents. Um, you know, at some point, maybe we'll discuss that and then discuss Cromwell's, uh, ascendancy and lordship, which has related to this constellation of historical variables of the 30 years war, and beyond, obviously, the perception of a Catholic power play emerging from the Holy Roman Empire and from the Spanish Empire, and Protestants, particularly Calvinists, believing that they were going to be exterminated, that was another factor that very, very much contributed to the severity of hostilities. You know, what the, the Lutheran experience of someone different, although that it depended on locale and theater too. There was definitely, there were definitely sectarian massacres between Cal and some Lutheran and some both sides. But yeah, it's important. Yeah, I forgive me if that wasn't a bit scatter shot. I'm not feeling well at the moment, but that's all I got for today. I promise I'll be more on the ball next time. And I'll see what I can do about finding the direct testimony of Peter Hagen-Dorf. Like I said, I'm actively working on finding a correct translation of some of these excerpts, but I think they'll be worth getting into. Awesome. Awesome. No, I don't think it was got her shot at all. It seems to be linear. So yeah. Great. All right. I encourage everyone to go over to Thomas's substack real Thomas777.substack.com and you can connect to him pretty much everywhere from there. And maybe one of these days Astral will remember that so that he can tag in the acquisition episodes, which I think he did. He dropped the message saying he actually did. He repaired that, Thomas. Yeah, I wasn't trying to get in my feeling to be a dick. I just like I said, I was starting to think you guys were embarrassed of yourself. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I never, because it happened like a couple times. Like, why do I never appear on these? Hey, that's Astral. That's all right. I know you guys are my friends. I don't really think that you're embarrassed to be associated with me. All right, Thomas. Until the next time. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, buddy. I want to welcome everyone back to the Piquinano show. After a little detour, we are back to Thomas talking about the 30 years war. I'm doing well. Thanks for hosting me. Of course, of course. Take it away. I mean, dedicating a lot of thought and research to the fact that the 30 years war it framed during political cash and it's in a way it was this positive. I would go as far as to say the entire theory of Sundervig, which we've talked about in other episodes and series, was approximately derivative of the 30 years war experience. I'm going to go to exactly what I mean in a moment. This is important, though. And I think this is, we'll provide people with a deeper and more relevant understanding of the subject matter and simply breaking down every discrete phase of the conflict or emphasizing military aspects and things, whether trivial of political intrigues and various factions. It wasn't just a pragmatic affair that the Westphalian peace and conceptual terms as well as in terms of practices created the modern state. This was by necessity in terms of the historical process. There couldn't be, I mean, the Holy Run Empire had been destroyed, but it wouldn't have been possible to return to those sorts of political modalities and modern military doctrine as well as modern military science as relates to political variables and understandings of national security and what it entails that derived absolutely from the 30 years war. And the 30 years war also built created the Prussian state, even though Prussia didn't exist then, it was the branded bird electorate, royal practical purposes. But the experience of the 30 years war informed Prussian military doctrine for the duration of its existence. And that includes the national socialist era and unified Germany was really the imposition of the Prussian, mightless state craft upon the entirety of the fatherland. There's this really interesting lesson on essay by Ernst Lulty called, I think it's called Germany in the Cold War. He talks about how, well, it makes a couple of fascinating points and I'll tie this back in a moment, even if it seems tangential. Ernst Lulty said in modern conceptual terms, the right and left schism, it didn't emerge from the French Revolution, you said it emerged from the war between the states. And like Heidegger and like Edelhoff Hitler, he viewed America as being at the forefront of historical potency, not just in the fact that in terms of technological innovations and momentum and things of that nature, but also in conceptual terms. America was at the forefront of determining the course of history in global terms, literally. He said the war between the states, he said that the union which became the United States of America, as we know it, was the first truly left wing or progressive state because of the premise entirely on abstractions and appeal to historical concepts extricated from a pistomological realities of you know, the organic experiences of a people over time. He said the south was axiomatically and unconditionally right wing. It was entirely based on this organic understanding of Americans as a discrete race of people possessed of a Christian faith that was overwhelmingly Protestant in nature and it viewed political activity and essential capacities as activity that was tailored and implemented a guarantee of posterity of that you know, I discrete people and they're historically coded way of life. And I basically agree with that. And America and Germany were an odd dialogue. Nowhere is that more apparent than in terms of the national economics model that characterized America and the guillotine and slightly beyond which the Germans adopted in its entirety. You know, I think we're talking about when you US grant, he toured Germany and he was viewed as this really heroic figure there and you know Hamiltonian economics, Frederick List, Bayesley represents Hamiltonian economics through the two tonic conceptual lens. But anyway, the Prussian state or the Brandnerburg, what became the Prussian state, Prussia was almost Germany was essentially destroyed, but what was to become Germany was essentially destroyed by the 30 years war. Prussia survived because it wasn't truly a party combatant in a way that most of the central German territories were, but what the Prussians realized is that they had to sustain, they had to maintain a credible military capability on a permanent perennial basis because it was inevitable in their opinion that an event like a 30 years war would return and they wouldn't survive the next conflict cycle due to a burglary interdependence at scale with the rest of the continent and other things as well as the ongoing existential racial conflict with the Eastern peoples. So the Prussian kingdom, not only did they create the first modern standing army as we think of it, they also implemented taxation at scale. of everybody. You know, and this is very highly controversial, but the notion was, well, we face existential threats to not just our political but our racial survival at all times. So if people are going to benefit from the protection of, you know, that this mighty military apparatus of force, able-bodied men are required to serve in it, but also everybody's required to sustain it, you know, with a proportion of their wealth or their earnings. And I shouldn't need to elaborately explicate the degree to which America internalized this idea, except it's perverse here because America doesn't face those challenges. And you can't extricate this sort of strong central state apparatus, the purpose of which is social engineering in part, you know, to inculcate people with a patriotic sensibility and, you know, the a scene in the Athenian sense, like Serel talked about, you can't make that some derasinated postulate and make it work. And also you can't justify it just on propositional grounds, like America tries to, because then you have a tyranny, then it's doing the opposite of what it's intended and that's perverse. These things only exist. There are admittedly extreme measures that force people to sacrifice substantial aspects of their own liberties. The reason why that can be rationalized ethically as well as, you know, as well as every other way is because it serves the posterity of the racial community. That's it. You know, and of course, too, it was very cynical and remains so today, I mean, it's unconsciously, this idea that America needs this massive standing army as if there's some sort of existential threat passively in the, in the wings. You know, me talking to me wrong, America does face threats, but not, but the regime won't acknowledge that those threats even exist and they certainly aren't ones of a conventional military nature. So this is important, you know, but so, and very indirect way, but in various capacities that we're, again, literally, despositive in how the United States of America developed after the war between the states, there is a, a linear trajectory from the 30 years war to, you know, to know. It's not just a matter of trivia and it's, it's not, it doesn't just relate to, you know, how the Germans does a people view that we would amount to a tragedy, the commons, or they're, you know, or they're unfortunate, historical fate, Owing to this kind of collective experience of trauma. And if people require, just anecdotally, if, you're not, if anybody requires more data or more a concrete understanding of the conflict within the European psyche, I mean, from the, from the end of hostilities, you know, in, in 1648 until really even beyond 1945, because in the DDR, this continued to loom large, just incidentally, there was another point nullity made in his Cold War essay. He reiterated that East Germany was the real Germany, even though they were under a hostile occupation, and the SED only existed by design of the Soviet Union. He said that there was a, there was both a potency to East Germany because communism was dictating the course of power political events and conceptual reality, especially in the early Cold War. And Germany, East Germany was a purely ideological state, but it also claimed that it was the result of a German historical process that had resolved in socialism, which was being realized, which would bring about the end of history. You know, and I think there's something to that. If you, the, if you're the Buddhist Republic as an absolute contrivance, you know, it was, it was neither German nor European nor was it, nor was it just some mirror of America. It was, it was this ideological construct that didn't purport to represent any kind of historical resolution of processes. It, it simply represented it, you know, an opposition to what was claimed to be perverse aspects of the German national character, or some sort of economic engine and military arsenal, contra communist aggression. There wasn't any potency there in the terms of the old he was talking about. And there were, there weren't, there was only really one potentiality. You know, and even that, even that potentiality evaporated after the inner German border came down, you know, but to bring it back and forgive me if I'm jumping around too much. The German stage in the 18th century was a big deal. You know, it's not as storied as, as the, as the London stage is, but I'd argue that it was just as important. And a lot of plays were historically coded and oriented. Frederick Schiller, he was about to play right into historian. He, he produced a series of plays based on the, the stacking and quite little rape of Magdeburg. The joint force of the Imperial Army and the Catholic weed assaulted Magdeburg under the command of this upstart count. And um, the men who constituted this force, they were half starved, they, they'd been in heavy action from monsoon end. And when they laid siege the Magdeburg and then finally breached the city walls, it was like when the Red Army laid siege to the German Reich. You know, little girls, old women were, you know, were raped over and over again. Old men and, and little boys were slaughtered. You know, it was, it was the origin of violence. And when the Protestant minister approached the count and he begged them to halt the violence, the count. In so many words, he said, I can't, I can't control it. It's in the hands of God or maybe the double. But he said, if I don't let the repain and the murder run its course, I can't control these men at all. This is their reward. And uh, the uh, this is a powerful but the Protestant minister said something the effect of well, then we're in hell. And this play about the sacking of Magdeburg coupled with this trilogy that Schiller also wrote called the Fallenstein trilogy. That sort of became the canon of the national traumatic experience of the 30ers war. And to be clear, there wasn't really a sectarian overlay to this. Obviously, I mean, it so happens that in the case of Magda Burgett, it was the imperial army in the Catholic league that was engaged in this orgy of repean and violence, but the Protestant militias did the same thing. And on an individual basis, the Calvinists under arms were probably the most extreme of anybody except the Croats and some of the Italians who were the vanguard of Roman Catholic forces. The Croats developed reputation as being utterly savage fighters during this, during the conflict cycle, which is interesting. I mean, that endorsed this day. And I mean, the Croats are a great people. I'm not saying that pejoratively, quite the contrary, but you know, and the Schiller's plays developed a following during the warriors in the Third Reich, which isn't surprising. And of course, Herman Launze, that's a great novel. And Imperial Press just published an edition of it, which is fantastic. I mean, that wasn't published until just before the Great War. I think it's at first when the print in 1910, but that was about this freehold farmer and his families mass-decured by marauding mercenaries. So he swears he's going to revenge on these men. So him and a bunch of the other villagers, you know, like men in the village, they develop their own militia and they savagely attack any of these mercenary bands who threaten the peace of the village. And he becomes this legendary citizen killer, you know, which obviously is deeply resident in the German psyche. And that's another thing too, that you can take away from this. There's this sort of idiot's caricature of German military violence and German military culture as being this kind of slavishly, you know, almost as being this kind of like institution that worships authority for its own sake and this gains personal initiative. I mean, that's non-sensual kinds of reason, including the fact that Germans literally invented mission-oriented tactics. But the German ideal is a citizen soldier. It's the opposite of what the United States holds out as the ideal, as it's got a professional cast of, you know, guys who are basically like a SWAT team with permanent shoot-to-kill clearance that's deliberately discreet from the rest of the population. You know, the, I think the point again and again the folks' current years, that concept that wasn't just very forward looking in terms of how modern word develops. And it's fascinating, you know, if you look at their kit and stuff, they look like they could be in Vietnam or make a rod one in the 60s of the 80s respect of the 60s, 70s or 80s. But it's also that concept of work in a way I don't think it would have been in France or in Russia or in England. It would have worked in Scotland or Ireland, but the class divide and the peculiar dynamics therein, I don't think that's sort of organization. It would have played out in a way that facilitated operational needs. But, you know, all these things culminated in a very tragic course for Germany. You know, in that history does not repeat itself, that's an idiot's canard. But there is a clear trajectory that is determined by the historical experience. And nowhere is that more evident than the experience of Germany in the modern world. I believe too, you know, and obviously the conditions on the ground and on the continent didn't impact Britain in direct capacity, although there were plenty of English Irish and Scots and Welsh who fought in the 30s wars mercenaries only to the fact that that's where the action was if you were a professional soldier or only to sectarian motivations. You know, the modern UK as well as Britain in the distant and ancient past, it's sort of a microcosm of what goes on on the continent. I view the were three kingdoms in Kromel's ascendancy as a microcosm of what happened in the 30 years war in a lot of ways. And obviously when people speculate on a harvest conceptual horizon, the world is not the tend not to even mention the conflict variables that were extended in the 30 years war, but it was absolutely impacted by those things. You know, there's less distance there that I think is often allowed, particularly by court history these days, it's so anglophone and character, not just because it's become the global lingua frango and acodeme but in conceptual terms. I mean, that's what determines thought patterns and the sort of parameters by policies. That's why I really is why emphasized continental influences so much. It's not just because I'm a higali and I believe these things would be true. This is a, an analytical model that is deliberately neglected. There's a deep conceptual bias there. So I'd like to think on my own very small way. I'm contributing to that being rectified. But it's also tragedy in the 30 years war was, and don't get me wrong, it almost destroyed the Germans as a race of people. If you want to look at it like that, Hitler famously said that the German people were scattered to the four wins and about a third of them were just annihilated. Maybe 30 to 40% they just died. And obviously in the early days of the war, the war was not the only 20th century. People were far more oriented towards understanding race and ethnos and biological terms. Hitler included as a man of that, of his epoch. So he spoke of that kind of different racial types in Europe, being uprooted from their land of origin and mixed it scattered. And Hitler's view had taken almost three centuries for the German people to reconstitute in essential capacities including biological. But the other side of that was the German people. was owing to Prussian ascendancy in the aftermath of 1648 and the fact that the conflict cycle approximately caused or at least facilitated at least was an essential condition precedent. The Prussian ascendancy that did create the Prussian master caste narrative I think and the second Reich, the Kaiser Reich, that was viewed as the ongoing process of realizing the destiny of the German folk after the destruction of the Empire and that's one of the reasons and I'm not saying this is a positive thing because sectarianism is always ugly but you know the Kultertompath which originally described the Hohenzollern effort to purge Catholic influence from public life. You know this endured until the end of the Kaiser Reich in some sense supposedly Vellhäum's Vellhäum the Seconds wife wouldn't let Catholics in her house but Prussia viewing itself not just as the master element of the German people and the the first among the Valk but they also they're committed to never again allowing a super national imperative or authority or power to set the folk against itself you know and confidence in the state and confidence in the national narrative that I mean don't get me wrong there was very bad blood owing to excesses of the Kultertompath and a lot of Catholics retreated very badly but that didn't deteriorate that never deteriorated or unraveled into a the kind of sectarian hatred that that happened in in the UK which is interesting but Germany also the Kaiser Reich was also far more of United polity than the UK and even England you know within that structure you know and that's one of the things that's I mean I've made this point again again Hitler was a half-sperv Austrian who's forative experiences were a you know being taught and you kind of raised by priests you know he had an abusive father who then proceeded to die of a heart event when Hitler was you know a little kid not even a teenager you know Hitler was a half-sperv Austrian who identified the national socialist mandate as being the heir to Prussian political culture and you know he had the confidence of of his own tribe and they're adjacent co-religionists in Bavaria as well as the unconditional loyalty of these northern Protestants and these Prussians you know like we've talked about the national social is heartland and some of the electoral map was the was the was the semi-rule Protestant North you know that's remarkable because the Hitler coalition really shouldn't have existed if you look at things in conventional terms and what people generally take for granted about European identity and how the sectarian divide plays into that and other things and that also they're during the war during the conflict cycle there was this you've probably seen them I think most people have you know if you spend any time in museums or read books about the early modern period in Europe there's these engravings and carvings both on metal and wood and that became of the subject matter those tended to be historical sometimes they were icon of a kind of graphic and religious in nature but generally these etchings that dealt with political events and warfare and a tremendous amount were produced by these master and gravers Jacques Kallow he produced a really famous one called the Great Miseries of War that depicted atrocities in a way that was shocking for the time and there's another one called the terrors of the 30 years war you know and this of course a lot of people then weren't literate but you know that's something too that it tells you something because there weren't you didn't find that kind of thing associated with the seven years war or even with some of the crusades and the east against the indigenous vans and things and don't me wrong there was extreme brutality there too but something happened to the the continental psyche you know particularly in in Germany and particularly German lands and in in parts of France that habituated them to a horror of a certain sort and that I believe inculcated German political life understanding that when war arrives really anything is possible if the conflict cycle reaches a critical intensity you know and that that's one of the things that people don't understand I was telling to some people the other day over dinner about the post and speeches you know that was him was sort of directing knowledge men of the ethnic cleansing particularly of Jews and a lot of mainstream historians aside from whatever idiotic mythologies and ideological conceits they include within their narrative they act like well him there's talking about these horrible acts with with this dispassionate dinner what a monster I say no that and people are gonna misunderstand I'm saying you're if I say that's within the German political character they're gonna say oh you're saying that the Germans are monstrous no no no no no I'm not saying that at all I'm saying that the German political mind and the German ontological sensibility about the ethics of warfare is a resign to the fact that truly monstrous acts become not just normalized with characteristic. And yes, there was a lot of unprecedented variables in the Second World War, but Europe Central was also habituated to a degree of existential brutality, really sight unseen, save some of the horrors brought to bear on the American frontier and in the racial wars with the most sanguine and savage tribes. But you know, in this, what's culturally resonant as regards war and peace questions, I mean, this is important, not just for the sake of standing on ceremony and not just for clarity and historical record, this is how people understand themselves as a nation and as an ethnos and within the terms of their confession and what the meaning is of their own, their own shared memory within their racial group, epigenetically and spiritually and otherwise. I think that can't be overstated. That's one of the reasons why these lies about history, that that's such a catastrophic effect on the American character and how and why the punitive social engineering regime to literally decultureate the Germans as a people as such a catastrophic effect on them. You know, but to understand, I mean, it's relatedly to understand the cultural persona, or the historical persona, probably more accurately, of a people is to decipher their historical memory and as late as 1944, 45, and even subsequent in the DDR until the 1980s, the references both direct and oblique to the 30 years war and phenomena they're in was a regular part of German national life and that's not accidental or some kind of curiosity. But they're also too, if we're gonna, if people accept what it postulated about the 30 years war being this outsized causal factor in conceptual state craft in the modern era, particularly as regards military affairs, but not exclusively. There was this destructive theory to the 30 years war that what in, I mean, I know some people, some revisionists say that that became sort of mythical and it did because myth making is always part of the process of historical memory and aggregate. But it bore a real relation to reality and that changed things. The modern state, again, was born out of warcraft and high politics and the exigencies presented by national security imperatives. You know, that's one of the things and again, I'm no libertarian, but that's one of the things that's wrong with the progressive mindset and that's one of the things that's wrong with the United States as government developed after the war between the states, and particularly after 1933. The states doesn't exist to teach children how to read or to give them one shit school. The states doesn't exist to help men and women get along better. The states doesn't exist to make black people feel better about themselves or to get girls interested in studying engineering or to make you a better man or woman. The state exists as structured in the modern era to guarantee the posterity of the national community and to manage military affairs and guarantee the existential security of the national community and adjacent peoples who are legitimately under its dominion. That's it. And this was always the understanding until very recently in comparative terms. And so when we say that the 30 years war, when we say that the Prussian state was the Prussian state, was the model of all state craft at scale in the Western world. That's what we're talking about. And the significance of that can't be denied. And there are a bundle of that, the criticism in ethical terms. There's an empirical criticism too that I is a little bit outside the scope, at least for today. There's a discussion, but the ethical objection is that, well, the state that's self-catchily views its existential mandate as an intuitive of war is going to be this war-mongering state. No, not. I mean, there's always that potential reality, but the state that a state born of military necessity there's going to be natural checks on the reckless exercise of military violence just going to the reality of this strategic balance and the existence of near-pierre competitors, intermediate proximity, but also one of the reasons why these normy sociologists and social science types who, first of all, their big kink is pretending that democracy has a meaning and is in a floating signifier, particularly after 1991, but they also get this idea that the internal situation of the state somehow impacts in this positive ways the external environment that's ridiculous. That's like saying that somebody who has cancer is making the external environment toxic. You know, like I. the state is always. unless you're talking about a true hedgehog. which is something approaching that. America is not a conventional hedge bond but the impact it has on the wider paradigm is like that of a hedge bond but globalism changes things but with that exception and there's it's more complicated than I'm permitting admittedly for this example with that exception it's the strategic landscape that determines the form and structure of the internal situation it can't really be any other way and you know but like I said it's complicated in the case of America and but also the way the way this is a discussion from other age to the way that America approaches military affairs is is it odds with is it odds with extent realities but you know that did present something of unique danger and in the American case even before America achieved true superpower capabilities just by the fact even if you were to extricate the ideological motives of the new dealers I am not singling them out to burn an effigy the new deal revolution was was truly revolutionary okay I mean that and it totally altered American national life and the structure of the American state it was the realization of the process that began we were in the states as in terms of what the old he was talking about but attempting to extrapolate those Prussian structural aspects to a purely ideological and propositionally abstract political culture you don't have any concrete or organic or historical variables to appeal to for to unify the body politic or to command its loyalty or at least its obedient compliance and that conveys a grossly outside significance on warfare and its function within the state and its usefulness in in managing the internal situation if you follow me there and I think that's exactly what happened it's not the whole story but it it's it's um undeniable and at base to I mean I I hope to write some long form stuff on this too um Americans the core of America there's a strongly Germanic aspect to it regionally American differs in terms of the culture bearing and and um native element but you know a major aspect of the founding mythology according to the Hamiltonian faction was that Americans are angle Saxons where it's Germanic people and we're casting off this sort of alien tyranny of of the Roman Church and of this Latin overcast that ruled us in Britain I mean part of that was ideological myth making but I mean that's that's not incorrect either you know you add in the the the Celtic aspects and the fact of Ulsterblood that changes things too and the descendants of the Cavaliers in substantial measure constituted the aristocracy the south and they obviously were descended from Normans so it's complicated but you know there's um this Germanic blood intermingled with you know the Ulster scots as well you know they they we are in part you know the bastard offspring of Vikings so you can't that's why make a point a lot too that the kind of Calvinist diaspora of you know America Ulster Sudafrica Australian New Zealand that represents the unique heritage that's not just some mirror of you know the United Kingdom or something I mean obviously but that's a bit outside the skull I'm gonna stop there as I fear that I'm rambling a bit I'll we have to stop next episode and get more in sort of the concrete military aspects of the conflict and things I hope that this was useful and interesting to the subs I think it will be I took I took some notes awesome all right head on over to Thomas the sub stack it's real Thomas 777 dot sub stack dot com and you can connect to him from there you can go to Thomas 777 dot com the T is a seven and yeah I think he posts it links everything is linked there I believe yeah me so go support Thomas do that on sub stack or whichever way he has linked on his website and thank you Thomas I look forward to the next episode yeah thank you my friend I want to welcome everyone back to the Pikenyone show Thomas is back and we are going to conclude the series on the 30 years war are you doing Thomas I'm gonna well thanks for hosting me there's a significance that I emphasize within the any study of the conflict that make differ from what others might I said at the outset I wasn't going to make this a deep treatment or discussion of Piken shot military methods or of the early modern period generally first and foremost I as I think any revisionist is you know I I'm a political theorist I'm not a historian so I always fall in the conceptual side of things there's a running discussion and obviously people in the continental tradition differ from people in both the analytic tradition as well as people who favor a more progressive view of historical processes and only progressives as in people read the Washington Post and you know can't pee correctly I mean you know people used to be considered as sort of the wig historicist tradition you know obviously if you fall on that side of things you're gonna view the conceptual lens that people came to frame the conflict in and subsequent political development as being a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy people develop certain conceptual biases owing to the nature of sectarian combat and then extrapolated those epistemic priors to all subsequent conflict iterations when the primary diet was sectarian or what have you. I think that's the wrong way to look at it. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, there was this ongoing tension within Christiandom between perspectives, one of which was primarily Latin, then one of which was primarily Germanic and broad strokes. I'm talking about the way things were conceptually devised within respective cultural minds. I'm not talking racially or something. I believe this culminated on the continent. sectarianism is a bit different in Britain. This culminated on the continent with the 30 years war and the sectarian conflict diet generally. This wasn't really resolved, I don't think, until Bismarck. I think it was largely by necessity and it was the fact of Europe becoming a true global power unto itself. That was on the cusp of overcoming the warring states phase of its political development and entering the world stage in a way that had been unthinkable in prior epochs. Obviously, power political affairs within that truly global schema within Velt Palateague was excessively menacing in a way that was very binary and obviously that's what allowed the sectarian divide to finally be overcome. Those kinds of existential realities. That's what always allows for sectarian divisions to be overcome. Either one side annihilates the other or it's resolved. Not to wing this off under a tangential discussion, but that's what's allowing the sectarian rift to heal in Northern Ireland, I believe. It was the existential threat posed by the occupation regime that is trying to ethnically cleanse white Christians. You have an existential threat that suffocates all their conflict paradigms to the critical imperatives emerging. They're in. This isn't just Monday morning quarterbacking as it were. If you read you know historical accounts from the era and the testimony of declared to work participants to the events in the immediate aftermath of Westphalia, you can tell what's coded into their conceptual horizon. Culturally is this sort of post-Aromon understanding and one side of the other of the nature of authority where it derives. I mean, and this isn't just a case of cherry picking either because I'm anticipating that it'll be one of the claims presented in Rebottle. There was an all-encompassing intensity to the 30 years war that tended towards both myth-making in military and political terms, but also tended to characterize discourse conceptually just because how it could have not. There is a parallel between it and the Second World War and its destructive mass, but also its formative. It's ontologically formative aspects. You know, and we talked, I think, the last time and if memory serves to be the same, there was the same considerations on the minds of people in Britain also. I mean, don't get me wrong. There were English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, mercenaries who participated in the conflict directly, even though the respective kingdoms from let they go home weren't engaged as for all combatants, but in terms of the political horizon, this was as much characteristic in essential capacities in Britain as well as in the continent. And that's suggestive of a matter of apoccal or historical significance, not just something derivative of, you know, the subjective impressions of accidental observers. This idea too of the need of a secular sovereign, not in the colloquial sense, but in the conventional, literal definition of it, to act as arbiter between ambitious factions and sectarian motivations that didn't somehow spontaneously emerge with Hobbes. I mean, the real genius of Hobbes was some of his musings on the symbolic psychological aspects of the state craft and the relationship of man as a discrete individual, contrast of the sovereign and how that relationship is primarily psychological. It's not grounded in material quantities. I mean, Hobbes stands as a, it was an intellectual giant for all kinds of reasons. I'm not suggesting otherwise, but this idea that he was the one man who understood that there was a profound existential aspect to the new politics and that the military aspect of that was becoming unmanageable unless some sort of Leviathan agent that enjoyed universal legitimacy could establish dominion over it with the requisite will to brutality that would be so required. I don't think that's deniable, but there's obviously all these things show up people's understandings of what constitutes the state's legitimacy and where it derived from. What is the ultimate source of authority and the way people talked about that changed precipitously after Westphalium. It, um, but it also the framing device of it, even though the concrete particulars were different and the way power was understood and its potentialities were understood couldn't have been more extreme as it were or pronounced or severe, but the conception of people being situated as regards state craft in what amounts to a post-Roman world. And it's something to determine what the ideal state is within realistic parameters and more significantly what its relationship is to ethical considerations and how it can reconcile its own legitimacy, contra, you know, God's dominion and ultimate authority of God or a man. That That's what the that that Odo what I mentioned that the onset of this discussion was competing understandings of sovereign authority and the pious man's the Christian man's relationship to these things You know Christian St. Paul's the Pauline you literally as authority comes from God only and alone But the authorities that holds sway Our of God's ordinance even if they're even if they're evil men You know a magistrate what it doesn't it's not as if he's acting outside of the purview of God or outside of the authority of God even if he acts against Christian principles You know and Man does have a duty To obey the laws of the polity So long that polity itself is not patently illegitimate There's a lot that's written on this extrinsic description obviously That's something that's interesting contract Islam because obviously within the Quran is a great deal written about What a pious Muslim always to secular authorities and what the discrete parameters are within You know the legitimacy of a secular office Christianity's more complicated than Islam Metaphysically and otherwise I'm not saying that pejoratively this is a fact but Nevertheless You know that the issue was far from settled even when Europe could probably be said to have been Christianized Which I I think people follow me if Probably Gleena that I I essentially accept Spanglers timeline We can talk about Christian dumb existing in approximately a thousand AD I realized that Israeli is the fourth century a the European peoples were Converting the Christianity and substantial numbers but Even after the Roman Empire was ashes Or you think of as the majority of civilized Europe it still had a wet and stamp on it in terms of the languages people spoke and their cultural and wars in terms of the wheel codes in terms of their Habits the foods they ate and most significantly our discussion their view of government and a lot of peoples particularly in Europe central and The disproportionate Number of them Germanic Their commitment to Christian dome was probably nominal The nice seem creed came about by necessity, okay? Because the Aryan heresy not Aryan Aryan AR I am that It had become endemic Because a lot of In in part because a lot of missionaries were willing to accept the nominal obedience or That sort of ceremonial acceptance of formal protocols and things and If these people remained basically pagan and rejected the divinity of the Christ so be it That's why this came about and this endured for centuries People forget that You know it was well into What we'd think of as the later Middle Ages There were crusades being waged against European pagans. This didn't just go away But even among the pious Germanics They had a very different concept of where authority comes from This was exacerbated By pagan influence is obviously but That wasn't The essential aspect of it nor the sole proximate cause Even the way the Even the way these things are framed and in the some of the Pauline letters and the early church fathers Characterizing the Roman state is diabolical or demonic. I mean that that was true, but to some Germanic Yaelaman Who until a few generations back had been Worse of being the tribal gods and things You know in his mind how how could authority be diabolical? You know authority comes from An ascending source it doesn't descend from the emperor It's validated by You know bonds of blood and soil and by shared affinity for the same God so To such a man These controversies would seem To be Either totally a rational and incomprehensible or a sort of exercise in In logic games almost like mathematics At a purely theoretical level That doesn't directly translate to Either recognizing or rejecting A belief in the divine origin of political authority but It does Force the question as to what possible obligation Would a subject people have to an emperor who doesn't speak their language who doesn't Practice their ways Who claims nominally to worship the same God but whose iconography and liturgical aspects are totally alien to the congregant in question This said a lot of this is the source of the schism between Protestant sex in the Roman church at least if we're talking about Lutherans especially and reformed There's probably a more cultural aspect to the former and political conceptual aspect that's paramount to the latter But I don't think that can be denied You know and I read There's this really interesting Vlog is and I it's I read it my first year in law school not because it was a sign or anything they don't They don't deal with Complex legal theory in law school at least not it like a shit law school that I went to This is before you could download you know PDFs for free and stuff so I haunt the library and The law library John Marshall we shared the library with the Chicago Bar Association. So it was actually a really good library and I found an Oxford history of Western legal theory Now if there's written by an Oxford guy the first edition in the 50s or something and the body of it it's substantially At least in some terms you know endured through seven subsequent editions or whatever He makes much of what he views as the sort of civic mythology of the Federalist Papers. I disagree with some qualifications on that take. He objected to all kinds of things, but a particular interest to me was the critique he levied against Hamilton and John Jay. His Tory types tend to be more favorable to Hamilton and Jay for reasons that I think aren't mysterious. Hamilton opposed the kind of occasion of a written constitution at all. He essentially viewed the constitutional government as some happy medium between Republican and monarchist tendencies. He viewed the President of the United States as basically an elected monarch. Those that don't know, I'm not trying to be pedantic. A lot of people don't know about the controversies of the founding fathers. That doesn't make you stupid or not educated or something. It's very complicated. But Hamilton and Jay both wrote about the facts that the legitimacy crisis of the United States, the King of England, had largely derived from the fact that they basically viewed it as emergent from the time of the Norman Conquist because the Germanic people were subjugated by Latin overlords who were linguistically, culturally, and culturally different and who practiced a totally different religion for all practical purposes. The American Revolution was Anglo-Saxon dumb reclaiming their political rights as a discrete folk and Germanic people elect their kings. The nobles decide who was the king. The King of England, in the Hamilton and Jay, you read him from the lines, has essentially made himself a pope and an emperor, and that's the still-decent of tyranny. It's also a deeply heretical posture. The American Revolution was a Germanic revolt in substantial measure, at least in political terms, I guess, Latin oppression, and worse than that by a Latinized king who has also made himself a pope. So there's two layers there of tyranny and illegitimacy. I'm the first to stipulate there's many Americans. People recommend the book a lot, "Elby and Seed" in our quarters. At least a lot of the Southern guys do, and a lot of the Northern guys who have heritage, American roots and things. It's not a bad book. And I agree in the substantial measure with the basic anthropology that it lays out, causally, but it's complicated. I believe, and I intend to write on this moving forward, I believe that the war between the states and the war of three kingdoms, there was a causal relationship there, and I think the war of three kingdoms in the 30 years war, there was a causal relationship there. And the American Revolution and the War of Interest, there was a sectarian aspect to both. And there is myriad nuances there, but I, Himalayan J also worked wrong. And this was, this really endured until the 20th century, even, and it was just laws caused historians or something. You have guys like Lothra, I'm stoddard talking about the Anglo-Saxon character of America. You had European progressives on both sides, you had Marxists, and national socialists talking that way. This was a real thing. Okay, I mean, whether, at some point in these things, we're going to self-fulfill in prophecy, I mean, don't get me wrong. I don't think this was an image under confedulated identity or phenomenon. But even if it was, well, if you're building a new political culture that's based entirely on the rejection of the British crown, there's got certain implications. And E. Michael Jones, I mean, Dr. Jones is a good dude. You know, and he was nice enough to come on the Mind Faser pod. And we had a good talk with, I don't know, off the record. You know, like we were talking about, I mean, he overstates his case, and I love the guy, but I think he's got a persecution complex of a sort like a lot of our big city Irish friends do. But he's not wrong that America is probably the most anti-Catholic country it ever existed other than the UK. And that doesn't come from nowhere. And it doesn't just emerge because we're all a bunch of crazy, you know, holy roller teleban types who want to be mean to Catholics. I mean, yeah, I'm sure this day you find some people who are just bigoted because they've got weird ideas. But there's a deep doctrinal and philosophical objection to Roman Catholicism in this country. And it comes from exactly what we're talking about. It's deeply identityarian, you know, and if you want to parallel, I'm always making the point because I think it's relevant. It's a direct rebuttal to a post you'll end, of course, historians. Beginning with William Shire and enduring the present, there's this, and it's not just crazy Zionists who say this. There's this mythology and this conrard that, well, you know, the National Socialist Party, there was a bunch of Catholics who were emulating Roman Catholic rights and rituals. And trying to secularize the faith and, you know, it was, they were a bunch of reactionaries who were angry at the modern world. And they were just cloaking the ideology and the trappings of secular racialism. Okay, the National Socialist Heartland was the Protestant rural and semi-rural north. Okay. I mean, obviously Munich and Nuremberg, they had a deep and sacred significance to the movement. And they had a hardcore partisan footable soldiers there. But in the electoral map, if you're talking about the National Socialist Heartland, you're talking about the Protestant north of Germany. And that makes perfect sense. Okay. I mean, one of the reasons why Hitler was an unusual personage, he was this Habsburg Catholic who identified within his program, he identified the new Germany as the legacy of the Prussian state. And he had the support of both a bunch of Catholic unkers and a bunch of swabians and Prussian officers. And meanwhile, there was this Protestant Yale manry who were his most dedicated followers, like that shouldn't make sense. But that's why it worked in terms of an electoral coalition. And there literally was a camp with party and the Catholic center party had real clouds. The story after people act like, I don't want to spend this all afternoon with discussion of what's wrong with court history on the National Socialist Revolution and things. But there's also this claim that, oh well, well, the first one they claim that the Reichstag Arson was a false flag. And that's ridiculous because it's, I mean, it's preposterous beyond belief, okay. But the claim is also, oh, and then after that, you know, the KPD was banned. So there was nobody to challenge National Socialist, the National Socialist plurality, because now we're wrong majority in the Reichstag. That's totally it. of the reality and Hitler had to basically make concessions to the Catholic center of power because that's how much power they had. I mean, which makes perfect sense. But I believe the German piety is tradition and in Protestantism generally, different as I'm the first to acknowledge and advocate for the reality because I think a lot of Catholic partisans deliberately ignore this. There's profound differences between Protestant sex. There's not this thing called Protestantism or Protestant Church. But one of the commonalities is the emphasis on the congregation, not just in terms of ecclesiastical governance and function. But the congregation is the basis of the community in life. And the community in life is the basis of the congregation of Christ. So without those communitarian aspects, the Christ church on earth isn't realizable. That's why Nimrod was a very bad man. That's just because he was a tyrant. But the whole story of the Tower of Babel Nimrod, not only did he say that he could build a tower to the heavens, said he could become a God himself, but he said that it was incorrect for there to be discrete races and ethnicities and languages. So he's going to wipe all that away. I mean, if that's your position, you're against God. You're saying creation is incorrect and the way that people are incorrect. That's lost in the shuffle. People lie about scripture, lie about all kinds of things. That's one of their talking points. That's one of the ways you know they don't actually read scripture ever. This idea that it's incorrect for people to have a congregational affinity for their own kind or to develop a communitarian bond on a shared heritage. That's the essence of Christianity. What be it as it may and don't be wrong, obviously the Roman Catholic Church takes congregational as a serious league and that's why literaties are delivered in local languages and stuff. But it's a different thing. There's not even within the same confession, you'll find reformed churches that are very, very, very different from each other. I mean, that's the big criticism that Roman Catholics who actually are thinking people have is where there's got to be some sort of final authority on doctrine. And obviously to us, it's so less mature. And as to who's the Christian religion is, people has the idea that the Calvinists don't take extrinsic authorities seriously. That's not true. Obviously, you should read the early church fathers and you should read Calvin. But the point being that in the view of people in the view of the Roman confession, the Roman Catholic confession, there's a built-in schismatic tendency to Lutheranism or reformed theology. Because it may, among Lutherans, this idea of piety and the inner witness is the ultimate, the inner witness brings you to Christ. And also, that's both the arbiter of acts of conscience and the source of pious impulses. But that also is deeply personal in a way that's historically coded. And I don't think that's mysterious and what I mean. So this idea of this sort of pious commitment, this congregationalism, a pious commitment to the inner witness and a sort of shared understanding of the source of moral learning being that inner witness among a community of a confessional agreement driving from those aforementioned principles. And that's an extravagant we bound up with a kind of very Germanic patriotism that's strongly racialized potentially, particularly under conditions of existential conflict, actual or emergent. And that's the culture comp that term doesn't always be, people think that term originated in the inner warriors or something or that it described the reaction against the gross immorality of Vimari. It didn't. I mean, it's using all kinds of capacities and it's not a malaproposism. I mean, it literally means culture struggle, but it came about owing to the, you know, at post-unification, it referred to the, you know, tendency of the ruling House of Honez or in the pursuant policy of, of a, nakedly sectarian, how much an 80 environment. You know, like I said, I don't know if this is true or not, but it, Vellhums, supposedly Vellhums' wife wouldn't even let Catholics in her house, you know, and these colder kind of tendencies didn't come about because Prussians were so strongly sectarian that they just couldn't abide, you know, anything suggesting a true power-sharing arrangement with the Roman Catholics, it's because Prussianism and pious Lutheranism is so, they're inextricably bound up. One can't be divorced from the other. If you're talking about Prussianism, you're talking about pious Lutherism. And, you know, if you're talking about national socialism, you're talking about a, a, a Prussian ethos that was presided over again by a Habsburg Catholic who was very, was very much of that heritage. You know, if you want me to get to Hitler was, I don't know exactly how it breaks down in Europe in terms of the education system before, like the days they have for the empire and things, but what I do know is that Hitler was raised by some in areas in his education, you know, until he went to, until he went to high school, very equivalent, you know, it is, it's really teachers' real priests. And the church was the center of communitarian life. When I'm getting at it, Hitler wasn't just nominally Catholic, he was very Catholic, you know, culturally, if not in terms of his inter-confessional belief structure, but, you know, this ultimately, I think this touches in concerns every aspect of conceptual political life from, I don't know, the, the Mervor-Ringian era until 1945. This idea of concentrated authority within a ruling element or sovereign and the emerging complexity or the shifting of the proverbial sands within the ex-Nate paradigm causes that sovereign or that ruling element to have to devise a way. There's a stainless legitimacy or a sort of power and that's rationalized on grounds of descending authority ordained by the Christian God. You know that that whole narrative is inescapable. And not just that but I think it's this positive and what develops. And even in America that's what informs this myth of the imperial executive and this idea that the constant vigilance is required to preclude such a thing from emerging. You know and the 30 years war was such a catastrophic culmination of these factors that even of people rejected the you know suggested immutability of that paradigm that I'm describing. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy regardless. You know and that's the significance of the 30 years war and that's the core essence of why. I mean it's such a huge topic you know and I think it's imperative that this stuff be discussed and I did the best I could with this series you know but I can only speak from my own base of knowledge and expertise and I'm not I mean I'm not I'm not a military guy even looking to you obviously but I and I think I know something about I mean I know something about you know modern warfare and game theory and you know the very the relevant inputs and variables particularly as regards 20th century conflict paradigms and stuff but I don't I'm not a military historian and I'm not one of these people who I'm not I'm not like a documentary in a story and either where I try to identify every aspect of a historical phenomenon or paradigm and then we those discrete variables into a sort of pasties that can convey a true understanding of the epoch you know I ideal in concepts of a playable theorist so I'm always going to fall on the side of what's arguably you know more what's arguably an undue emphasis on and more abstract and symbolically psychological aspects of the subject matter but that's all I got in the 30 years war I realize that I'm going to full hour but I apologize for that it is one of that it's all good it's all good will get we'll get together over the next couple days and figure out well we already know within next series is going to be so we'll schedule that out and yeah and I'll remind people to go over to Thomas a sub stack it's real Thomas 777 that's sub stack calm or to go to Thomas 777 calm where the T is a seven and you can connect with them there go support them on sub stack and yeah Thomas thank you this was I think I think I think one or two people asked for this series but it was definitely something I wanted to do so you know I just want to thank you personally I welcome thanks for hosting me and that I want to think that so I'm sure their their feedback and their kind compliments I really appreciate that and I mean feedback's essential because I I mean I it really is otherwise I don't know if I'm doing my job but and plus I also want to I also want to cover things that people find interesting you know that obviously you know I mean I it's a prerequisite that it's got to be something that I know about and I can ski gone among with some meaningful expertise but no and people have been very nice and in praising this series and I really appreciate that all right so I've seen a couple of this thank you