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Every aspect of our modern lives is commodified and decimalized, from the minutes of our labor to the food upon our table. All goods and services we consume are produced and handled by professionals, who spend their lives developing their mobile arsenal of mental and tactile skills because they can outsource the production of food and shelter to other workers. Yet until 300 years ago, this way of life was completely alien to everyone outside a small population of urban merchants and artisans.

Liam and Russian Sam are joined once again by Jackson @gracecthdralprk to explore the city before capitalism, when urban people were small, ambitious, and literate minority distinct from the peasants and princes who lived outside the city walls. This episode of Gladio Free Europe dives into early modern city life, and particularly the artisan system that was the engine of pre-capitalistic production. Drawing on the works of Yuri Slezkine, Sean Wilentz, and E.P. Thompson, this discussion looks at the early relationship between city and country, and the development of an artisan political consciousness, especially in the early United States.

As the 19th century progressed and wage labor began to take hold across industrializing economies, the artisans recognized that their way of life was collapsing and refused to go without a fight. Artisan radicalism would fail, their early 19th century militancy laid the foundation for later working class agitation. The values and aspirations of these ambitious craftsmen would come to define the logic of the entire world.

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Brains. Rot. A shambling gait. Everyone knows the tropes that make up zombie, but how did this strange cocktail come to be? Liam and Russian Sam paddle through dark and torrid waters in this week's episode of Gladio Free Europe to chart the origins of the zombie from Afro-Caribbean folklore to today's Hollywood monstrosities.

Possibly the most enduring creature of the classic era of horror cinema, zombies continue to petrify moviegoers in ways that mummies and wolfmen and even vampires do not. But unique among this pantheon of monsters, the zombie is rooted in African religious traditions that crossed into the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade. In fact, the word "zombie" first appears as an appellation of a slave rebel centuries before it was associated with the undead. But by the 19th century, the term reemerged among practitioners of vodou, the unique religion of Haiti that blends Catholicism with traditional West African religions. In the context of vodou, a zombie came to mean the most horrible product of black magic: an empty corpse brought back to life by being filled with the soul of another, always in order to do that person's bidding.

Modern movie zombies have little in common with Haitian folk religion, drawing as much from European stories of ghosts and vampires as from vodou. But elements of vodou and the folk memory of the brutality of slavery survive in unexpected ways in zombie lore. The fear of zombies may be so resilient because they remind us of the brutal domination of man over man. The act of zombification thus represents a fear that lurks in all of our hearts, and a fear that became reality for millions of Africans in the colonial era: that a simple change of fortune could strip of us our will and personhood, and that we could be forced to exist with our humanity stripped away.

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Humans have been consuming alcohol for as long as we've been human, yet the identification of alcoholism as a chronic addiction is startlingly modern. The history of alcoholism, and the various ways to solve it, provide a great look at the shifting social attitudes around addiction. Many of these disparate ideas come together in the controversial 12-Step Program made ubiquitous by Alcoholics Anonymous.

Liam and Russian Sam are joined once more by their good friend Jon to discuss the past 10 million years of alcoholism, beginning with the earliest known consumption of fermented fruit by our simian ancestors and moving through the 18th century gin crisis and the Victorian temperance movement. Across the 19th century, physicians and preachers clashed over the concept of addiction as a medical condition or a personal moral failing. While the former understanding is now taken for granted, moralistic interpretations steeped in Protestant theology survive in many addiction treatments, including the 12-Step Program.

Jon walks us through the origins and practice of this program, laid out in the 1930s by the enigmatic "Bill W," an alcoholic who turned to both Carl Jung and Lutheranism to help with his addiction. As his program mushroomed into a global movement, his eccentric ideology became scripture for millions of people seeking treatment. Jon describes his own experiences with this philosophy and recounts some of the more controversial aspects of Bill W's life 12-Step Programs writ large.

Jon's Substack: https://dfg.substack.com

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The United States has a fairly long and established history for a state, long enough that the country is approaching its 250th anniversary in just a few years. Much has changed in that time, while other things have failed to progress far enough. To look at this history of continuity and change, we decided to dive into the American centennial and bicentennial celebrations, as well as the history surrounding them.

Although 1876 and 1976 seem distant, the two years actually have a fair bit in common. Civil rights, nefarious government overreach, economic downturn, labor militancy and more were in the forefront of American minds during both periods. Whether in the Gilded Age or in the period dubbed by some "American Glasnost," the United States continued to battle demons along similar lines, and the powers that be hoped that the festivities surrounding the country's birthday would bring to mind the glorious past and future rather than the lackluster present.

But whether the celebrations in Philadelphia were framed by the World's Fair or a giant concert, whether they were presided over by Emperor Pedro II of Brazil or Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, the celebrations could not drown out the grittiness of lived experience. Join us as we put that grit under a microscope and explore the bacteria found within.

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Many podcasts were conceived during the pandemic, but few have proved as long-lasting as our humble broadcasts. After over three years of honing the craft and sharing so many stories, the whole gang reunites to assess our body of work. Liam, Abram, and the Sams have an engaging chat about what Gladio has meant to us and recall some of our favorite episodes.

A special shout-out goes out to our listeners. You have given us the resolve to keep putting these out and I hope that you find our work engaging and entertaining. Here's to a hundred more episodes!

Mentioned Episodes:

E01 Yegor Letov and the National Bolshevik Party

E03 Wag the Dog

E09 S1m0ne ft. Pam

E13 Migration and Memory

E14 Les Rallizes Dénudés ft. Zach

E28 Quo Vadis ft. Maggie

E41 Spiritualism in the 1800s

E47 Dirty Harry

E57 The Golem

E58 Cyrus Teed and Koreshanity

E60 Legendary Ancestry Claims

E67 The Bog Bodies

E67.5 Even More Bog Bodies

E84 The Ainu Before Japan

E87 The Meiji Restoration and Hokkaido ft. John Bellamy Poster

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Liam and Russian Sam continue their exploration of the fall of the Roman world, as described by revolutionary historian Henri Pirenne. Writing between the world wars, the great Belgian scholar used cutting-edge research methods to analyze changes in the economy and society of the 6th century, describing a Roman world in Western Europe that lumbered on without Rome. According to Pirenne, the greatest shock to this unstable system was the rise of the Islamic Caliphate in the early 7th century, which broke off contact between east and west, turned the Mediterranean into a "Muslim lake," and gave the Eastern Roman Empire a challenge far greater than the Goths or Persians of old. Across the next 200 years, the once-Roman world would adapt to this great new change. The ensuing turbulence in the west would lead to the rise of the Carolingian Franks and the new Empire of Charlemagne, which would bring Western Europe out of antiquity and truly into the Middle Ages.

This episode of Gladio Free Europe is a roller-coaster across the 7th and 8th centuries, featuring colorful personalities such as the gold-nosed Byzantine Emperor Justinian II and the legendary feuding queens Fredegund and Brunhilda. Come listen to see how arcane questions of the nature of Jesus led to bloodshed across the Mediterranean, and decide for yourself whether or not the fall of Rome happened with the collapse of the Roman empire in 476, or the birth of a new empire on Christmas Day, 800.

Further Listening:

⁠E13 Migration and Memory⁠

⁠E15 The Last Kingdom⁠

⁠E33 Late Roman Empire⁠

⁠E36 The Franks ft. Natasha⁠

⁠E49 The Arab-Norman Civilization (Part 1)⁠

⁠E50 The Arab-Norman Civilization (Part 2)

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On September 4, 476 the barbarian general Odoacer deposed the last Roman emperor in the West and proclaimed himself king of Italy. After 500 years of existence, the Western Roman Empire was gone. But if you were living there at the time, would you have even noticed anything had changed?

Liam and Russian Sam return to one of their favorite historical subjects, an area that has energized and terrified generations of scholars for 1500 years: the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire. Considered to mark the end of classical antiquity and the start of the middle ages, this event was traditionally understood to be the fundamental cataclysm of the history of Europe, perhaps even the history of the world. But on the eve of the Second World War, aging Belgian historian Henri Pirenne proposed an alternative view: that the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of the barbarian kingdoms only amounted to a change in management. The real transformation of the Roman world into the medieval world would not happen until centuries later, when the empires of the Muslims and the Carolingian Franks built new political and economic systems that replaced what had been left by Rome.

This is the key argument of Mohammed and Charlemagne, Pirenne's most famous work published posthumously in 1937 and one of the most revolutionary texts in medieval history. Still hotly debated today, Pirenne's thesis upended a seemingly adamantine tradition of scholarship established by the Italian humanist Petrarch in the 14th century, and elaborated by later historians such a Edward Gibbon, which viewed the medieval period as a detestable Dark Age that had to be redeemed by the discovery of Roman glory. While not rejecting outright the notion of an early-medieval Dark Age, Pirenne put forward a strong argument for continuity across the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries, interrupted not by the invasions of barbarian peoples but instead by the later rise of the Muslim caliphate. New religious divisions severed the arteries of trade and communication that united the Mediterranean world. And when a new Roman Empire emerged in the west the following century, Pirenne argues that this realm of Charlemagne did not restore Roman civilization as once was believed, but instead created a new imperial system just like their Arab contemporaries.

Listen to this week's Gladio Free Europe to decide for yourself if the end of the Western Roman Empire did or did not mark the end of the Roman world.

Further Listening:

E13 Migration and Memory

E15 The Last Kingdom

E33 Late Roman Empire

E36 The Franks ft. Natasha

E49 The Arab-Norman Civilization (Part 1)

E50 The Arab-Norman Civilization (Part 2)

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Liam and Russian Sam tunnel beneath the hills of Mexico to uncover the remarkable history behind the 1948 film "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and its creators.

Based on a 1927 novel about three American gold-hunters torn apart by greed, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the only modern novels whose author is effectively unknown. Attributed only to the mysterious "B. Traven," a German residing in Mexico, speculation over the writer's identity takes us through the German Revolution of 1919 and rumors of secret illegitimate sons of industrialists and Kaiser.

Celebrated in its time for its stark depiction of human brutality, the novel ascended to immortality when director John Huston adapted Traven's story in an usual western in 1948. Starring Humphrey Bogart and Huston's father Walter as prospectors, the film is regarded among the greatest riches of classic Hollywood cinema.

Listen to this episode of Gladio Free Europe to dig through the dirt of deception and intrigue surrounding both the novel and the film, and decide for yourself just who was B. Traven.

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Further Listening:

E07 Hernán and Aztec Empire ft. Paul Guinan

E41 Spiritualism in the 1800s

E66 Hail, Caesar!

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Liam, Russian Sam, and Turan Explorer continue their journey across the vast steppe of Hungarian Turanism in this episode on Ármin Vámbéry, the all-time Orientalist white boy whose remarkable wanderings were fundamental to the development of the Hungarian obsession with the East, and the rise of a political movement that would convince millions of Central Europeans that they were in fact Central Asians deep down.

Coming from the humblest of beginnings in Slovakia, Vámbéry overcame abject poverty, brutal antisemitism, and Hungarian Slovakia entirely due to his remarkable language learning abilities and unyielding perseverance. After being hired as a language tutor at the age of 10, he found friends in the local elite of Hungary, eventually pursuing his dream of visiting the Ottoman Empire as a young man. Quickly becoming a favorite of the Turkish aristocracy, one of the only non-Muslims to be called "Effendi," Vámbéry then traveled even further east while posing as an Islamic Dervish, first to Persia and then to the much more remote lands of Central Asia, to cities like Bukhara and Khiva that had not been visited by any European for centuries.

After his return, Vámbéry was celebrated across Europe as one of the 19th century's most prominent orientalists. His research and memoirs were of great interest to the British and Russian governments, who each had their own imperial designs on the regions he visited. But in his homeland of Austria-Hungary, Vámbéry's research inaugurated a national obsession with Central Asia, believed to be the homeland of the Hungarian people. By the end of his life in 1913, this Turanist movement had become the most powerful force in Hungarian nationalism, and Vámbéry its prophet. Just as theories of white supremacy were taking hold everywhere else in Europe, Hungarian nationalists proclaimed brotherhood with the peoples of Turkey, Uzbekistan, Japan, and many other nations abroad.

After his death, the dismemberment of Hungary following World War One caused a rise of ultra-nationalism throughout the nation, and a subsequent failed revolution led by communist Bela Kun shifted Turanism in a violent anticommunist direction. Turan Explorer covers the ways Turanism adapted to the increasingly antisemitic climate of the 1920s and 1930s, even though many earlier Turanists, including Vámbéry, had been Jewish themselves. Last, Russian Sam explores the ways that Hungarian Jews adopted a form of Turanism as a nationalist mythology specific to their own community. Though now-debunked, the popular Khazar theory envisioned Jewish Hungarians as the blood relatives of their Christian neighbors, and shows how this strange obsession with the East could unite disparate groups as much as divide.

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This week, we have a very special guest coming to us from the steppe via transfer in Central Europe. This episode is all about the constitutive elements of Hungarian Turanism, the ideology that traces Hungarian origins back into Asia and often comes with a political program for what to do with that knowledge. In this multi-part series, we set the stage for a later exploration of Turanism as a doctrine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But before we go there, we must dive into the murky origins of the Hungarian people as derived from linguistic and genetic evidence, and how Hungarians of the medieval and early modern period conceptualized this migration. We have medieval chronicles deriving a biblically-based genealogy of the Hungarian people, we have early modern legal thinkers of the aristocracy constructing a doctrine of racial supremacy over their class inferiors, this one has it all!

What relationship do the Hungarians have to the Turkic peoples? Are the Hungarians descended from the Huns of Attila? Was the progenitor of the Arpad dynasty sired by a bird? Find the answers to these questions and more on this episode of Gladio Free Europe.

Turan Explorer is on Twitter, Tiktok, and Youtube. He also has a podcast, available on Spotify and other platforms.

Closing song: Gabor Szabo - Galatea's Guitar