Gladio Free Europe

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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

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There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. Vladimir Lenin surprisingly did not say these words about 2014, a year that saw monumental pivots in culture, technology, and world events and arguably never ended at all.

Liam and Russian Sam are joined this week by their good friend Jackson or Grace Cathedral Park, a longtime advocate of the concept of "The Long 2014." They discuss how the last years of the Obama administration inaugurated a lasting vibe shift, from rise of Netflix to the brutal emergence of ISIS, or the ways that the parallel development of Black Lives Matter and the odious GamerGate galvanized masses of young Americans into extremely different forms of political rebellion.

Join Gladio Free Europe for our most recent historical exploration yet, and decide for yourself whether the Long 2014 has yet come to a close.

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The Dune series has gone through a revival of late thanks to the film adaptations of Denis Villeneuve, but what are we to make of it? In this episode we explore Dune through the lens of its author, Frank Herbert. His beliefs defy easy political classification according to today's preconceived notions, making him difficult to situate. Herbert was a libertarian who was deeply uneasy with market forces, a localist with great sympathy for indigenous and anticolonial causes, and a dyed in the wool environmentalist who voted for Reagan, on top of being a fiend for psychedelics and an inveterate JFK hater. What are we to make of all this?

In addition to Herbert's personal beliefs and political philosophy, we explore the many different real-world influences that filled in the details of Herbert's world. Although the series is set some 20,000 years in the future, traces of currently existing human cultures persisted and gave color to this world, from the martial spirit of Caucasian and North African liberation fighters to a liberal mishmash of Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, and other beliefs which continue to inform the faiths and actions of the peoples of this world.

So just who was Frank Herbert, how did this inform his writing, and what went into the worldbuilding of the Duniverse? Find out on this week's episode of Gladio Free Europe.

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Since the 17th century, nearly 10 million Irish people left their homes for an uncertain life abroad. While stories of Irish settlement in the United States and Canada are well-known, the lives of tens of thousands of Irish people who settled in Latin America are much more obscure.

In the first Gladio Free Europe solo episode, Liam runs through the long history of the Irish presence in Latin America. As early as the time of Shakespeare many Irish people began pledging their service to the formidable Spanish Empire, out of desperation, defiance, or duty to their Catholic faith. These Irish volunteers, later termed "the Wild Geese," were deployed on Spanish military adventures across the entire known world, but saw their most notable success in the American colonies. Some Irishmen would settle in Latin America as members of the colonial elite, while others would shake the foundations of the Spanish empire and push toward independence.

The Irish experience in Latin America would have its most brilliant moment in the middle of the 19th century, after Spain had been evicted from the American continent and a new hegemon emerged. At the start of the Mexican-American war, a group of mistreated Irish recruits and survivors of the great famine defected from American service to join the enemy. Driven by both Catholic and republican ideals, these men would form their own unit to defend the Mexican state against United States aggression. Although the San Patricio Battalion would be short-lived, they played a crucial role in halting the American advance and their sacrifice is a testament to over two centuries of Hispanic-Hibernian cooperation.

Ending song: El Caballo by The Chieftains

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In 1675, the Puritan colonies in North America were fighting for their lives. A brilliant young commander named Metacomet assembled a Native American coalition that upended a half-century of colonialism, pushed the English back to the coast, and would come very close to obliterating settler life in New England.

In this episode of Gladio Free Europe, Liam and Russian Sam return to colonial New England to cover King Philip's War, a conflict that is little-known today, but provides one of the greatest "What Ifs" of American history. The psychological terror of Metacomet's revolt, and the brutal English reprisals that followed, would have enormous implications on the development of racial hierarchy and the expulsion of indigenous peoples. And while Metacomet was not even 40 when he was drawn and quartered by the English, he would live forever in the nightmares of the Puritans and the memories of Native Americans, as one of the greatest icons of resistance and rebellion this continent has seen.

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Related Episodes:

E90 After the First Thanksgiving

E84 The Ainu Before Japan