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This week, we talk about centaurs, demons, and self-filling pots of food. That's right, we're talking about saints and their hagiographies! This unusual genre stands at the crossroads between the Late Antique and Medieval worlds, and despite their often strange contents, they have a lot to tell us about the world in which they were written. Finally, we look at a firmly modern saint, a martyr who perished in the 1940s, and consider the ways in which the passage of time has likely sanitized many of the saints, many of whom were probably far from saintly by contemporary standards.

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With Argentina, 1985 having been in the running for Best Foreign Language Film, we are joined by our good friend Kevin as we delve into the history of the Argentinian Junta and its genocidal campaign of disappearances, extrajudicial murder, torture, and the kidnapping of children. The latter crime is the subject of The Official Story, another Argentinian movie which actually was made in 1985 and approaches the crimes of the period from a more personal angle.

Using these two films as a jumping off point, we tell the harrowing story of this dictatorship and the long struggle to bring the participants to justice. Who were the junteros and how did they seize power? What was the P2 connection? How were they ousted and why was the legal battle against them such an uphill battle? Finally, what do these movies get right (and wrong) about the events depicted, and what do they have to say about the state of Argentinian society at the times of their making? All this and more on this episode of Gladio Free Europe.

Gladio Free Europe received a frosty transmission this week from the icy waters of the Bering Sea. Writer, prophet, and friend of the pod Jon called in to talk about life in Alaska. We run through the past 300 years of the 49th state, beginning with initial bloody encounters between indigenous Yupik and Inuit peoples and the Russian Empire and the ensuing colonial contest with Britain, the United States, and even Spain. By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly what makes Alaska so different from the Lower 48, the reason American merchants were so set on acquiring the territory, and why famous sled-dog Balto is a damned fraud.

Check out Jon's Substack

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More and more people are talking about bog bodies! Due to great feedback on our most recent episode we're following up our bog talk with an overview of recent developments in wetland archaeology and an overview of some of the most interesting bog sites in Europe. We dive into our favorite finds that we didn't have time to cover in our last episode, like the morbid battlefield of Alken Enge and the beautiful bog dog of Saxony. We expand our scope to bog bodies outside the Iron Age, exploring corpses deposited in bogs from 9,000 BC up to a late medieval murder mystery. Linked below is the new meta-analysis of hundreds of bog remains we draw from in this episode.

Tune into Gladio Free Europe this week for one more dip into the murky mire.

Bogs, bones and bodies: the deposition of human remains in northern European mires (9000 BC–AD 1900)

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We get knee-deep in the peat this week to examine the bog body phenomenon. Due to their unusually anaerobic nature, bogs across the world have a remarkable ability to preserve any animal matter that falls into them. The cold and wet climate of Northern Europe has proven especially fruitful for the preservation of human corpses, many of which date back to the iron age and beyond. Generations of scholars have been enchanted by these enigmatic and unnerving corpses, whose flesh and faces are so well-preserved that they look like they could have died next week. Moreover, individual bog burials like the Egtved Girl and the Tollund Man offer unparalleled insights into the lives and typically violent deaths of individual people from the deep past. 

The existence of these bodies gives a voice to a people who could not read or write, and whose culture is only known from potsherds and petroglyphs and the occasional footnote of a Roman text. At the same time, any true understanding of their lives will always remain beyond our grasp. On this episode of Gladio Free Europe, we show this paradox has tantalized artists, archaeologists, and propagandists for hundreds of years. Join us to see what happens when the dead live again.

We are now on Patreon! We are not setting up a paywall, but if you would like to support Gladio Free Europe, we'll be thankful for your contribution.

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The Golden Age of Hollywood was a rough time to be an actor. Overdoses, suicides, and secret abortions were routine, but always escaped the papers thanks to the hard work of the studio fixers. In the 1930s to the 1950s, Hollywood studio heads hired thugs and corporate spies to maintain control of their employees and keep scandals under wraps, and these fixers often used blackmail and brutality to enforce the studio's will.

This week, Gladio Free Europe discuss Joel and Ethan Coen's recent classic Hail, Caesar!  which follows a day in the life of one of these fixers, a fairground bouncer turned movie executive named Eddie Mannix, played by Josh Brolin. Although the movie depicts him as a deeply conflicted family man, the real Mannix was a world-class scumbag who abused and manipulated may actors, particularly young women, and may have even murdered those who got in his way. Liam and Russian Sam recount some sordid stories about real Hollywood fixers, especially Mannix, and go into the unlikely origins of America's film industry and its early leaders such as Louis B. Mayer. The studio system was both awful and awe-inspiring, an institution that relied on terrible exploitation and enabled shocking abuse, but also produced many of the greatest cultural achievements America has ever seen. Men like Eddie Mannix made all of that possible.

This episode includes some graphic descriptions of abuse.

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In 1768, hundreds of Greek peasants were brought to Florida by an ambitious British businessman in hopes of creating a classical paradise in America. Within just three months, New Smyrna would be the site of a full-on worker's revolution and this utopian dream would go in flames. 

Liam and Russian Sam go back to Florida this week to chart the early history of the Sunshine State, starting with the first European explorations of the soupy, steamy peninsula by Ponce de Leon and ending with its ultimate annexation by the United States in 1821. In between, Florida changed hands many times and was the site of many different spectacular colonial failures. Storms, sickness, and starvation wrecked every European adventure into Florida, while at the same time allowing communities to Native Americans and freedmen to thrive undisturbed. Grandest of all of these colonial failures was New Smyrna, a beach town that still exists today. Scottish merchant Andrew Turnbull established the colony to be a homeland for Greek refugees from his wife Gracia's native country, but by the end most of the settlers were actually Catalans. Intended to be a model alternative to plantation slavery, New Smyrna was nonetheless the site of brutal forced labor. 

From start to finish, the New Smyrna was a dismal failure, but the history of this colony encapsulates so much that makes Florida unique, and possibly the most cursed corner of America.

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This week, we are joined by archaeologist Anton Larsson to discuss the other English-language movie about the Thirty Years War: Queen Christina, a historical romance starring the famous Greta Garbo. We discuss the multifaceted legacy of Sweden's famous philosopher-queen who oversaw the end of the long war waged by her father Gustavus Adolphus before ultimately converting to Catholicism and abdicating the throne.

We use this 1933 film to trace frenzied rise and fall of the Swedish Empire, the onetime bane of Central and Eastern Europe, which reached its apogee during the era of Christina. Surprisingly few Swedes today realize that their country was once the center of an overseas empire, but their neighbors sure haven't forgotten.  Sweden, seemingly existing on the periphery, provided a continuous stream of both trade and warfare in a surprisingly vast swathe of the world across many different eras. We look at (hopefully) the last of these while also chatting about the film and looking more closely into the life of the real-life Queen Christina.

Hosted by: Liam, Russian Sam, Anton

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The one and only Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House stopped by in our little valley to bring us the latest updates on the Thirty Years' War. We ventured into an overview of the history of the war, when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse roamed the Earth, the 1971 James Clavell flick The Last Valley starring Omar Sharif and Michael Caine, and Matt's upcoming series Hell on Earth where he and producer Chris Wade dive into the terrifying world of 17th-century Central Europe. Is building a monkey house enough to secure the heart of your beloved? Was Ferdinand II literally Hitler? How did the grooming of one prince change the course of history? What does all of this mean for the world to come? Which personality from the Thirty Years' War would win in a gladiatorial match? All this and more on this week's Gladio Free Europe! Hell on Earth premiers on January 11.

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Bring out your cudgels, the midwestern barbarians are afoot! This week we delve into the massively underrated 1942 Christmas film The Man Who Came to Dinner starring Bette Davis and Monty Woolley, the story of the cranky proto-podcaster Sheridan Whiteside who seemingly breaks his hip on a speaking tour and is forced to recuperate in a podunk Ohio town. To contemporaries, Whiteside was obviously based on prolific critic and radio personality Alexander Woollcott, whose appraisal could make or break careers at the drop of a hat, even though his heft has largely been forgotten.

In this episode we explore the life of Woollcott as well as the famous social circle that surrounded him: the Algonquin Round Table, a collection of particularly gifted, galling, and gay young writers and comedians who met for lunch every day across the 20s and 30s. Members included Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker, even Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. This extended circle of friends dominated the American culture industry in Hollywood's early days, and this movie is an amazing window into this period, filled with nods to many different members of Manhattan's "Algonquin Round Table", alternatively known as the "Vicious Circle." By the end of this episode, you'll see why The Man Who Came to Dinner deserves the highest seat in the holiday movie pantheon.