Hi everyone. Here is the first episode – well, the prologue – for a brand new Martyr Made series called Whose America?, on the American labor wars. This is a series I’ve been working on for a while, and a story very close to my heart.

I appreciate the patience and support you guys have shown me. I have a habit of over-burdening myself until work grinds to a crawl, then I panic and work myself nearly insane to catch up. Well, the good news is that I only decided to do this prologue at the last minute to set the tone and get the ball rolling, when the *actual* first episode of this series, on the largest insurrection in American history before or since the Civil War, was already almost done. I’ve got another two books to read before I’m ready to release it into the wild, but it won’t be too long.

This episode has already been available to Substack subcribers for a week. I will be doing that from now on, so you can add that to the list of benefits available to subscribers for just $5 p/month or $50 p/year. If you enjoy this episode, or even if you don’t but just want to keep my cats from starving, please consider supporting the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber to the MartyrMade Substack.

Thanks for listening!

Hey everybody. Many of you have asked for my thoughts on the crisis in Ukraine, so here they are. I re-recorded it because the audio was trash the first time around. Sorry about that.

This is the kind of content I usually put on the Substack subscribers-only feed, so if you like this and can spare $5, please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing at martyrmade.substack.com.

Here are some links I mention in the show:

The Snipers Massacre On Maidan

How the West Sowed the Seeds of War in Ukraine, by Pedro Gonzalez

My Twitter thread on the Rand Corporation’s strategy white paper

Scott Horton’s recent speech on the Ukraine crisis

Thanks for listening.

There’s a quote always attributed to Winston Churchill – falsely, I think? – that goes something like, “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by 30, you have no brain.” I’ve got a different version that I like a lot better, and it goes, “If you’re not reading Nietzsche at 20, you have no heart. But if you haven’t transitioned to Dostoevsky by 30…” In this episode, I look through the lives and work of the two 19th century existentialist authors, who have a great deal in common, but who, in the end, couldn’t be more different.

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History is replete with examples of leaders, nations, and empires who left a trail of blood behind them. But with the Bolshevik takeover of Russia after the First World War, something new crawled from the depths of the earth onto the surface of the world. Never before had a government shown such uninhibited savagery toward its own people, during peacetime, as a matter of policy and in the name of scientific management. After Nazi Germany was defeated in the Second World War, Stalin’s Soviet Union unleashed hell on the devastated nations of Eastern Europe, leaving behind an unmatched record of sadism and brutality.

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This is a short piece I did for Daniele's History on Fire podcast. Many of you may have already heard it, but I thought I'd put it on the main feed just in case. It was a fun break from Jim Jones, and nice to be a little less serious for once. Hope you enjoy.

More short episodes like this will be available to subscribers only at the MartyrMade Substack.

Jim Jones and Peoples Temple follow the remnants of the 1970s radical left into the fire.

WARNING: Extreme language and disturbing content.

Thank you to www.campuspress.com for sponsoring this series.

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Huge thanks to the folks behind the Alternative Considerations of Jonestown Project. This podcast wouldn't have been possible without their indispensable hard work recording, organizing, and transcribing the Peoples Temple tapes and other source materials. For further information about Jonestown, you can't do better than their website. I did my best to tell the story here as I understand it, but if you ask me the work they're doing will lead to a fundamental future reassessment of what happened.

This was originally intended to be part of the previous episode, but I decided to break them up.

Warning: EXTREME LANGUAGE AND GRAPHIC CONTENT

The student movement is dead. The Black Panther Party is torn apart by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Activism devolves into struggle sessions and terrorism, as the movement for civil rights and social justice is left to "drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen." Treason drives Jim Jones off a cliff.

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This series brought to you by the kind folks at CampusPress.

This episode begins where the '60s end, when the radicalism of that decade crash headlong into the diminishing expectations of 1970s America. The Weather Underground veers off toward its explosive climax. As the idealism of the student movement is shunted into self-help fads and therapy sessions, what remaining energy of the radical left is drained into increasingly bizarre and violent channels.

I broke this episode up into two parts, so it ends a bit abruptly. The second segment will be available a few hours after this is released.

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This series brought to you by the good folks at CampusPress.

This episode discusses the beginning of Peoples' Temple's slide into radicalism after Jim Jones leads his people to California. We also talk about the development of 1960s radical political movements, and Jonestown conspiracy theories.

I had to record this episode in a hotel bathroom while on travel for work. The audio quality has some issues at various points. Hopefully, it's not too bad.

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In this episode I trace the trajectory of the civil rights movement through the 1960s, and the gradual shift in emphasis and leadership from the stoic southern marchers following Martin Luther King, Jr to the militant Black Power soldiers of the northern ghettos.

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