The Martyr Made Substack

Hey everybody. I’m back on the grind after a fun last week. The highlight was after the Rogan podcast, when I got Joe, Duncan Trussell, Daniele Bolelli, and Scott Horton to all come out to dinner with me.

Here is an interview I recently recorded with the New Founding guys. I was getting sick at the time and wasn’t feeling 100%, but people have told me it was good anyway. Available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify:

Apple Podcasts:

Spotify:

The Martyr Made Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Martyr Made Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hey guys. I recorded this w/Auron today. Go give him an upvote and comment how awesome I was.

Quick update: I’ve got a wedding to attend this weekend, and from there I’m going to Austin to do the Joe Rogan Experience. So I’ll be busy the next couple days, but will get you the three audio versions I owe you by the weekend, and we’ll catch up once I’m back home on Wednesday.

The Martyr Made Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hi everybody. I was working on the next installment of The Peculiar Institution when I got an email from a student named Isaac Hayward asking for advice on an essay he’s been assigned. The topic - “To what extent did World War 2 result from the outcome of World War 1?” - is one I’ve been thinking about lately, so I thought I’d use his prompt to write a post on it.

First, we should split the question up by phrasing it in two different ways:

1. If World War 1 had not happened, would there have been a world war some time later?

2. If World War 1 had not happened, would World War 2 have happened?

The minor change of wording alters the meaning of the question. There is a short answer to both versions, and we’ll get those out of the way first.

If World War 1 had not happened, it is entirely possible that the same pressures would have eventually led to a confrontation between some combination of the same belligerents. The problems that led to the First World War are not likely to have been resolved by the passing of a few more peaceful decades. There were many potential triggers, but at root just one real cause of the war. The triggers include the nationalist aspirations of the subject peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia’s ambitions in the Balkans, France’s grudge against Germany over the 1870-71 war, and many others. The real cause, though, was that Germany had become the strongest power on the continent, but, since it emerged too late to benefit much from colonialism, had the least to show for it. Britain, France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary ruled over hundreds of millions of subject peoples around the world, while Germany had nowhere to grow without stepping on the toes of an already-established power.

A stable geopolitical order is one that roughly matches the recognized power relations between the various players, but things are destabilized when power relations change and the geopolitical order isn’t adjusted to reflect that. We are in a period like that today. The end of the Cold War left the United States as the only superpower on earth. We used that position to do some good, some bad, but in every case we did what we wanted, when we wanted, how we wanted, and we didn’t much concern ourselves with how other countries felt about it. Eventually, it became natural for American leaders to assume that we should have more say than Russia over what happens on Russia’s border, and more say than China over the South China Sea. It sounds absurd in a vacuum, but for 20 years no one objected because no one doubted that the US was strong enough to get its way. As Russia and China got stronger, though, the US foreign policy establishment continued to behave as if we were the only cat with claws. Could the US Navy really defend Taiwan from China if the chips were down? Maybe we could. It’s possible we’d wipe the floor with them. But 10, 20, 30 years ago, when we took the position that China’s near abroad was more our business than theirs, there was no maybe about it. As Russia has learned in Ukraine, you can’t predict the course of a conflict with spreadsheets and war games, sometimes you have to find out the hard way what’s really what. So it is possible, even likely, that a major settling of accounts was in store for Europe, one way or another.

Still, the shape of that hypothetical conflict is hard (but fun) to imagine. We’re left to wonder, for example, what might have happened if the Ottoman Empire had remained intact for another 20 or 30 years, long enough to realize that it owned all the vast oil deposits in the Middle East? It’s possible the newfound wealth would have cured the “sick man of Europe,” and that the Turkish caliphate would have been one of the dominant powers of the 20th century. Or what if Russia, which was industrializing more rapidly than any country on earth by 1914, had had a few more decades to develop, and to benefit from the vast oil deposits in the southern part of its empire? The what ifs are endless.

On to the second question, which, I think, is the real question Isaac was asking: To what extent was the Second World War - the one that actually happened - a result of the outcome of First World War? The short answer is easy: World War 2 absolutely would not have happened if the first one had not happened, or had ended differently. Rather than describe the thousand reasons why it would not have happened, though, let’s discuss how the war of 1914-18 led to the war of 1939-45.

There’s a famous story about a high society dinner party at the home of Waldorf and Lady Astor in the 1930s. Someone at the table asked where Adolf Hitler was born, and, in a demonstration of her quick wit, Lady Astor immediately answered, “At Versailles.” She was referring, of course, to the Treaty of Versailles that was Germany’s punishment for having lost World War 1.

Germany had faced the combined forces of three great empires, and very likely would have won if not for American intervention. In 1917, the Russian Empire fell, freeing up German forces to reinforce the Western Front. That same year, in the wake of the Battle of Verdun, the French army reached its limit, experiencing strategic-level mutinies so widespread that France would not go on the offensive again until the very end of the war. If the Americans had not joined the war in April, it is very likely that the French and British would have had to accept a negotiated peace with the Kaiser in 1917. But with the Americans on the way, Britain and France knew that they just had to hold on long enough for the US to tip the balance.

By 1918, Germany had very little effort left to give. Millions of her best men had been killed or wounded, the British hunger blockade was causing mass starvation in Germany and Austria-Hungary, and strikes led by communists and social democrats were breaking the military supply chain. Admitting that their days were numbered, the German leadership requested an armistice based on Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points. In January 1918, Wilson had told Congress, and the world, that the United States did not intend to help one side vanquish the other, but to create a new and lasting peace system in Europe:

The terms of the immediate peace agreed upon will determine whether it is a peace for which such a guarantee can be secured. The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace. . . .

. . . it must be a peace without victory. . . .Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last, only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit.

Given the war-altering significance of the American intervention, the Germans hoped that Wilson’s demands would prevail over the imperial ambitions of Britain and France. After all, both France and Britain were broke, and hopelessly in debt to the United States, and it’s no exaggeration to say that American money, supplies, and troops were the deciding factor in the war. The Germans had reason to believe that America would get its way. Also, while the Germans had sued for peace, they had not been defeated on the battlefield. The entire line remained within French and Belgian territory, and other than a brief Russian incursion into East Prussia in the first months of the war, no foreign boot had stepped on German soil. When the leadership requested an armistice, the army was exhausted, but its lines remained intact and, whatever the economic and political situation on the home front, the soldiers did not feel they’d been beaten. Given the effort it would take, even with American support, to drive the German lines all the way back into their own territory, the Germans, while they were to accept defeat, believed they had some leverage to negotiate. When the armistice went into effect on November 11, 1918, both the Germans and the Americans thought that peace would be negotiated along the lines laid down by President Wilson. It didn’t take long to disabuse everyone of that naive assumption.

Great Britain clamped down a hunger blockade in 1915, and by the final year of the war people in Germany and Austria-Hungary were literally starving to death. In all, some 800,000 Germans, mostly children and elderly, would actually die of starvation or of complications directly resulting from malnutrition. That is over 1% of the total population of Germany in 1914, so, adjusting for population, it would be like 3.5 million people starving to death in the United States. It affected everyone, including the rich and the aristocracy. I remember reading an entry from the diary of a German princess who was living on thin turnip soup and having trouble finding even basic necessities for the last year and a half of the war. People moved through the streets listlessly, with distended bellies and emaciated faces, all the signs you’ve seen in videos and pictures of modern famines. When the armistice was announced, the first thought on every German’s mind was that the hunger blockade would finally be lifted. They would be disappointed.

Although the Germans voluntarily demobilized and marched under arms back to Germany, the Allies surprised them by keeping the hunger blockade in place. It’s hard to describe, but maybe not so hard to imagine, how disillusioned and betrayed the German people felt. When the Kaiser abdicated and his empire was replaced by a republic, many patriotic Germans who had supported the Kaiser during the war accepted, even celebrated, the change because they assumed the Allies would have no more reason to punish the German people. After all, it’s not as if the German people had voted for war in 1914, they were thrust into it by the Kaiser’s imperial government. Regardless, despite heroic efforts by American and international relief organizations, the British would keep the blockade in full force for another eight months after the war was over.

Hi everyone. Check out the trailer for the new Martyr Made series, Enemy: The Germans’ War.

As I embark on this project, I’m more thankful than ever for your support. I’ve taken on controversial topics in the past, but as we saw from the reaction to my appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show last year, World War 2 is the ultimate third rail. The series will not be an apologia for the Third Reich, but an attempt to understand the war through the eyes of the people who lost it. Still, I know I’ll be attacked, not only by individuals, but by the same large, well-funded organizations that came after me last year. Fortunately, I have confidence that Substack means what they say about supporting free speech. They had my back after the Tucker interview, and I know they’ll have it now. But you guys are the reason I don’t have to be afraid. I work for you, and only you, and yours is the only opinion I really care about. Gratitude doesn’t begin to capture what I feel for you guys, but just know how much I appreciate it.

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To those of you who are not yet paid subscribers, help me weather the storm that’s coming for just $5 p/month or $50 p/year. In addition to supporting the podcast through what promise to be some heavy seas, you get access to tons of exclusive podcasts, essays (with audio versions), and more. People in my position like to say that $5 is just the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks, but I know from experience what it’s like for every cent to count. So if the subscription fee is tough to swing, but you’d like to subscribe, shoot me an email (martyrmade @ gmail) and I’ll get you set up. If all you’re able to give is your attention, I’m happy and humbled by it.

Next episode should be ready by the end of March.

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Here’s the audio version of my earlier post Catching Up (with a different title so people know what it is on their podcast apps).

Question: Subscriber John Melton asks: It seems that the US attitude towards Stalin during WW2 wasn't as severe as it later became. Is that true or was it merely the fact that a common enemy like the Nazi makes strange bedfellows? What was FDR's opinion of Stalin and did he see the growth of communism as a direct threat to the west at the time in WW2? Was there less worry over communism in that day? If so, why? Did the US know what Stalin was doing to his own people?

Answer: A real answer to this question would take a whole book, but the short answer is yes, the attitude of the Roosevelt administration throughout the 1930s and during the war were radically different than the one that would take root in the late 1940s. The friendliness of Roosevelt probably owes to a few reasons. One that is commonly discussed is the fact that his administration was shot through by communists and communist sympathizers. This, while not irrelevant, has IMO taken on an exaggerated importance to people trying to figure out Roosevelt’s thinking. While it’s true that there were many high-ranking sympathizers around Roosevelt, it’s also true that other influential luminaries - such as William Bullitt, Averill Harriman, and George Kennan - were warning Roosevelt against the naive belief that Stalin shared American ideals or interests. The truth is, Roosevelt was his own man, and, on this and other topics, listened to people who told him what he wanted to hear, and ignored other voices.

Another reason is that, in the 1930s, sympathy with the Soviet Union was a fashionable high-status opinion. All the cool kids were doing it. If you were at an Ivy League college, in Hollywood, the arts, or participated in “respectable” political activism, being outed as anti-communist had a similar effect as being outed as a MAGA Republican would have in those communities today. It revealed one to be gauche, vulgar, low-class. This attitude held even after the war, when the American establishment had soured on Stalin, and even hard leftists began to doubt whether the USSR was an acceptable representative of their ideology.

Hey everyone. This is an answer from the previous Q&A. As often seems to happen, it turned into a short essay. Answers to more questions will be coming soon.

Question: Subscriber John M Anderson asks: Darryl, can you discuss the economic situation in Germany in the mid-to late 1930’s? Specifically the programs and policies Hitler implemented to benefit the German people, the impact of those policies compared to the rest of the world, and Hitler’s attempt to separate Germany from Central Banking cartels and how that might have affected international policies towards Germany.

Answer: Well, getting into the weeds would take an entire essay or podcast episode. I’ll eventually get to that in the current series, but if you don’t want to wait til then, check out Wages of Destruction, by Adam Tooze, and Hitler’s Revolution, by Richard Tedor. Both are excellent books about your question, and Tooze’s book especially goes deep into the actual policies. For now, let’s discuss some of the ideas that informed the social and economic policies of the NSDAP.

Purity and unity were the two master concepts of the Third Reich’s domestic policy agenda. The Germany that fought World War 1 had only been around for 43 years when that war began, and, although many were enthusiastic patriots of the Kaiser’s Reich, in 1914 the country was still riven by regional, religious, and class differences. Some regions had to be dragged into unification, which they regarded as mere submission to Prussian military power. After the Great War, for example, Bavarian separatist movements sought to break their region away from the Weimar Republic, a tendency which Hitler denounced as venomously as he did the hated Republic itself. Germany was also split between Catholic and Protestant Christians, and the religious divide overlapped with, and intensified, regional divides since each denomination was concentrated in different parts of the country. Above all, the most worrying and potentially destructive element was the radicalization of the newly-politicized working class. The two rising ideologies of the 19th century, liberalism and socialism, pitted class against class and intensified divisions within industrializing societies.

Hitler was born into a middle class family (his father was a respectable civil servant), but spent his young adulthood as a penniless drifter in Vienna. For a time, he slept in shelters and workhouses, and often went hungry. In his middle class youth, he had observed the contempt with which the “respectable” people viewed the so-called proletariat; in his young adulthood, he observed and experienced the want and neglect from which poor and working people suffered. Nationalism was a bourgeois ideology - everyone Hitler knew as a boy had been a fervent nationalist. Middle class nationalists heaped scorn on the urban riff raff for their apparent lack of national feeling. Hitler had imbibed the biases of his father’s class, and was at first repelled when he got a close-up look at the proletariat in Vienna. Dissolute, disrespectful of all authority, without interest in anything beyond their next drink, fix, or meal, and, it was true, practically devoid of national feeling. To the extent that they were political at all, they were drawn to the street corner socialism preaching violent hatred for everything associated with the higher classes. Over time, as he shared their suffering, he developed sympathy for the underclass. Early in Mein Kampf, he scolds the middle class for their contempt of the poor and working people. One passage is worth quoting at length, both for its insight into the “social problem” and into the political mind of the young Adolf Hitler:

In the US, sports tend to be coded as right wing. In a country in which Presidential elections always fall within the margin of error from 50/50, nobody is surprised when Donald Trump is met with sustained, uproarious applause when he makes an appearance at a fight or college football game. Even when he showed up at UFC 309 in New York City - not exactly a hotbed of Trump support - nobody was shocked when he got the same pop as when he attended an SEC football game down South. The association has held up even after several years of sports leagues groveling before the dictates of left-wing race and gender ideology. Similarly, the military has and will always be coded as right-wing, regardless of how often General Mark Milley uses the phrase “white fragility” in front of Congress.

It makes sense. Sports and war are masculine pursuits. All the effort put into expanding their appeal has not changed that a bit. Yes, I am aware of women’s sports, but in every case they exist as appendages of their male counterparts. For example, the WNBA cannot fill an arena, and has been a money-losing pseudo-charity event run by the regular NBA, even though women are half the population of potential fans. The US Women’s Soccer team has enjoyed infinitely more success than the men’s team, but has never generated the same interest as the men’s team.

For the last decade or so, there’s been a trend among right wingers to deride “sportsball” as a distraction for the politically somnambulent. The left puts energy into political conflict, so the thinking goes, while people who should be right wing piss away that energy on games. It’s understandable, given the major sports leagues’ kowtowing to left-wing ideas that will, sooner rather than later, be seen by everyone as embarrassing fads. But it’s also wrong.

Here is the audio version of part 16 of our ongoing series, now approaching audiobook length, on the history of slavery and the leadup to the American Civil War. When this project is finished, paid subscribers will have free access to the series in eBook and audiobook form.