-
Congress Denounces the “Horrors of Socialism”
Do you want to see an great exercise in propaganda? I present to you H. CON. RES. 9 of the 118th CONGRESS. Let’s read it: Concurrent Resolution Denouncing the Horrors of Socialism. Whereas socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has time and time again collapsed into Communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships;…
-
Our Demagogue in South Korea
The Current Situation in Korea – 18 March 1948, Declassified CIA Memo: The reports starts of with the following summary: US strategic interests would be seriously affected by the absorption of Korea into the Soviet orbit. The current political, economic, and military situation in the US and Soviet Zones, respectively, makes it unlikely that any…
-
The Retrospective
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So welcome to our one final look back at the French Revolution before we finally move on. What I’m looking to do here, as much for myself as for you guys, is to walk back through everything that we’ve covered, to pull out what I consider to be the really…
-
The Empire
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Over the winter of 1804 and 1805, Emperor Napoleon I knew that come the spring, he was going to have to march out to prove to the world that he deserved the imperial crown he had just bestowed upon himself. And when the inevitable War of the Third Coalition started…
-
The Consulate
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So a funny thing happened on my way to the finish line. On Friday morning my hard drive crashed. I didn’t lose any files, but I did lose an incredibly necessary day of work while my computer was being fixed. As a consequence, I had to abandon the dream of…
-
There Is Your Man
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So we have somehow, amazingly, come to the end of the French Revolution. We’ve been at this together for 14 months, more than 50 episodes and over 250,000 words of transcript. But today, the Directory will be overthrown and Napoleon Bonaparte will come to power. There are lots of places…
-
The Coup of Prairial
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So this week marks the penultimate episode of our cycle on the French Revolution. It will take us through to the autumn of 1799 and set up the looming coup of Brumaire, that, out of some necessity, I am marking as the end of the line. After next week’s episode…
-
The Second Coalition
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. We spent all of last week with Napoleon in Egypt. This week we are going to double back and follow the developments in Europe while Napoleon’s army was trapped in the east. And as we will see in a moment, it was largely because Napoleon had gone east that things…
-
The Egyptian Expedition
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So, as promised, this week we are going to spend the entire episode covering Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. We are going to stick with him for a whole year, all the way through August 1799 when Bonaparte decides that for the good of France, he must abandon his army…
-
The Coup of Floreal
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So we left off last time with a circuit of all of France’s new allies, all those sister republics who were thrilled, just thrilled, to be joining the French revolutionary project of liberating mankind. And by that, I of course, mean getting rung dry. Today, we’ll take a look at…