The History Impossible Weekly Newsletter
And we're back with...Periodic Bulletins?
Hello all. Sorry for essentially dropping off the face of the earth last week. Like I said, personal nonsense and heavy workload plus simply not having enough to talk about. Thankfully, things have changed this week and I have a number of things I’d like to highlight for all of you. As all you fine subscribers have seen, I just posted a new essay, serving as a sort of addendum to my “Pandemic: A Plague Tale” episode, where I dare to try and predict the future while looking at the past. So please go give that a read and leave a comment if you’re so inclined. In doing a quick Google search, I also just discovered that the Harvard Crimson published an article back in February making its own comparisons (though I didn’t particularly like the arrogant—hey, it’s Harvard, I shouldn’t be shocked—phrase “Discomfort accompanies progress”; nice euphemism for “conflict”, Ivy Leaguers). In any case, that plus the recording I’ve been doing on the next episode of History Impossible has mostly been taking up my time this week. But I have gotten a chance to read, watch, and play, which I’d like to share with all of you today.
What I’m Reading
Having recently finished Secret City, I wasn’t as keen to get into a deep-dive of history and American politics, so I started down a completely different path, this time related to my other social studies passion, psychology. There have been two books occupying my time: first, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, and second, The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups by William J. Bernstein.
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of the former with Molly when we have particularly long commutes somewhere (remember, we live in Los Angeles), and as interesting as a lot of it is—psychology is never not fascinating—a lot of it is simply confirming with scientific evidence what I already kind of suspected about human beings—surprise! We’re all very self-interested! This is by no means a criticism—it’s still a very enlightening book (so far) and I highly recommend people who don’t like to believe self-interest is the driving psychological force in our lives give it a read/listen.
In terms of the latter, this is a book I got a long time ago on a whim thanks to its coverage of social psychological phenomena in a historical context (or history in a social psychological context?) and I knew it spent a chapter discussing the subject of the Anabaptist rebellion in Muenster in 1534-1535, something I never tire of referencing, especially if it gives me an excuse to proclaim how much I love the Hardcore History episode, “Prophets of Doom”, in which Dan Carlin covered the subject in his usual legendary fashion. But it goes far, far deeper into the delusions that can grip crowds, focusing both on religious manias (like the rise of the Millerites in the early-to-mid-19th century and their faulty end-times predictions) and economic ones (like the “South Sea Bubble”, which involved stock market manias that swept Paris and London in 1720 thanks to, among many things, gold dealers—the “banks” of the time—printing more paper currency than the worth of the gold they held onto). I’m still powering through this thing, but I’m loving every second of it, and it’s helping me appreciate that whether we’re running on banks or toward prophets claiming to know when and how the end is nigh, that we really are a special species, whose skills in fooling ourselves cannot be topped.
I’ve also dived into a couple more books for the trilogy of episodes I’m working on (yes, it’s most definitely become a trilogy at this point; there’s just too much that needs to be discussed). First is Yugoslav-American historian Paul Mojzes’ Yugoslavian Inferno: Ethnoreligious Warfare in the Balkans, which provides some of the best zoomed-out perspective on just what the hell happened to Yugoslavia, primarily for non-Yugosphere readers. It proposes some conclusions that somewhat contradict things I’ve been saying and reading, which just makes it all the more interesting, especially since it’s coming from a man who grew up under Josip Broz Tito before moving to our fair shores. In any case, it’ll be making an appearance in all three episodes I’m working on. The other book, Bosnia: A Short History by Noel Malcolm, is exactly what it sounds like and is serving as the main basis—apart from Marko Atilla Hoare’s Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War I mentioned in a previous post—for the third episode in this trilogy. I’ve made less progress with the latter than with the former, but I feel like it should be recommended for all interested in the subject of Bosnia in the broadest of terms (similar to Misha Glenny’s massive tome, The Balkans, or, if you’re feeling ambitious, Rebecca Black’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon).
What I’m Watching
I actually managed to watch a historical film this past week. That is, the 2014 classic-style drama-comedy-war film, Monuments Men, from director and star George Clooney. When it comes down to it…I don’t really have much to say, sad to report. For once, the critics seem to have gotten this one right; I wouldn’t rate it as low as the Rotten Tomatoes score would have it, but I definitely wouldn’t rate it any higher than, say, 2.5 stars out of 4. It’s very competently made and Clooney shows his appreciation of classic cinema (like he did with his 2006 crime noir The Good German), with this one giving off a lot of The Dirty Dozen vibes, both aesthetically and tonally (though by no means matching that film’s quality; fun fact, despite my WWII fanboy bonafides, Molly loved TDD even more than I did when we first watched it semi-recently). But generally speaking, Monument’s Men was kind of a dud; it certainly plays with the secondary (perhaps tertiary) theme of Third Reich history about their thievery of priceless art, but it doesn’t get into the debate of whether or not that’s better than simply destroying it (which they also did, don’t get me wrong). Stealing the art of cultures you’ve conquered is still stealing, especially when it’s something the elites put up on their walls as if they procured it legitimately, but part of me can’t be as devastated by that as much as, say, the Taliban detonating Buddha statues.
What I’m Playing
I’m still on my Star Wars kick, but I recently started toying around with the Russian-developed immersive sim, Atomic Heart, an indie title that feels like it’s been in development since PlayStation 2’s were still the norm. There are a number of things that make this title noteworthy to the history fan. For one, it’s yet another attempt at alternate history, which, I just gotta say: video games have been so, so, so much better playing with that kind of thing. There was the BioShock series (from which this game takes a lot of inspiration, to its benefit), there’s the rebooted Wolfenstein series that, despite some of its stumbles, remains excellent, and arguably the Assassin’s Creed series, though certainly less so. In any case, this game centers on a futuristic Soviet community in the 1950s with all the robots in the community going crazy. Because you see, in this alternate history, the Soviets doubled down on researching robotics, which ultimately propelled them to the head of the global technological race and changed everything into their favor. That’s all I know so far, but this game has managed to keep me entertained (despite some of its best efforts, like its terrible English dub and dialogue, which has managed to hold it back from being a must-play).
And That’s All She Wrote
And that’s it for this week folks! Check back next week for further updates, and keep an eye out for the next episode of History Impossible. It’s coming sooner than you think.