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Past and Present
Feb. 15th, 2025 12:20 pmDaily horrors whenever one catches up with the news, both on a global and national level, makes for an increasing need to find some way to fannishly relax. (Mind you, there are no safe zones from current day insanity in fandom, either. Some weeks ago yours truly was horrified to learn the claim that the Orange Felon supposedly likes Sunset Boulevard, one of Billy Wilder's masterpieces. I'm still in denial about that - maybe he just likes some songs from ALW's musical version? How would he even have the patience and focus to watch an entire movie with no action scenes, no sex scenes and lots and lots of sharp dialogue, not to mention no macho hero in sight? What Billy Wilder, who as a young man watched the country he was in go from a Republic to a fascist state, but who was with all cynisim pretty idealistic about the US where he found refuge would have said about the present, I don't want to imagine. At the very least, he'd demand a rewrite. I mean: like all VPs during the Munich security conference, the current one a few days ago visited Dachau. I'm not exaggerating, it is what every single US VP attending the Munich security conference has done. Like the rest of them, Vance got a guided tour by one of the few still living survivors. If it filtered through that Dachau, one of the very first German concentration camps which when it was built and put to work in 1933 included as its very first inmates Social Democrats, Union Representatives and Communists, i.e. the very people Elon Musk and Alice Weidel (Germany's Marine Le Pen wannabe) declared to be Nazis to an audience of billions, Vance didn't say. Instead, he went from visiting a concentration camp to meeting Weidel, i.e. the leading woman of a certified right extremist (or if you want to be less polite, Neonazi) party, and then held forth at the conference where he claimed to defend free speech (you know, while his boss kicks out reporters daring to say "Gulf of Mexico" and erases trans people out of existence) and told Europeans they're the true anti democratic dictators and should work with their Nazi parties already.
Billy Wilder, at his most cynical, would not have written such caricatures as are currently in charge of dismantling democracy not just in the US but nearly everywhere. Btw, the retort by our current secretary for defense, Boris Pistorius, was this:
Aaanyway. I find history podcasts not just interesting in general but at such times as these oddly comforting in a "this, too, shall pass" way. (I am not referring to the history of the 20th century, of course. That currently provides a "this, too, shall come back" vibe.) Since it's been a while, some impressions on my English language favourites:
History of Byzantium: got into something of a depressive slump after the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, but that's history, and it is now back to the narrative. (Decline-and-fall-like as it has to be.)
Not just the Tudors: continues to be very entertaining, and most guest speakers Susannah Libscombe interviews are good, with the occasional dud; most recently there excellent episodes on the various males of the Borgia family, and then for Lucrezia she changed her interview partner and alas her new interviewee was, shall we say, less than stellar.
History of the Germans: has since last I wrote been reordered so there are thematic seasons, i.e. if you're just interested in, say, the Ottonians or the Hanseatic League, you can listen to just those seasons. On a personal level, my experience with this podcast has been that the seasons that deal with parts of history I'm not so familiar with captivate me more than those I do already know a lot about, but not because the later is badly researched (au contraire), it's just that I love getting intrigued and learning more. So of course I have favourites. In the recent year, I loved the Interregnum season (starring among others Rudolf von Habsburg, the first Emperor of that family, going from simple count to HRE buy "waving a marriage contract in one hand and a sword in the other" as he tactically married his many female relations to lots of dying-out-older nobility, Ludwig the Bavarian (proving that getting excommunicated by the (Avignon) Pope is no longer the big deal it used to be as he employs, as Dirk puts it, half the cast of The Name of the Rose, and Karl IV, he after whom the bridge and a lot of other things in Prague are named after) and the current season, The Reformation before the Reformation, which you get the whole late medieval enchilade of corrupt popes and antipopes, the Council of Konstanz (good for book swapping, not so good for actual radical reforms, ask Jan Hus, who gets burned during it) and then the Hussite Revolution in Bohemia.
Revolutions: Mike Duncan's second podcast which used to be finished with the Russian Revolution but now has been resumed by him with a highly entertaining sci fi season, the Martian Revolution. Its backstory sounds a bit inspired by The Expanse as well as lots of the historical revolutions he has covered. If the CEO of OmniCorps whose blinkered know-it-all-ness, ego and lack of anything resembling human empahy triggered the Martian Revolution sounds a bit like a current tech bro in charge of the White House, I'm sure it's entirely coincidental.
Billy Wilder, at his most cynical, would not have written such caricatures as are currently in charge of dismantling democracy not just in the US but nearly everywhere. Btw, the retort by our current secretary for defense, Boris Pistorius, was this:
Aaanyway. I find history podcasts not just interesting in general but at such times as these oddly comforting in a "this, too, shall pass" way. (I am not referring to the history of the 20th century, of course. That currently provides a "this, too, shall come back" vibe.) Since it's been a while, some impressions on my English language favourites:
History of Byzantium: got into something of a depressive slump after the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, but that's history, and it is now back to the narrative. (Decline-and-fall-like as it has to be.)
Not just the Tudors: continues to be very entertaining, and most guest speakers Susannah Libscombe interviews are good, with the occasional dud; most recently there excellent episodes on the various males of the Borgia family, and then for Lucrezia she changed her interview partner and alas her new interviewee was, shall we say, less than stellar.
History of the Germans: has since last I wrote been reordered so there are thematic seasons, i.e. if you're just interested in, say, the Ottonians or the Hanseatic League, you can listen to just those seasons. On a personal level, my experience with this podcast has been that the seasons that deal with parts of history I'm not so familiar with captivate me more than those I do already know a lot about, but not because the later is badly researched (au contraire), it's just that I love getting intrigued and learning more. So of course I have favourites. In the recent year, I loved the Interregnum season (starring among others Rudolf von Habsburg, the first Emperor of that family, going from simple count to HRE buy "waving a marriage contract in one hand and a sword in the other" as he tactically married his many female relations to lots of dying-out-older nobility, Ludwig the Bavarian (proving that getting excommunicated by the (Avignon) Pope is no longer the big deal it used to be as he employs, as Dirk puts it, half the cast of The Name of the Rose, and Karl IV, he after whom the bridge and a lot of other things in Prague are named after) and the current season, The Reformation before the Reformation, which you get the whole late medieval enchilade of corrupt popes and antipopes, the Council of Konstanz (good for book swapping, not so good for actual radical reforms, ask Jan Hus, who gets burned during it) and then the Hussite Revolution in Bohemia.
Revolutions: Mike Duncan's second podcast which used to be finished with the Russian Revolution but now has been resumed by him with a highly entertaining sci fi season, the Martian Revolution. Its backstory sounds a bit inspired by The Expanse as well as lots of the historical revolutions he has covered. If the CEO of OmniCorps whose blinkered know-it-all-ness, ego and lack of anything resembling human empahy triggered the Martian Revolution sounds a bit like a current tech bro in charge of the White House, I'm sure it's entirely coincidental.
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