Otto von Bismarck - Lies - Extra History

[Music] hi everyone welcome back to lies the part extra history where I talk all about mistakes we made and and all over the place to tell you the stories I got left on the cutting room floor as we were putting these episodes together the credits paid flags were a plague again there were just a ton we got wrong like using the austria-hungary flags at the Austrian flag we also sort of missed by a mile on some the maps the borders of Luxembourg Poland Belgium well basically everything were wrong at some point and we had the magic ain't changing Mokka in the episodes the correct representation is the one in episode 6 the other one you might recognize from World War one none of this stuff material affects the story but I'm sorry we missed it in so many places oh and caught it's pronounced comment waves on two things a bit more substantive what we've told is really only half the story of Bismarck like with Justinian Bismarck just did too much stuff to fitness single series it's my hope that sooner or later the patrons vote for us to cover the second half of Bismarck life so we can see how his plans turn down because the second map is life is so important to be texturising there's a lot of ways to look at Bismarck and what we tried to paint him as arrogant and a wastrel but also a lover rogue in his own way personally I think that's fair but there are certain other ways to look at him and character flaws will come up in that second half that we really should address in case in case it's quite some time we get there because this wasn't the full story of Bismarck the biggest black mark on Bismarck's career to me is that he was pretty clearly an anti Polish racist a Pollard magnet caused me so many problems velvety deep loathing for basically anything polish he's also been accused of being an anti-semite I don't actually really see this there are plenty places where he literally said quotes like I silently disapproved the agitation against the Jews being on religious or racial grounds uh and he refused to make constitutional amendments against them but that said he was too complacent about anti-semites if we do follow-up series you'll see that there's this point at which he is frustrated with the liberal industrialists who he's been working with for basically most of his chancellorship and so it's Dan he forms a coalition with religious conservatives and these particular religious conservatives are radical anti-semites he curves some of their most sort of extreme desires but he still lets the lyric bill unchecked and I think he saw it as politically expedient basically I'll let them rant while he uses their them to get his political agenda through I see this much akin to what happened to conservatism in the United States I don't think that the majority conservatives in the United States including most of the conservative politicians out there are actually conscious racists or extreme Islamophobes but conservative party aligned itself with extremists and brought their rhetoric into its platform to use them as a base to get their agenda through and like conservatives here in the United States I think Bismarck thought a lot of the religious extremists he was working with were ridiculous and that all their sound and fury would burn itself out while the policies he use them to help enact would last for a great long time I think thought the populace would see through all the silly shouting and the impossibly overstated claims and that the movement he sort of made a devil's bargain with would end up as a historical footnote I think this ideas that with concentration camps and a Holocaust fifty years down the line was as remote and insane sounding to him as it would be for America to Americans today I think he says to himself hey we work with this guys and maybe we move the needle from 0 percent to 5 percent of country develops into a horrible racist nightmare I mean really it would take something truly ludicrous like losing most costly devastating the war in human history up to that point and then following that up with an economic collapse so vast that people were taking wheel bottles of money to go buy bread in order for anyone to take these guys seriously but you know stuff happens and it's absolutely Bismarck's fault for opening that to work by working with these guys rather than just nipping it in the bud there's also the question of whether World War one was this fault I'm not sure that's the right question because sure if you say that the creation of Germany caused World War one and Bismarck was responsible for the creation of Germany then yeah it's clearly his fault but I think a more interesting question is why did World War one happen sooner I think the creation of Germany as inevitable if you disagree with this premise then it's totally reasonable to pin probable or one of Bismarck but I just I can't see it any other way too much of the maintenance centuries are the colluding to make it seem impossible that Germany doesn't become one nation so if you accept that Germany was just gonna be a thing you have to ask why poppin down a power in the middle of Europe that was potentially both economically and militarily more powerful than any of the other powers at the time didn't cause a wide scale conflict earlier and to mean so the answer is actually Bismarck I think Bismarck's main goal throughout his entire life is actually creating a diplomatic situation in which Germany wouldn't be attacked before it was too strong for anyone to think about attacking it and I mean he almost succeeded if he hadn't been booted and his diplomatic efforts not just ignored but completely reverse you might not have had World War one but one of his main failings is that he literally couldn't see a world without bhisma the one thing he didn't have a plan for was what was gonna happen when other people took over and decided to do things radically different even completely opposed to Bismarck's great plan of course you can argue that if bismarck had come along Germany might have been unified under some other German faction maybe Austria and rather than pressure which might have led to a less militaristic society which in turn might have radically altered the course of history I think this is wholly valid and I think there's a lot of interesting things to explore there also as far as his character goes he was an aristocratic autocrat he believed in a certain social order and believe that society worked better than he was running things rather than actually letting them be run democratically and sometimes I mean this can be true in the short term when great leaders in charge democracy is not about consistently getting the very best person to run things in the most efficient way possible rather when it's working properly democracy is about getting reasonable people to run things reasonably and giving the people tools to remove those people if they're not doing so which means that in the short term some autocratic system might actually be more efficient with a benign ruler it might even be just better but in the long term that sort of autocracy always is worse democracy is a long-term system even if you ignore the benefits of getting everyone involved in civil life even if you ignore the moral value of giving each person some agency over their own destiny true democracy avoids disastrous rulers that autocracy always eventually leads to and so is plain more efficient in the end but Bismarck is an automatic and he builds this autocratic style leadership into the fledgling German nation and that's something that you can certainly blame him for down the road it's gonna cause problems but on the other hand for all that I do think he represents a lot of how conservatism is supposed to work she had a power structure and in order he wanted to preserve more conserve even and he felt that it was better for the nation and that it would be better just served by it but of course it also involved him and his buddies ruling but you know he realized that in order to conserve the existing power structure he had to make the average person's life good enough they had no reason to complain about the guys just staying in power and them could get any to run things sort of the old way he made everyone's life pleasant enough that there was no call for radical new ideas or a change in political direction he made sure he did this and I know I'm sure this will all come up in Apollo up Bismarck but I want to make sure we say here in case you don't get that for a while because he created a social security system nearly universal mental health care sick days wide scale accident insurance for workers and why because he wanted the people to love the state the state as he designed the state is he maintaining this conservative state he thought of the he wanted them to love their benevolent monarch and not cry out to change one of the most effective things he ever did to combat socialism was to implement policies that made people's life good enough that they wouldn't be tempted by the promises of socialism which ran counter to the old way he strove for as a conservative which leads me to a story because the best part of this g.od names his welfare legislation it's genius he literally made it practical Christianity that was the name of the bill and pretty hard for his ultra conservative religious allies to agitate against practical Christianity but all right I'm officially rambled on forever let me see if there's anything I have any other lies really that I need to cover in Episode two when I talk about him grabbing a bunch of peasants to go down and put down an uprising that was empowering peasantry I probably never mentioned it wasn't really just about empowering the peasantry it was at least as much about expanding the rights of industrial workers in the middle class but you know and in Episode three I skip the whole part in Bismarck's life where he's assigned to minor random posts in Europe and doesn't really do a lot it doesn't affect the history but I figured I should bring it up here because I feel like it's that period that gives him a sense of the European political landscape and gets him thinking about Germany's place in Europe as a whole oh and there's also a small pile of procedural parliamentary stuff then I skipped over about how we ended up getting to use the budget over and over and over again when the lanch dog wouldn't approve his budget so if you're a policy wonk and like really into parliamentary procedure you might want to look into that section because there's some amusing stuff going on oh and in Episode four and really throughout the rest of the series I had to cut a character named Albert von loon he was the war minister he was actually a huge help to be smoking a very influential part of Bismarck's government not to mention being an interesting character in his own right and saving Bismarck's making a bunch he's still probably the biggest omission in this whole thing so if you dig Bismarck you might get a kick out out of just looking up on room oh and he had the rad nickname the great Silent One and in episode 5 remember when I'm talking about Bismarck doing some crafty letter and editing hit France the pressure to go to war well that's another thing you should definitely look up because it's immensely amusing but I think my favorite bit was the word choice I don't know if Bismarck knew this or not but I suspect he did when he was making his selected cuts to the letter he chose to keep the word Kings adjunct he's chose to say that the Kings adjunct had been sent to dismiss the French ambassador which was fun and appropriate to the ambassador's rank but the French had no similar position to King's adjunct and the only adjunct in French is a noncommissioned officer so of course all of the French papers published that the Prussian King had sent an NCO to dismiss their ambassador which was a grave insult while the Prussian papers all published the Kings active consent showing the King acting magnanimously and observing protocol even though he had been slated so it was amazing just using the same word not saying different to the two sides he got them to see the issue radically differently both of them in the way he wanted to and in Episode six and the sad fact for you when they were starving at Paris the Parisian ate everything including the city's two elephants castor and pollux oh and weirdly Kaiser Wilhelm's first real international appearance was arbitrating a dispute between the u.s. and the UK over the bloodless big war in the San Juan Islands which resulted in the San Juan Islands being given to the native states which weirdly in serendipitously enough is where I would record a bunch of these episodes but ok I think that's about it for lies there's just one thing laughter on September 23rd 1735 Walpole became the first British prime minister to serve from Ted Downey's and 127 years later to the day Bismarck became the first Prime Minister of Russia and 37 years to the day again after that Nintendo was founded coincidence yes also lies dead of July's what one might have actually moved into 10 Downing Street on the 22nd the 23rd might have actually been his first day serving there as Prime Minister it was a little bit unclear instead I was reading also about half the books I read on Bismarck had some comparisons in Walpole and there was one I found that I didn't really end up using but it just had this quote that's stuck in my mind ever is the best summary it said what corruption was the instrument employed by Walpole Bismarck merely resorted to coercion yep that's it to a tee but yeah that's it for me to if you like the ending theme go listen to a Kinder's awesome music it should be posted by the time this goes live also we have a cool always have a plan shirt designed by lately is called the farty in the shop so if you enjoyed that there's that too and with that I leave you join us though next week as we start to explore the life of the great antagonist of justinian Kooser on the first see y'all then take care everyone [Music]

Channel: Extra Credits

Views: 297,625

Rating: 4.7601228 out of 5

Keywords: extra history, extra credits, james portnow, daniel floyd, history, documentary, lesson, study, educational, history lesson, world history, extra credits history, study history, learn history, otto von bismarck, otto bismarck, otto von bismark, von bismarck, bismarck, bismark, otto bismark, german unification, german history, unification of germany, prussia, iron chancellor, napoleon iii, german confederation, moltke, general moltke, german empire, franco-prussian war

Id: nkc87DmiDwI

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 02 2017