![]() Yet it never forgets that it is a narrative. The medium of audio (and the audio production is a delight) lets Carlin range all over the many fronts of this war and the many small sub-stories of this war without interruption and in perfect narrative harmony. It’s epic narrative storytelling at its best. “Blueprint for Armageddon” brings the history of this time period to life in a way that no book or movie could. The death of liberal political philosophy and the birth of totalitarian and authoritarian 20th-century thought is a theme woven throughout the podcast series, but the listener is left to connect the dots and see everything which was lost to a generation in the Great War. As a result (and as Carlin shows) no one is prepared for Bolshevism, total war, the emergence of “the home front,” the bombing of civilians. No one is prepared for wars with machine guns, tanks, airplanes, and gas. ![]() It’s surreal, a change from Napoleonic-era militaries to militaries built for mass destruction. You get a very good picture of how developed societies change when they engage in major land warfare for the first time in a century. Most powerful is how Carlin’s series positions the war as the turning point of European culture and history. ![]() “Blueprint for Armageddon” brings this time period to life in a way that no book or movie could. What’s great is that he mostly doesn’t, except to wonder – like me – at how people lived through years of trench warfare, chemical attacks, near-certain death, and body-choked battlefields. Through all of his extensive research and notes, we get a view of the war from 360 degrees, and it’s hardly necessary for Carlin to provide any additional color or opinion. “Blueprint” draws on all the scholarship of early historical works like Tuchman’s The Guns of August with all of the drama with which someone like Winston Churchill viewed the war in his memoirs. He makes extensive use of primary sources, including accounts from civilians, diplomats, generals, and the lowliest recruits – and later major players like Adolf Hitler, who came of age in this conflict. Along with providing detailed commentary on the major geopolitical shifts which accompany this war, Carlin reflects on the vivid individual memories of its participants. Fortunately, Carlin has done his homework. History textbooks rarely help us understand experiences, and most people only give lip service to “the horrors of war” as a result. In this series, Carlin helps to solve one of my main problems as a student of history: namely, that I don’t have any idea what it’s actually like to experience a society-reshaping war. The listener is left to connect the dots and see everything lost to a generation in the Great War. It seems I’ve found a (mostly) kindred spirit in Dan Carlin, host of the long-form award-winning podcast Hardcore History and creator of the recent six-part World War One series “ A Blueprint for Armageddon.” I want to understand how they survived those lows, how they resisted those lows, and how they showed humanity in the face of them. I want to know them so I can know myself, and I want to avoid making the mistakes and judgment calls that led to an early demise for so many of my ancestors.įor this “war to end all wars” that resulted in more than 17 million deaths and 20 million injuries, I particularly want to understand how people can bring themselves and their societies to such lows of death and destruction. ![]() I want to understand how and why people behave the way they do. Recently it’s brought me around to a renewed study of the first world war.įor me, the study of this war (and other terrible things in human history) is about far more than military maneuvers or victories or defeats. Morbid fascination is a strong motivator for me.
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