Part One: Alfredo Stroessner: The Luckiest Dictator

Robert is joined by James Stout to discuss Alfredo Stroessner. 

(2 Part Series)

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Like a like a hero, Sophie, I deal with all
sorts of stresses that you can't even imagine, like the
stress of writing an episode about Alfredo Stressner, the dictator
of Paraguay. Boom. How's that? Also the episode started like
twenty seconds ago. Uh huh yeah, okay, Well we're doing great.

(00:25):
That was perfect. That was such a good introduction. Yeah,
thank you, thank you everybody. How you doing, Sophie fu?
So this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where Sophie
and I banter and then people on the subreddit decide

(00:47):
whether or not it's problematic. Um, it's the moral north
Star that is sebred Thank god. I just think it's
so I just the the subreddit. It's so funny sometimes
where they're like, oh is uh is everything okay? There?
It's like yes, but also no, none of it's okay. Yeah.

(01:13):
I mean the thing is, we love our fans, and
I appreciate that there's fifty five thousand people who want
to talk about the show and a subreddit that's that's
kind of amazing. But at the same time, there's like
a degree of all of these podcast episodes, everything we do,
there's like a script. Today's script for this two part
or is eighty six hundred and sixty five words. It's
usually between eight and ten thousand words, but also like

(01:35):
a third of the runtime of any episode. It's just
us talking and the amount of fine tooth comb going
over that people do like of like a like little
jokes or like someone will misspeak or you'll transpose a
couple of letters in a word, and then there's like
thirty people talking about it, and it's like, guys, come on, man,
we are recording a conversation. You know how those work.

(01:58):
We've already recorded several of the conversations. We will make
some gaffs. Yeah, to chill out, Come on, man, chill out.
God bless the people. I know. I yeah, I like subredits. Man.
I keep in my heart the people who are alike
just listening to this so they don't have to be
alone with their thoughts while driving or vacuuming the house

(02:18):
or you know, shearing a goat walking the dog. God
bless all of you. God bless you, and God bless
us everyone. James Stout, welcome to the program. Thank you, Robert.
It's glad to be here. Yep. Amongst the goat shearers,
amongst the goat Shearers, James, what do you know about Paraguay?
A relatively little. Actually, it's not another big area of

(02:41):
expertise for me, So I'm excited to learn. I'm gonna
I'm gonna venture to say, it's not really an expertise
for many people outside of Paraguay. This is not a
country that gets talked about a lot. It's certainly not
a country that, like Americans, talk about a lot. I
had to really, really aggressively go into the reading about
this to learn much of any just because, like my life,

(03:03):
the first thirty four years of my life had not
provided me with much information passively about the country of Paraguay. Now,
Paraguay is, if you're like me, and up until recently
had not spent much time thinking about the country is
a lovely little landlocked nation bordered by Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina.
And it is perhaps the most doomed little country I've

(03:24):
ever read about. Maybe Belgium, but they wound up dooming
a lot of other people and Paraguay never did that.
So the subject for our episode today is another little
another dictator, Alfredo Stressner. And you know, we got to
go through some history before we talk about Stressner because
as a man himself, he's not the most like He's

(03:45):
not like Hitler or like Saddam, where his early life,
as dark as it is, is just this like wacky
cavalcade of madness. Stressner is a guy who is an
incredibly effective dictator. He might be best at being a
dictator if anybody we've covered on this show, but he's
also the best at being a dictator because he kind

(04:07):
of lucks into the perfect situation for a dictator. Paraguay
is almost like crafted over the course of about one
hundred and fifty years to be the ideal country to
have a dictator like Stressner. I've never really encountered a
situation like this in a history, and it's fascinating as
a result of that, But it all kind of comes
back to the fact that Paraguay might kind of be

(04:27):
cursed this. They have a rough chunk of history after
the liberation from Spain. Like most of Latin America, Paraguays
founded as a Spanish colony in the early sixteenth century
and up until the last twenty years or so, it
was not democratic in any meaningful way. One book that

(04:47):
I read Paraguay under Stressner by Paul Lewis describes it
as an unbroken sequence of dictatorships. Now, that is a
nasty way to describe a political situation. It's also worth
noting that when we're talking about the eighteen hundreds, that's
an accurate description for basically everywhere on Earth. Like you
could argue it's not that far off from describing the
United States in that period, given the amount of people

(05:09):
who are enslaved or otherwise disinfraniation. So Paraguay is not alone,
you know, in the eighteen hundreds and having a bunch
of dictatorships. Um. Now, when the country achieved its independence
from Spain in eighteen eleven, it left behind a Obviously
Spain was a could be a very brutal colonial master,
but it didn't like do so in order to take

(05:34):
on a more liberatory political system. The architect of their
split from Spain, a guy named doctor Jose Gaspar Rodriguez
de Francia, wound up as dictator, and that's probably not surprised.
Was not surprising to that many people. He seems to
have been fairly popular. He spends twenty five years in power,
which is a substantial reign for a dictator. Stalin Mao,

(05:55):
both only get like four years more than that, and
those are kind of two famously, and this is eighteen eleven,
which makes it, I think more impressive. Yeah, because people
didn't look very long. Yeah. So he's in there a
long time. And while he's in charge, you know, it
is a dictatorship, and he brutally purges, you know, any
kind of opposition that attempts to form. But for most Paraguayans,

(06:17):
it's a pretty peaceful and relatively positive time, especially compared
to kind of the previous period. It's worth noting that
his official title voted to him by the Populace was
El Supremo, so they could vote for his title, but
not for when I vote put quotation marks. I don't know.

(06:37):
It's like a thing where they've got like a parliament
or whatever, or a congress that's like, you know, is
basically enthralled to the dictator and periodically he'll have it
vote for things. You know. That's kind of the story
of Paraguay for quite a while. I want to be
judging this guy based on his apparent but this man
has a face like a spank toss if we I've

(06:58):
never heard anyone describe that way. Next leg. I spoke
a picture for him in a chat, and I think
it'll come to you like that is they's not a looker.
Oh my god, you know his face people, you need
to google this man. His face does look like a
spanked ass. If there's no other way of coming. If
you put a nose on an us, that would be

(07:19):
his face. It's like the bottom half of its His
face collapsed in on itself because he smelled something so unpleasant,
like it looks like he's yeah, like awful. His five
head is is Yeah, really, it's incredible. What a horrible portrait.
I wonder if he killed the person who painted this,
because look, if I would, that would be okay. I'm

(07:43):
just gonna say it. It's having this portrait made of you.
It justifies at least one murder. This person struck a
powerful blow for democracy. Cons So. One of the fun
things about Paraguayan dictators is that they all are named
like luchadors um. So this guy is El Supremo. His successor,

(08:04):
Carlos Antonio Lopez, who's also dictator for life, is El Excellentissimo. Um.
Oh wow, yeah, I know it's fun. These are these
are some good names. I'm gonna be yeah. Um he
was like, yeah, we gotta throw a fucking adjective up
on that. Yeah, I'm taking to the max. So if
you look at Paraguay on a map again, it is

(08:26):
immediately obvious why the country has had such a tumultuous history.
It is landlocked, and it is surrounded by Brazil and Argentina,
two countries that are famously not peaceful with their neighbors
during the eighteen hundreds. Um, although it's Paraguay that's going
to be starting shit with them. So the early eighteen
hundreds are not a peaceful time in South America. And

(08:48):
given the fact that Paraguay lacked any natural difference, so
Paraguay is kind of geographically you might think of them
as the opposite of Switzerland. Switzerland is like such a
natural fortress that even with very few people, they could
hold off as many times their size. Paraguay has basically
no natural offenses other than that it's hot and there's
lots of mosquitoes, which isn't nothing, but like anyone can

(09:10):
kind of walk in there and cause problems. And so
as a result, it's early dictators chose wisely to invest
very heavily in the army. They're like, we're probably gonna
wind up getting our asses kicked if we don't do this.
And by the time Carlos Lopez, that's l Excellentissimo dies,
his son, Francisco Solano Lopez takes power and at that

(09:35):
point the little country has a military that is larger
and more well funded than one would expect from a
country of that size. Unfortunately, Francisco Lopez is um, he's
going to take an ill advised year abroad to Europe.
It's actually more like eighteen months. When he's in his
twenties now. A lot of people go on gap year
and you know, it's, yeah, go to some raves and yeah,

(10:00):
intolerable in Barcelona. Yeah, it takes some e briefly date
a German girl who has interesting opinions on the moon landing.
You know, it's it's all. We've all had good experiences
on our gap year. Unfortunately, that is not the case
with Francisco Lopez, because so his equivalent of entering into

(10:22):
an ill advised romantic relationship from someone he met at
a rave is he hangs out with Emperor Napoleon the
third of France, um friend of the pod and so
I'm gonna quote from an article in the January twenty
thirteen issue of Military Heritage magazine. Here he was taken
particularly with the glittering marshal splendor of the court of

(10:43):
the French Emperor Napoleon the Third. Returning home, Lopez brought
back with him several steamships to fill out the embryonic
Paraguayan fleet, along with all the guns, ammunition, and gold
braid that his deep pockets could purchase. He also brought
back it's it's a bling that. Yeah, he's he's getting
going doubt. He also brought black a new mistress, an
Irish adventuress named Eliza Lynch, who, like many a gold

(11:05):
digger before her, catered to her meal tickets outsized ego,
recklessly encouraging his delusions of grandeur in dreams of imperial glory. Now,
I don't know how entirely fair it is to blame
this Irish jack. We are like, what happens next, But
that's how that magazine put it. Yeah, so conte Military
Heritage being particularly woke on gender, Yeah, that is very

(11:26):
likely that said she does come up in any rite
up you find it. The guy. I think there's there's
a lot going on. I mean, he's a rich kid
whose dad was the dictator, and he goes to Europe,
falls in love with these European armies, and he builds
himself a splendid little army based on the solid base
that his dad has left him. In eighteen fifty seventies,
made vice president to Paraguay, and then in eighteen sixty

(11:48):
two his dad dies in Francisco, takes power, and he
from the beginning he cannot give up kind of these
these dreams Napoleon had stoked of military excellence. He's a
little bit like that doomed Hapsburg who's going to get
murdered in Mexico right around this same time period. So
this little military, very good military his predecessors had built,

(12:09):
was adequate, very adequate to the task of defending Paraguay
from intrusion by a neighbor. So he's he's got this
toy like his for Lopez, this wonderful army that his
predecessors built is like this big, shiny toy, and he
spends like a couple of years outfitting it and getting
it really set up. But he's, you know, the reasonable

(12:29):
thing to do if you're Paraguay is just kind of
try to keep being Paraguay, right, as opposed to starting
a war with the neighbors who surround you and are
all much larger. Lopez, though, he wants to be a
big continental power like France, and so in eighteen sixty
four he decides to um to take that leap, you know,

(12:50):
to throw the iron dice. So Uruguay, which is you know,
pretty close, is racked by a sort of soft civil
war at the time between two rival political parties. Again
neither of them is very democratic, but one of these
parties is backed or one of these parties, which is
like the party in power at the time, is friendly
with Lopez and Paraguay. Brazil backs the other party, and

(13:12):
in this kind of internecine struggle, the party that Brazil
is backing and arming wins. Lopez takes offense to this.
He demands that Brazil stopped giving military support to Uruguay,
and Brazil is like, you guys are like a speed bump,
where Brazil, of course not you. What do you think
we're gonna listen to you? They are much bigger. So

(13:33):
he makes a questionable decision. Paraguay is on this river
and there's like a Brazilian merchant ship that's import in
the capital, and he has his forces sees that merchant
ship and when they do, they find out that the
Brazilian governor of the bordering province of Matta Groso is
on the ship. So Lopez arrests this guy, throws him

(13:55):
in a dungeon and then sends his arm and then
invades Matta Groso and like, and it's this, it's a
very big, sparsely populated province. He basically just marches in,
takes the tiny capital town and then it's like, we
own this whole thing. So that is a bold yeah, okay,
doubling the side of his country in one fells group, yeah,

(14:17):
and thinking this will probably be okay. So, like, this
is a bold move at the best of times. And
if he had just wound up going to war with Brazil,
that's a tough fight for Paraguay, right, That's like that's
like Kansas going to war with the entire state of Texas.
Like it's not you know, the kind of odds are

(14:41):
stacked against him as he is as it is, but
he doesn't like stop just at taking Mattagroso, because the
next thing he does is He's still pissed that Brazil
has backed the side he didn't like in this conflict
in Uruguay. So he sends his army to Uruguay to
like take back power for his people. And at the time,
by the way, while he's doing all of this, he
has he has himself get voted the nickname El Supremo.

(15:04):
So El Supremo sends his forces off to to Uruguay
to win some glory. But the problem is that there's
like this slice of Argentina. So Lopez like asks for
permission to send his army through, and Argentina is like, no, hey,
what do you what are he of course not, We're

(15:25):
not gonna let you do this, and so he declares
war on Argentina too, So great, what a chat. The
third thing that happens is that because of everything else
we've talked about, Uruguay winds up declaring war on him
as well. Um. So this is a this is a
bad situation to be in um And he, you know,

(15:47):
he launches a couple of attacks with his well made
little army, and his well made little army winds up
getting just bashed to pieces, in large part because he
is an incompetent commander. After thousands and thousands are dead,
it becomes clear to Supremo that the population of young
adult males is not going to be enough to sustain
Paraguay's war effort, so he starts drafting children, creating battalions

(16:08):
of twelve year olds to hold the line and suicidal
last stands to delay the enemy. For an idea of
how yeah, for an idea of how bad this is,
there are ports of like Brazilian soldiers massacring trench lines
and then when they realize they've just shot a bunch
of twelve year olds, like weeping and like just breaking
down because like you know, like that's a pretty bad situation.

(16:31):
Twelve year old. No, nobody, very few people want to
kill twelve years yeah. Yeah. So, as this war drags on,
Lopez starts drafting old men and eventually even women. He
has them doing a lot of logistics work in the back,
and in eighteen sixty nine, Asuncion the capitol falls and
Lopez flees into the hills to fight a guerrilla war,

(16:52):
which he is just as bad at as the rest
of this The last of his forces are surrounded in
eighteen seventy and he dies a band ending them trying
to wade across the river. So now that's that's that's
kind of funny the way this ends. And like, objectively,
there's an absurdity to how badly this war goes. But
like James, you and I have both reported on and

(17:14):
studied a lot of wars. I don't think I've ever
read about a war that goes worse for a country.
No war this goes. This is called the War of
the Triple Alliance. So the death toll of the War
of the Triple Alliance is comparable to the American Civil War.
There is no accurate pre war census of Paraguay. All
of the estimates of the of the percentage of the

(17:34):
country that dies are kind of based on calculations that
are themselves a little bit of a crapshoot um. But
I have every analysis that I've read makes basically the
same point, which is, Paraguay suffered a higher percentage of
its populace dead than any country in a war I
can I can name. Um. The most common estimates say
that two thirds of the pre war population die. Um.

(17:57):
Some estimates place the death tolet. There are estimates as
high as ninety percent, although that's likely high, but everyone
seems degrees sixty per seventy percent of the entire country
dead is a reasonable estimate. This includes nine ninety percent
of the pre war male population. Wow, and so post
war chunks of the country will have a twenty to

(18:18):
one ratio of women to men. So that's about as
bad as a war could go. Yeah, yeah, that's not great.
That's it's really sub optimalcome for everyone. Yeah, maybe from
the dude to survive, but yeah, the graphic collapse, wow, yeah,
it is, it is it. It's like, I don't I've
ever heard of a war going that badly, Like when

(18:38):
you're making German casualties in World War two seem like,
well that's you know, you can bats back from that. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it didn't even do like twelve year olds
at the Battle of the Psalm that is. Yeah. I
love that the sort of the misogyny kept on if
when they were sending twelve year olds out there, that like,
we've got to keep women out of the front line,

(18:59):
can't company yea guns? Yep. It's uh, there's a lot
actually to say about because I've read a couple of
articles about this about like the way in which this
impacts kind of cultures of entrenched misogyny in Paraguay that
I am not really competent to go into. But there's
you know, a lot, there is a lot written about
like what happens when you're like the first generation of
young men after this, and there's like like twenty twenty

(19:23):
to one female male ratio and all this attention being
kind of like lavished on you because of how badly
this war goes and how decimated the population of men
was prior to this. There you can find some really
interesting writing on this. I don't want to, like, uh,
we'd be getting a little bit off of where I
feel competent talking to go much more into it, but
it's most worth reading that, Yeah, you're going to fuck

(19:44):
up your society for genetically as well as social. It's
really it's very rarely good if ninety percent of any
group and your society gets massacre. He's like he's bested
the Black Death in terms of decimating his own Sula
Lopez gets our gets the behind the Bastards of award
for probably the worst at Warum, I don't think I've

(20:07):
ever heard if anyone fail worse at having a war
than this. But you know who's good at engaging in
unrestricted warfare? Oh, the Raith Young Corporation. That they are,
They are one of the best. And all of our
sponsors believe that you can only truly achieve victory in
a conflict by salting the earth with the bones of

(20:29):
your enemy. Um. So you know you get the gold,
isn't it You grow grows from the bones, That's right,
That's right, that's where gold comes from. And also where
the best delivered mattresses are forged from. Anyway, the biom mattress. Ah,

(20:49):
we're back. So Paraguay just kind of barely ekes it
out as a country after this. Um. And if you're
if you're interested in kind of much more detail about this,
the War of the Triple Alliance, which if you google
it that's also like you'll get a lot of World
War One results, but this is a different thing. The
Lions led by Donkeys podcast did a good series on this,

(21:10):
which which you should check out. They go into it,
spend a lot more time on it than we are,
because this is just kind of setting the scene. So
Paraguay and kind of like there's this series obviously afterwards,
Brazil occupies the country, the people, the countries who would
want to take about a third of the land mass
of Paraguay as kind of part of the war debt,
and then there's another like cash war debt that staggers

(21:30):
the economy for a few generations. The only reason that
Paraguay survives at all less a nation is that Brazil
and Argentina are big rivals and neither of them is
willing to let the other have Paraguay. Right, they kind
of like maintain a rump state there just because it's
not worth dealing with the conflict over who gets to
have it now. Argentina in this period had played host

(21:52):
to a lot of dissident Paraguayans, members of the old
upper class who had had to flee the country when
the dictators took over right when Spain gets kicked out,
and a bunch of these guys, when Argentina participates in
this invasion of Paraguay, they form up and join the
Argentine army and like make a unit of like exiled
Paraguayans fighting to liberate the country from Lopez. And so

(22:14):
after eighteen seventy, Argentina successfully kind of helps maneuver these
guys into power, and they draw up a democratic constitution
that basically existed as an excuse for these people to
sell off all of the state's land and businesses for
their own personal profit. The British banking firm Bearing Baring's brothers.
Oh yeah, James, how did I know that the British

(22:36):
banking industry would get involved? I was just going to
remark of selling off the entire country's assets for your
own personal profit is a very British vibe. Like the
thing is so it is. I mean waiting as a
as a rule, if there's like a dictator in the
eighteen hundreds, there's a British bank behind God, let's not
let's not limit the time period so narrowly, very air. Yeah,

(23:01):
we've made a long and proud tradition of during three
twentieth century. So Margaret's kid. So the Bearings brothers are like, Wow,
things are going great in Paraguay. Look at how effectively
they have taken all of these national resources and handed
them off to a tiny chunk number of oligarchs. Here's
a couple of very large loans Paraguay, and the oligarchs

(23:24):
say thank you for the loans that are meant to
develop our country. We're just going to take the money though,
and buy houses. Yeah, and so the nation has left
bankrupt and in ruinous debt. After this, it's again not
the first or the last time this will happen. So
the Brazilian military occupies Paraguay for a while, but they

(23:45):
bounce pretty quick and Paraguayans are left to try and
navigate their place in South America. Bereft of a couple
generations of men and also any money. It does not
go smoothly. As scholar Paul Lewis describes, Paraguayan governments after
eighteen seventy brought either internal peace nor liberty, although they
were still dictatorships. Managed elections, or the direct seizure of

(24:06):
power was the means by which every succeeding president achieved office.
Forty four men occupied the presidency in the eighty five
years between the death of Slano Lopez and Alfredo Streissner's
coup in nineteen fifty four, one president every twenty three months. Moreover,
of those forty four, more than a half twenty four
were forced from office by violence of the threat of violence.
Many of the remainder were simply provisional presidents who headed

(24:28):
caretaker governments while the real contestants for power fought it out.
Sixteen of the twenty four presidents were overthrown. Who were
overthrown served for less than a year, and five of
them were in office less than a month. Amazing. This
is a lot of turnover. Yeah, the worst is the
period from nineteen ten to nineteen twelve. That is a

(24:50):
two year period in which Paraguay has seven presidents and
nine administrations outstanding. Again, don't just wait, because we could
still do that in the United Kingdom. We've been we've
been pushing for it. Hey, I believe both your country
and my country can have seven presidents in two years. Yeah,
we'd love to see. All it's gonna take is the

(25:11):
Secret Service getting a little bit more into cocaine. And
they're already pretty into cocaine. It's gonna be like, get
cocaine bear up and there in the CIA, and it'll
be I think it would be nice if, like our president,
we adopted like a pseudomystical tradition where like the president
gets to continue to be president as long as the

(25:31):
cocaine bear does not eat him, and when it does,
we all agree not to be partisan about it. It's
just like it's it's like that that what's its name?
Seeing its shadow and deciding we're going to have more winter.
She's like the bear the president. Can I get a
new one in there? He's talking about the groundhog. The groundhog.
I forgot the name groundhog, so sorry, yeah, Phill, Yeah,

(25:56):
that's I recently learned. Apparently there is another groundhog called
Staten Island phil Um. But the previous New York mayor
dropped it. Our ground hugs not drop safe. I think
it depends on the height and probably the angle of
the drop. This is another reason cats are superior. Yeah, yeah,

(26:21):
you can drop a cat all day long. I don't
get shit. Mayor? Was this? Do you know? Because I'm
just gonna look handsel Stan? Yeah, I guess it's let's
have a look stant nine and phil dropped de Blacio.

(26:42):
Here we go, Washington Post. Stannine, his famous groundhog died
after build de Blacio dropped it. Incredible, incredible, p he's
the Francisco Solano Lopez of New York groundhogs. Yeah, there
were pictures. The dog is a pitch of it on
its way down. Oh, how far did you drop him. Okay,

(27:07):
was he standing on a balcony? Was he? Was he
doing a Michael Jackson with this animal? Oh god, if
I had, Deblascio would have been at the top of
my list of mirrors. He's blamed the groundhog for his unpopularity.
Wow yeah, wow. This manisode goes out to that groundhog. Yeah,

(27:30):
this is this is now dedicated to whatever that groundhog's
name was. Just Staten Island film stann Island, Phil r I,
Oh god, Deblascio, what the fuck this? Honestly as you
can't blame you can't blame the groundhog. No, I like,

(27:51):
he's another victim of state violence, and I have to
say it another example of classic groundhog shaming, which is
a plague in this country. So back to Paraguay in
the late nineteen twenties, things are finally starting to improve
slightly after that, after that two year seven precedent run

(28:13):
even out a little bit. They get some more competent
leaders who start to reinvest. I mean they're mainly reinvesting
in the military, but also not the worst idea given
kind of the situation, because at this point the late twenties,
the only neighbor that Paraguay has not lost a devastating war.
Two Bolivia starts sniffing around this region in northern Paraguay

(28:36):
called the Chaco, and Bolivians are like, well, the last
time Paraguay went to war didn't go good, and like
we could probably take them, and there's this kind of
this place, the Chaco is kind of this like wasteland
in the northern significant chunk of the country. It's not
a wasteland, but that's how it gets described by people.
It's like a kind of desertified territory. It looks beautiful. Honestly,

(28:59):
I'd love to go hike there or something, although there's
a hell of a lot of skeeters. But there's this
like the Olivia becomes briefly convinced because of like they
find a little bit of oil there. There's not really
oil in the Chaco, but they are convinced that, like
there's a shitload of oil in the Chaco, and so
they're like, let us, let's let's go invade and take
this from Paraguay. And it's kind of obvious for a while.

(29:22):
Part of why this is happening is that, like when
everybody gets their freedom from Spain, they don't always have
like super clear maps of who's is what. So there's
like this long argument about like whether or not, you know,
this chunk of the Chaco should belong to Paraguay or Bolivia.
So they're all arming while this is going on, and
Paraguay puts this guy in command of their army in

(29:42):
the Chaco called Jose Estigarribia, and he is going to
be There are military scholars who will say this guy
is one of, if not the best field commanders in
the history of modern warfare in the Americas, because the
war that's about to result from this is a modern
in war. They have tanks, they have machine guns, they
have air power. This is going to occur in like

(30:04):
the early nineteen thirties. The Bolivians put an old German
Man in charge of their military. Now what time, guys,
you're you're not even ready, James, You're not even ready
because this guy's this guy is no shit. Real name
is General von kunt Li k you in DT. Look

(30:33):
this ship up now, I know on this episode always
called Hans cunt Yeah, so he I was going to say, yeah,

(30:59):
this guy from the day he was born, which look,
so this guy, first of all the Vaughan means that
he's German nobility. He is a German officer's count me. Well,
let me tell you the rest of the story. So
he is a German general officer throughout the First World

(31:21):
War in the Eastern Front, and he has a reputation
for two things. One he is a competent logistical commander
and two, whenever there's any kind of combat, his go
to tactic is to throw every man he has into
a suicidal headlong charge. He is a He is one
of the worst journal commanders. He is terrible at what

(31:42):
he's doing. Um, he gets a shitload of men killed,
but he's he's also he becomes after the war a
celebrity in Bolivia. Um. Now, this is very like like
the question of like why is this guy so beloved
by the Oblivians. A lot of it is that, like
he loves Bolivia, like he moves there. After World War One,

(32:05):
he gets a job kind of acting as an instructor
for the Bolivian military. This is very common at the
time too. I mean, you have to remember that while
von Kunt is very bad at what he does, I know,
I know, the German military has just almost won a
war against the world. So all of these little countries
and big countries in South America are like, oh, we

(32:27):
the best people we can get to help us reform
our militaries is some German guy, right, because like they
got they came pretty close to winning. So the Bolivians
fall in love with von Kunt because he's just kind
of this, despite the fact that he's shit eatingly incompetent,
he looks and talks like this, like archetypal image of
the Prussian military genius, and they just all kind of

(32:50):
buy it. Paraguays again, Paraguay's army is commanded by Estegarribia,
who's one of the best military leaders in the modern
history of the Americas. And so the Chaco War which
results when Bolivia invades, is a fascinating conflict. It is
going to be a testing ground for a lot of
tactics that are key in World War Two. This is
not a military history podcast, so we're not going to

(33:12):
labor long on the specifics. But there is one key
detail I think we need to talk about, which is
that when the Paraguayans start arming up in the late
twenties and early thirties, they have to make one of
those tough decisions that countries who don't spend a trillion
dollars a year on their army have to make, which
is like, what kind of artillery do we buy? Because
we can't afford a lot of it, and we can't
afford many different kinds, so we're either going to be

(33:33):
getting a few big guns or a lot of little ones. Now,
World War One had proven that modern wars can't really
be one without big guns. But big guns come with
all sorts of logistical hurdles, and Paraguay did not have
the industrial base to manufacture the kind of shells and
parts that larger field pieces needed. Artillery was also super
vulnerable to air power, and Bolivia had an air force

(33:54):
that outnumbered Paraguays more than two to one. So the
very savvy Bolivian military planners or a Paraguayan military planners decided,
instead of buying a bunch of big a few big
field guns that planes can bomb, why don't we just
get hundreds and hundreds of eighty one millimeter mortars. We'll
just get a shitload a little mortars. And these are
like man portable indirect fire weapons that you can camouflage easily.

(34:16):
You can like pick them up and run like a
motherfucker after shooting some stuff off, and they fire a
small enough shell that Paraguay could afford to make it indigenously.
This was a huge success. Paraguay becomes maybe the first
nation to use mortars effectively in a modern combined arms
sense in the twentieth century. They use mortars very similarly
to how you're going to see them used in Ukraine

(34:37):
and stuff during this conflict, and they just massacre the Bolivians.
This war goes terrible for Bolivia despite having by far
more men in tanks and stuff. And one of the
officers who is in command of a mortar of a
bunch of mortars during this war, I think he winds
up at the end in control of the mortar regiment
that helps to win the Chaco War is a guy

(34:59):
who aventially a general named Alfredo Stressner. Right, that's the
job that stress the big job Stressner does. He is,
he is a mortar commander. Now. Stressner's father, Hugo, had
been part of the massive German diaspha that had moved
to South America in the years leading up to the
First World War. Hugo was a Bavarian who'd worked as
an accountant for a brewery. His mother was the daughter

(35:20):
of a wealthy Paraguayan family of its She's actually a
mix of Basque and indigenous Paraguayan descent. Yeah, and so
Stressner fairly a lot of privilege, you know. But the
fact that his dad is German, they have a lot
more like money than most people, and his mom comes
from a family with money too. He enrolls in a
military school when he's sixteen, and by the time the

(35:42):
Chaco War breaks out, he's nineteen years old and had
established has established a reputation for himself as a competent
leader who has earned the respect of his men. Paraguayan
politics remains tumultuous in the years after the Chaco War,
but Stressner succeeded in sliding past most people's radar because
he's really fucking boring. We don't have a I don't
have all. I haven't found a lot on this guy's

(36:03):
early life, on his childhood and stuff, but he is.
It seems accurate to say, based on the stuff I
have read that goes into detail, that he is a quiet,
sober man whose main hobbies are chess, fishing, and a
weekly poker game. He gets married to a school teacher
who's a few years older than him in nineteen forty.
They have three children, and most people who knew Stressner

(36:24):
at this point in time would be like, hey, he's
a quiet family man. He plays a lot of chess.
You know, he's about as boring a guy as you're
going to get. In nineteen forty, he gets picked for
advanced training at a military college, and he returns home
a major whose superiors call him a complete officer who
was discreet and circumspect. Again, everyone, everything about this guy

(36:45):
is he is quiet and competent and not really worth
talking about in much detail outside of that, which is again,
we just finished our episodes on Romania and Chauchescu. You
always got to watch out for the quiet guys. So quiet.
If you ever meet someone who is quiet and competent,

(37:05):
bear mas them. That's the only thing to do. You know, somebody,
somebody you know, changes your your your car oil. You know,
quiet and competent mechanic Mason, do it to anybody who's
good at anything and humble. It's the only way we
can save ourselves from another Alfredo Stressner. So yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's that's that seems fair. Yeah. By the By the

(37:28):
early forties, Paraguay had taken a kind of rough stab
at democratic politics. This never goes great for them, and
the parties that they have are never very committed to
any scheme that might make them give up power if
they happen to take it. The largest conservative party in
the country is the Colorado Party, and it has both
a democratic wing, which means a wing that cares about democracy,

(37:50):
and a wing that doesn't so much care about democracy.
And in the early forties, that second wing is run
by a man named Juan Natalisio Gonzalez. Now, he'd been
involved in a number of violent protests and one failed
revolution before, for which he'd been exiled and then sent
to a concentration camp from which he had escaped. So
Gonzales has quite a background, and he had prior to

(38:13):
getting like exiled the second time he has been, he'd
been kind of a rabbit, almost religious nationalist. And then
he gets exiled the second time, and he winds up
like most Paraguayans who get exiled, fleeing to Argentina and Willie's.
While he's in Argentina, he meets a bunch of socialists
who have also been exiled because they had tried to do,
you know, a revolution, and these socialists, you know, even

(38:35):
though they're pretty left wing guys, also happened to be nationalists.
And so Gonzalez becomes more and more convinced that the
right politics for Paraguay might be some kind of you'd
call it national socialism. Yeah, going, it's bad now, James,
I know what you're saying, But this is the mid thirties.
No one, no one else has thought of national socialism

(38:55):
in this period of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Alam bells
and I'll be rung around the world. There's there's no
evidence of like how this could go badly in the
mid nineteen thirties. So Gonzalez is becomes yeah, he's we've
just been joking about this. Gonzalez does accurately identify one

(39:16):
of the biggest problems with Paraguay, which was the kind
of economic liberty, like the economic liberalism that has allowed
a tiny number of elites to buy all of the
land and natural resources in the country. Right, he recognizes
this is a huge problem that is just a justification
for the rich to take advantage of the poor. Now,
the leader of Paraguay at this point in the early

(39:37):
forties is a dictator named Maringo. In nineteen forty he
had suspended the constitution and banned political parties like you do.
But in nineteen forty six he legalized political activity again
and formed a cabinet with the Colorado Party and a
Democratic Socialist Party. Now Gonzalez is back in the country
by this point, and he does not like the idea
of the Colorado Party sharing power with a coalition government,

(40:00):
so he starts to build a street fighting movement for
the Colorados in order to like, you know, beat and
murder their opponents in the streets. Kind of themed after
the essay in Germany. Yeah, a little bit of good vibe,
I'm picking up. Yeah. Now, things come to a head
at the start of nineteen forty seven, which brings Paraguay
a fun new civil war called the Barefoot Revolution. The
side shook out roughly to every other political party and

(40:23):
most of the officers on one side and just the
Colorado Party, but a bunch of soldiers also on the
other side. And it's it's ugly, it's very short, but
extremely bloody. And one of the reasons why the Colorado
Party wins the civil war is that Alfredo Stressner is
a general by this point, and he is in command
of the country's largest artillery division. And when you kind

(40:47):
of just have one artillery division and the other side
doesn't have an artillery division, you know what, it's very
easy to do. Yeah, it's just kill everybody, that's yeah. Yeah. Now,
So Stressner is a big part of why his side
wins this civil war, and over the next two years

(41:07):
things do not calm down though. There are in two
years six coups and counter coups, and Stressner participates in four.
So he is by like nineteen the early fifties, he
is like one of the most experienced coopers on the planet. Like,
this guy could give notes to the CIA. Oh, you
guys are doing a coup. Now, I've been in a

(41:29):
bunch of those. Let me tell you, let me walk
you through the basics. Yeah. Now, it is a well
known fact that carrying out coups are it's like eating
potato chips. You never stop with one, right, And in
Stressner's case, he he does like five and in nineteen
fifty four he decides it is his turn to be

(41:50):
the man doing the cooping. He had succeeded in gaining
the support of the military by this point, and Gonzalez's
wing of the Colorado Party. And now I'm going to
quote from an article and Vanity Fair by Alex Schumatov.
The coup took place while all of a Suncon society
was at the Philharmonic. Legend has it that the shooting
started just at the thunderous beginning of Beethoven's fifth Da

(42:11):
Da Da Dam and everyone thought that it was part
of the show until soldiers burst onto the stage and
announced that a coup was under way. This is again
the struth. It's like, this is like a this is
not a thing that has not happened before either, like
this this is a way to do coups. Oh yeah, Look,
if you're not timing your coup with an orchestral presentation

(42:35):
like at the Philharmonic, what are you even cooing? Right? Yeah,
come on, it's a coup without culture, and it's that
coup at all. Have a little bit of art, you know.
That's That's all I'm saying about a good old fashioned coup.
It's it's you know, you could do it in a
in a Mala piece, because I don't know, have you
seen Mala's Hammer, No, Okay, it's worth googling. It's a

(43:00):
giant fucking hammer that, like I guess like every every
orchestra has to have one because it's just one piece
that he wrote that one of the instruments is just
a dude hitting a wooden box with it, like a
comedy sized hammer, And I feel like that would give
you some more cover for coups in Beethoven. So they
fucked up in that regard. Yeah, Yeah, there's a there's

(43:22):
a John Waters quote where he's like talking about today's
hackers and the thing that depresses him about the fact
that they all just kind of like wear hoodies and shit,
and he's like, look, I love what you're doing, but
if you're going to like hack into the Defense Department's
computers and like spread top secret information to try to
bring them down, you should have an outfit for that, right,
You've got to like a little pinash, you know. That's

(43:44):
what you gotta respect about Stressner. He's got a little
bit of pinash here. You know, this is this is
a this is a coup that's got some art to it.
Um gosh, darnett. So you know what else has art
to it? Is it? Gold? Gold is the only real
form of art, James, because gold never fades. It's eternal,

(44:07):
just like this podcast, which will continue from now until
the heat death of the universe and the end of
all things. Ah, what a what a great time. We're
all back. We're talking about the beginning of the Stressner era.

(44:27):
So the period of time that he's in power, his
regime is known as the Stronato, and it's one of
those things where, like a lot of the this is
sort of one of the there's this kind of concept
in Paraguayan politics that's evolved over the last hundred years
or so called I don't know how to pronounce this,
but mba r ete, which is an indigenous Guarani word

(44:49):
meaning like the law of the strongest right. This is
a like a strongly believed this. This is just kind
of like the I mean, we've gone through the history here, right,
this is the of the time, right, it's been nothing
but strong men dictators, And to be frank like you,
if you're one of these people who's living through these
periods where there's like seven coups in two years, you

(45:11):
might just find yourself wanting someone strong enough to stop it, right,
someone who could actually hold onto power so everyone can
get their fucking breath like it he comes to like
Stressner is it's not going to be easy for him
to solidify power because Paraguay's famously unstable. But also he
has this benefit that very few dictators get, where everything

(45:33):
has been so bad for so long that people are
willing to put up with a lot from a dictator
if he can actually hold things together. And like we
talk about how the instability of the Weimar years contributed
to the rise of the Nazis, that's not a long
period of time. This is like a hundred something years
of constant chaos and bullshit. So given the fact that

(45:55):
Paraguay goes through presidents like porn directors go through lube,
the fact that Stressner managed just to make himself dictator
is again not in and of itself impressive. Someone had
managed to do that about every year since eighteen seventy.
What's impressive is that he'd held onto that title. For
he holds onto this title, he's in power for thirty
five years. That is almost unprecedented in world history. Saddam

(46:19):
rules Iraq less than thirty years. Stolenis in power for
like twenty nine years. MAOIs in power for like twenty
seven years. It is extremely uncommon for a dictator or
a king at any point in history to reign for
more than thirty years, very very rare. The fact that
Stressner does this in a place as unstable as Paraguay
means that he's doing something. He's doing something competent from

(46:42):
like a consolidation of power standpoint, right, He's good at
what he's doing, not not in a moral sense, but
justin This is not an easy situation to handle, so obviously, Yeah,
one of the things that Stressner has to deal with
as soon as he takes power is the fact that
there's going to be a million other people who are
already planning to coop him out of power and take

(47:05):
power themselves. And I want to quote now from an
article or from that book by Peter Lambert. At the
time of the nineteen fifty four coup, the different factions
within the Colorado Party supported Stressner in the belief that
they would be able to use him for their own
political inns in the event. However, before nineteen fifty six
and nineteen sixty six, Stressner manipulated existing factional divisions to
consolidate his own control over the Colorado Party. Through skillful

(47:27):
political maneuvering, Stressner selectively purged real or perceived party opposition.
Epifanio Mendez Flitez, the major political rifle to Stressner, was
isolated and exiled in nineteen fifty six. In nineteen fifty nine,
Stressner responded to rebellion within the Colorado Party by dissolving Congress,
sending troops onto the streets, and exiling four hundred members
of the more reformist Colorado Activists. The expulsion of his

(47:50):
powerful Minister of the Interior, Edgar L. Yesfnin in nineteen
sixty six, represented the final move in eliminating internal party
opposition and in bringing the party firmly under his control.
And that's like a kind of good high level overview
of what Stressner does to consolidate power. But it doesn't
provide a lot of texture. It's just sort of a

(48:11):
list of people who get purged and kicked out. So
I want to read another quote from that Vanity Fair article,
which deals with the story of a single person Stressner
had to suppress. Take, for instance, the case of Napoleon
or Togoza, an attractive upperclass cavalry officer who ended up
being the longest held political prisoner in Latin America. The

(48:31):
theories about why he was arrested are many in baroque,
but some of them involve a sinister plot to overthrow Stressner.
When a young cadet, Alberto Benitez was killed, either by
other officers to cover up a homosexual clique or because
he was tortured by the police as encouragement to reveal
details of a coup plot. The Minister of the Interior,
Edgar Yussunfran or so. One theory goes hit upon the

(48:51):
brilliant idea of pinning the murder on Ortogoza, who was
not actually involved in any plot yet, but was just
the sort you had to watch out for. Putting him
away would be what is known as an acapette, a
warning slap to anyone who got ideas about moving against
the president. Where it goes A's insistence on his complete
innocence fell on deaf ears. He was not allowed to
be present at his trial, and one of his lawyers
was arrested and beaten. He was condemned to death, although

(49:13):
Stressner later commuted the sentence to life imprisonment after a
priest threatened to break the seal of confession and tell
who the real murderers were. Um, so yeah, that's a
that's that's Stressner. That's how this guy wields and consolidates power.
Sounds like a nice guy, Yeah, it's yeah, it's a
pretty normal thing to do. He is such a nice

(49:36):
guy that he is given. We've gone through all of
these other dictator nicknames, Stressner gets the best of them, um,
because people just start calling him the tarrannosaur. What the
fuck for? Look, ye sons, he sounds like reptile if

(49:57):
honestly though, like, this guy's a piece of shit. But
if that's the nickname that you get, it's hard. That's
hard to beat. That's about as hard a nickname as
anyone's ever gotten. That bold and they give him that
in part because he becomes he's there. He's in power
for so long, right, he's like this ancient, implacable, malevolent force. Now, legally,

(50:21):
Paraguay continues to maintain the trappings of a democracy, including
a Congress that occasionally gets to vote on stuff that
doesn't matter. For example, since nineteen twenty nine, the country
had been in a legal state of siege, which suspended
civil liberties, including habeas corpus. Stressner continued this, and Congress
renewed the state of siege every ninety days. His justification

(50:41):
was the threat of communism, which pleased the Americans. Many
of the changes Stressner brought were initially positive. The biggest
achievement of his reign was simply staying in power, which
put an end to the ceaseless stream of coups and
civil conflicts that had racked Paraguay for generations. This allowed
the state to actually focus on delivering services to regular people.
One example of this would be Stressner's stabilization of the guarani,

(51:03):
Paraguay's currency, which had been essentially worthless for decades. He
set a peg for the currency's value at one hundred
and twenty five guarrani to one US dollar, and while
every other currency inflated rapidly in South America during this
period of time, he was able to use the hammer
of state power to keep the guarani locked into place. However,
as Alex Shomatov notes, there was a price for all this.

(51:25):
When student and labor groups demonstrated in the Recession of
fifty nine, he crushed them. When the Congress objected, the
police brutality against students protesting a bus fare increase, he
dissolved it. The downside to order and progress. With Stressner
was one of the largest military and police to general
population ratios in the world and the highest proportion of
unsentenced prisoners in the Western hemisphere. He purged the old

(51:46):
generals and four hundred of the old democraticos and replaced
them with loyal members of the Bandwagon. Membership in the
party became compulsory for military officers and civil sergeants and
strongly advised for anyone else who wanted to get anywhere.
In the various sham elections, he received more votes in
some rural areas than there were registered voters. His heavy
leonine face was posted everywhere, and radio stations began the

(52:06):
day with the don Alfredo Polka polka, followed by the
message the Constitutional President of the Republic, General Alfredo Stressner,
salutes the Paraguayan people and wishes them a prosperous day.
So this is like one of the more effective police
states I've ever seen anyone institute. And he does it
in a He comes to power in a state where

(52:28):
like holding on for more than two years is almost
unheard of, and in a couple of years, he has
created like the most policed country in the Americas, which
is interesting to me. He's very he's a very fast
and efficient worker. Yeah that he's like he like builds
a state around himself, Yes, yeah, around himself and his

(52:53):
maintenance of power. But he also gives people a reason
for wanting him to stay in power, which is that,
for one thing, we're not dealing with these constant overthrows
of the government anymore. And as a result, while there's
all this chaos in a lot of other parts of
Latin America, that's not happening here, and our currency is
maintaining its value. It's kind of worth noting we're about
to talk about the US is very involved in Stressner's regime,

(53:16):
but this is the only country this is and they're
part of Operation Condor, right, um. But Paraguay is the
only country that's involved in Condor that the CIA doesn't
do any domestic like they don't have to fund any
right wing rebel groups. They don't need to. He has
such a hold on power, um. And you know, there's

(53:38):
other things that he does during the early period of
his reign, development projects that provide a lot of jobs
for Paraguayans. He builds a road to Brazil that brings
new options for trade while he has people build that road. Uh,
and he like when he comes to power, there's no
storm drains in the capital, there's no running water, really,
there's not regular electricity. All of those things come to

(54:00):
the capitol like once Stressner is in power. And a
part of that's just because like, well, we're not fighting
this endless series of coups anymore, so we can spend
some of our resources on making this place livable. A
lot of why he has the money to do this
is because he decides to bill himself as an anti communist. Now,
there's people who will argue that he was not really ideologically,

(54:22):
he didn't really care one way or the other. He
would have been a socialist if that had been the
way for Stressner to be in power. Right, that's a
thing that some people will argue. But he's he's wise
enough to see that, like, well, it's the nineteen fifties
and sixties. If I bill myself as an anti communist,
I can get a lot of that sweet ass America money.
And you know, that's that's kind of the best way

(54:44):
to improve your material base in Latin America at this
period of time is have like the CIA black budget,
shotgun money your way. So the month after he takes
power in fifty four, US development aid to Paraguay increases
by fifty percent. Between nineteen fifty four and nineteen sixty,
the country gets twenty four million dollars from US, and

(55:06):
we send advisors and CIA agents into Paraguay to train
the police in advanced torture techniques because he's like, we're
not good enough at torturing, and America is like, oh no,
we got guys who know to do that. We'll get
him right in there. And the reward for the US
here is eighteen In nineteen fifty eight, Nixon tries to
go to Venezuela. He goes to Venezuela and he gets

(55:29):
like pelted with rocks. But then he heads to Paraguay
afterwards and he's like met in the street with adoring crowd.
Stressner stage manages it. Nixon gets a great photo op
out of the situation, so you know, it's all worthwhile
for the US. We got Nixon got a nice photo. Yeah,
whether yeah that makes her styles today. Yeah, I've seen
the photo of Dixon getting pelted with rocks and I

(55:51):
used to live in Venezuela, and yeah, that's a proud moment.
Proud moment. Yeah, like I've been shamed of course, Like
that is what what what could be prouder than throwing
a rock at Richard Nixon? Not enough people in this
country through fucking rocks Richard Nixon. If we're being on it,
we should all have been throwing rocks at Richard Nixon.

(56:12):
That is beyond debate. That's really a bipartisan consensus on that.
I feel like we could end at the Cold War. Yeah,
but enough people throwing enough rocks at him. The old
people of Venezuela picked up where we left off. Yeah, tragically.
In Paraguay, stress is able to stop any rock throwing.

(56:32):
Now that same year, the same year Nixon visits, fifty eight,
a left wing guerrilla leader attempts to invade Paraguay. He
brings with him four hundred and fifty eight soldiers trained
in Argentina who attempted to infiltrate the country and start
recruiting for an insurgent war. Stressner's CIA backed security. Basically,
the CIA learns this is happening, and they warned Stressner,
and he sends six thousand soldiers to crack down. Most

(56:55):
of these guys are gunned down, but the survivors are
taken and put in to like helicopters and dropped into
Piranha filled waters. Yeah, it seemed to become Pitia ship
for proud boys. Yeah. That said, if you are the
kind of person who's willing to play ball with a
vicious authoritarian, Stressner's regime is not the worst time that

(57:16):
you will have had in your lifetime in Paraguay, right,
at least not in the early period of time. However,
the fact that he has made his country a stable
place that is very friendly for right wing authoritarians makes
it an enticing getaway for a very specific group of
people escaped Nazi war criminals. So this is good. We're

(57:39):
getting to a real fun part of the story here.
Paraguay's got this fascinating history with Germany. We've kind of
talked about some bits of it, right, and this is
the whole region. Right, You've got like you've got guys
like von Kunt going over to Bolivia, Paraguay gets its
own Germans like as we you know, as I noted,
Stressner's dad is a Bavarian. In eighteen eighty six, Bernard Foster,

(58:00):
who is the brother in law of Friedrich Nietzsche, had
moved to Paraguay. He moves there because he's like number one.
Eighteen eighty six when Forster moves to Paraguay is like
the immediate wake of that horrible, devastating war. And so
Paraguay is like, we will give Europeans money if they
will immigrate here and help us have like make enough people,

(58:25):
like we need your come right, we need we need
a lot of We need all the seamen we can
get right now, there are not many of us left. Um.
So that's when Forster comes over. And Forster also has
come related plans, but much more racist ones than the
Paraguayan government, because he is a philosopher of anti Semitism.

(58:46):
And to Forster, the primary appeal of Paraguay is that
it doesn't have any Jewish people, right, it does, but
it doesn't have a lot of them. Um. And he's like, well,
since this country is basically free of Jewish influence, and
use this country's policy to move a bunch of Arians
in and create weather Germania. You know this, uh, this
this German paradise in Paraguay. Um, Now this is obviously

(59:14):
and it doesn't work for shit, Yeah, it is. It
is not going to succeed. And I'm going to read
quote from an article by Nick Farizos. Here. Forster, his
wife Elizabeth, and fourteen families from Saxon, he crossed the
Atlantic and the dead of winter and reached Paraguay in
the swelter of summer. They carved a settlement out of
the rainforest northeast of the capital of Suncion, but the

(59:34):
isolated community was soon infested with bugs, burrowing into fingernails
and toenails and laying eggs beneath the skin. Yes, fucking
hates an anti semitis this next part, James, You're going
to really like. Their indigenous neighbors knew the cure, but colonists.
The colonists refused to consult an inferior race, sitting there like, yeah, man,

(59:58):
we got like a plant. We just rub on us
to deal with that. Oh you're dying. That's cool. Foisted
on his own patime. He'd love to see it. The
strict colonies. Young bucks pounded nails into the coffin of
an unsullied aryan New Germany when they began betting and
wedding local women. Plagued by sickness and unpaid bank loans,

(01:00:20):
Forster retreated to the Hotel de Lago in the town
of San Bernardino in eighteen ninety nine and committed suicide
by shooting up with morphine and strychnine nine in room nineteen.
So hey, good to this episode. Frederick Nazer's shitty ass
brother in law kills himself. That's nights. Nietzsche really inspired

(01:00:40):
some great suicide. Boy. We're going to talk more about
Bernard Forrester next episode, and a lot more about the Nazis. James,
We're not nearly done with the Nazi portion of this episode. O. Good, great, good.
But speaking of Nazis, I know that's not a good
way to lead into plugs. Not speaking of Natz Yeah, yeah,

(01:01:03):
how how where do you get to plug? James? Oh yeah,
definitely not any Naties. Actually, I've returned to Twitter after
my band so people for now now, yeah, until until
I post another picture of Mussolini hanging out with his friends,
and then I'll be that that is that is James
stout Um. And yeah, I also do a podcast with

(01:01:25):
you and Sophie and several of our other friends and colleagues.
It's called It Could Happen here. People should listen to it.
It's got some banging episodes. Yeah, all right, enough legendary,
All right, all right, legendary. Okay, everybody, that's the end

(01:01:47):
of the episode. Go. You know. Yeah, bugs anti Semites
wants to eat. Yeah yeah. My advice would be, if
you're too racist to stop the bugs from eating your fingers,
maybe you rethink your politics. Or take a ship ton

(01:02:09):
of morphine. I don't care. Yeah, yeah, honestly, the morphine
in stryct nine works fine too. If you're a Nazi,
I'm fine either way. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, you won't
find me crying Behind the Bastards is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit
our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

(01:02:31):
your podcasts.