Part Two: The Reichstag Fire Was Not An Inside Job

Margaret finishes telling Karl Kasarda the story of Marinus van der Lubbe, the council communist who tried to spark a civil war against the Nazis and failed spectacularly.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People, did
Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that things are real complicated
and sometimes there's a difference between moral action and strategic action,
and it's impossible to know. But what you can know
ahead of time is that my name is Margaret Kiljoy
and I'm the host. You can also know you probably

(00:22):
have guessed because you've probably listened to part one, unless
you're a very strange person. That My guest is Carl
Casardo from en Range TV. How are you?

Speaker 2 (00:32):
I'm doing great? Hello everybody, It's good to be back.
Hopefully Margaret, you're doing well. And I am personally extremely
excited to hear about Council Communism. Like I've been waiting
a while now I'm dying for that part. I mean,
I mean, I know what happens to Vanderloubi, but like
I don't know about the Council Communism part. So that's
what's what I'm here for.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
I know exactly. And our producer Sharen Sharan, how are you?

Speaker 3 (00:55):
I am good? Thank you for having me. Also very
stoked to learn what that is. Council of Communism yep.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
And our audio engineer is Daniel Hi. Daniel Hi Daniel, Hi,
I know or it's okay. Our theme musical was written
forced by un woman. My favorite thing in the world
is when listeners tell me that. They say it also
when they're like at work and shit, so cute.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
I know that.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, No, I'm really into it makes me happy.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
So you're adding into the general positive zeitgeist and the
magnetic sphere. For Daniel right there, it was like boom,
it just happens.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah, and just like a little bit of strangeness going
out into the world.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
So today is the moment you've all been waiting for. Yes, yes,
there'll be fire and political intrigue. But first, niche left
his theory from one hundred years ago that has no
about relevance to modern leftism.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Hooray.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yes, but it is relevant to this story. And I
actually think understanding the ins and outs of all of
this stuff that happened in the early twentieth century in
late nineteenth century has on me so much good at
giving me a vantage point to understand what's going on today.
The foolish thing to do would be to think that
the things that happen in the past are the same

(02:08):
as what's happening now. Right, But It has helped me
think about how people have like faced similar problems and
what they've come up with, and it just I find
it interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
I like that you said that because I sort of,
I mean, I know and I understand that also not
exactly full quote of you know, those who don't understand
the past are doomed to repeat it. I don't really
buy that. No, but those who don't know the past
don't have depth and understanding of the human condition and
better comprehension of what things happening now mean totally.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
You can kill someone with the dull sword, and you
can kill someone of the sharp sword, and it's easier
to do with the sharp sword. If I'm using the
Game of Thrones. The reason you read books is to
sharpen your intellect. You know, most importantly, understanding nitty gritty
stuff about ancient political ideology is cool and fun and
it has hip, and it will win you friends at parties.
It will win you exactly one friend at any given party,

(03:02):
the other random nerd who happens to be there. Everyone
else will leave you alone. They'll come over, they'll hear
what you're talking about, they'll leave. It's great. You get
to win at parties, you only have to talk to
one person at a time.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
It's like the Church of the subject, you says, I
drink to make other people interesting. I learned these topics
to find the other interesting person.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And so Marinus was a council communist.
There are not many council communists anymore. If there are,
and you're listening, I actually think you're onto something. It's great,
it's fine. I met a former one once and he
was in his probably seventies, maybe eighties, and he had
written a bunch of books about council communism in the
sixties and seventies, and then he became an anarchist. Council

(03:45):
communists are look forever ago, there was this split between
libertarian socialists like anarchists, and authoritarian socialists like Marxists. Back
in the nineteenth century. The authoritarian side is, you know,
the Marxist side, the liberty inside, the more anarchist side.
This is not universally true. This is the broad strokes.

(04:05):
And every now and then, over the ensuing you have this,
you know, this tree that is split, and you have
two different branches, right, and every now and then people
from one branch will be like looking over at the
other branch and being like, damn, that's a nice branch.
They got like pretty good bark. Like I don't know
what branches see in each other, but like, whatever branches
see in each other, they're into about each other. Right.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
It's like, I'm tired of three hour meetings about what
colors we should make our font What if we just
get a dictator that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
Right exactly. And so the anarchist side, looking over towards
the Marxist side, you would get as an example, I
would say it would be the platformist anarchists who are like,
what if anarchism was way more unified and organized at
the expense of putonomy or whatever what. I'm not trying
to talk shit on them, but they're cribbon notes from
the Marxists, right. And then in the other direction, I

(04:53):
know more examples of the other direction because our branch
is better whatever, because my p spective of where I'm at,
I see the other direction more if Marxist cribbing notes
from the anarchists. And among other groups that have done this,
there's like autonomous Marxists and various other groups are the
council communists. Because council communists. At its core was communists

(05:15):
who were like one if communism actually pushed for communism,
as we covered at length in the Russian Civil War episodes,
the Russian Communist Party aka the Bolsheviks, they had started
off being into the idea of these councils aka the
Soviets and the trade unions, and you know, some of
these people and some of these councils wanted to workers

(05:36):
to take power without creating a dictator, without taking that
power away from the workers and then centralizing it into
one place. Right, the Bolsheviks did the opposite. They centralized
power and the Soviets the councils were left with nothing.
So council communists spun off. At this point they looked
at what was happening in Russia and they were like,

(05:58):
what if the point was that power's supposed to stay
in the hands of the working class During the revolution,
I thought that was the whole thing. We were all
dying over. A ton of Marxists in Germany and the
Netherlands were into council communism in the nineteen twenties. I
talked about the some of the political landscape in the
nineteen twenties in Germany and how the Nazis were originally

(06:19):
sort of minority party among the right and they gain
power and stuff right and council Communism comes out of
the German left overall. Again there's Dutch parts of it too,
but basically, the German Communist Party originally started off pretty cool.
It was interested in workers' power. It was not interested
in being told what to do by the Bolsheviks. They're

(06:39):
in a different country. But then in nineteen nineteen, the
Communist Party of Germany, the KDP, they managed to do
some political maneuvering against the will of the majority of
their own members in classic Bolsheviks style, and so they
made the party line of this group suddenly be now,
we do whatever Russia tells us to do, even though

(06:59):
most Communists didn't actually want to do this. So the
party split. And here's where you get into that, Like, yeah,
I ever seen Life of Brian? Oh of course, yeah,
Trein you ever seen this movie Life of Brian? It's
okay if I have, I have no memory of bit.
But there's this part where like people are like, oh,
we're the Judea's Party of Liberation. We're like, no, we're

(07:20):
the where the I can't even do the bit. They're
all like arguing amongst each other themselves, and they have
basically the same name, and they're like arguing over fine
points and the getting really mad at each other, and
it's a fun joke. Well, the old Communist party was
the Communist Party of Germany. The new one that they
form is the Communist Workers Party of Germany.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
Oh, this changes everything right there, that makes the difference.
That's the reformation that will make it succeed.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Yeah. Yeah, So they go from the KDP to the KADP,
and they actually, I mean they're pretty cool. They set
up a workers union modeled after the Industrial Workers of
the World. Mark that off in your Bengo card, aka
union for leftists who are more concerned with giving power
to the working class than being obsessive about ideological labels.
So I the council Communists, they all right, like I
actually not not here talk shit on them. But they

(08:10):
still see themselves as part of communism, right. They don't
see themselves as part of anarchism or a new thing, right,
And so they they apply to join this group called
the Common Tern the Communist International, which used to be
back in the day. This like sort of horizontal group
of all these different socialists around Europe. Right these days,

(08:31):
well the days I'm talking about, it's just run by Russia.
So they're like, no, you can't fucking join. Fuck you
get the fuck out of here. You all want to
be independent. Fuck that, we don't want independence here, we're
fucking the Bolsheviks. So you call this This tendency also
gets called left wing communism, which I think is really funny.
Lenin wrote a pamphlet called left Wing Communism in Infantile

(08:54):
Disorder to make fun of them. Lenin got jokes, it
is funny to think about that.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
How there's that means there's right wing communism. I mean
it's just ket such a like fractionalization upon fractionalization, a
pro fractionalization, and then a group trying to bring the
factions together, but then don't. It's an endless story of humanity,
regardless of any movement.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
No I know, I know. This is why I live
alone on a mountain. Like, so this is how you
get council communists. At first, they tried saving the common
turn from authoritarianism. They're like, hey, what if we all
get to be worker's power? Like it says in the
name of communism, you know, and they were like pointing

(09:34):
out accurately that Russia was a capitalist state. This did
not work. They're like, fine, we're doing our own thing
and the five principles of council communism. Don't worry, we'll
get to fire soon. It's not one of their principles.
Five principles are capitalism is in decline and needs to
be abolished immediately. It should be replaced by workers control
over the economy through council democracy. The bourgeoisie manipulates the

(09:57):
working class with its social democratic ally in order to
maintain capitalism. This manipulation must be resisted by boycotting electoral
politics and fighting traditional labor unions. And finally, the Soviet
Union is not an alternative to capitalism, just a new
type of capitalism. So that's them. They did their thing

(10:18):
in Germany and the Netherlands alongside the other left communists
across the Western world, which was basically everyone who didn't
want to fucking toe the party line of Bolshevism. Council
communism was not particularly influential except in Germany and the Netherlands.
It's just like, you know, you read the Wikipedia, they'll
be like, wow, it's in all these countries and you're like, okay,
but was there one hundred people in France And they're
like yeah, there's one hundred people in France and you're

(10:39):
like that's cool.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, the one guy sending out postcards from Pueblo, Colorado
isn't a movement.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
Yeah, exactly, although I guess that's kind of a fucking
Nazi started.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
Well, you don't know where it's going to go, but
it isn't the movement yet, right. It might be the
yet Sea Crystal or something like that, but it's not
in and of itself yet totally.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
And so everyone of all sides could not wait to
throw the Council communists under the bus. So back to barness,
who's about to be under the bus of history?

Speaker 2 (11:11):
Oh you know what that makes me think everyone wants
to throw them under the bus because no one likes
being called out on what is ultimately the hypocrisy.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yeah, no, totally.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
Everybody hates that when he checks out. Yeah yeah, when
you're like, no, you're full of shit, everybody gets mad
at that, even if you're right.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Yeah, everyone's mad at them. Yeah, because it is that
it's that meme like everyone's mad at Jesus because he
was right, you know, yeah, like that's what's happening here.
Everyone's like, but the Bolsheviks are clearly bullshit, and everyone's like, no,
there are a guy. I mean, I don't know what
it's like to live in a place where people are like,
that's our guy, even though they're bad and wrong, and
you're like, what if that just isn't our guy anymore?
And they're like, how dare you split the party? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (11:48):
Thankfully that's nothing like what we have going on, so
we don't have to worry about that.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, no, No, it's just weird history. So Marnus is
in the Netherlands. He's getting in and out of jail,
and the word on the s and the Netherlands is
that there might be about to be a civil war
in Germany to stop Hitler from taking power. Right, this
is like January nineteen thirty three. Hitler's just I guess
this February nineteen thirty three. Hitler's just come to power.

(12:13):
And everyone's like, oh, we might stop this, right, we
might be able to have a civil war to stop this,
if only there had been, And he's like, well, don't
have a civil war without me, I'll throw cops through windows.
Not a problem. I'll walk all the way there. And
so he did. I think he hit checked again, but
actually it took him a couple of weeks to get there,

(12:35):
so maybe he did fucking walk. I don't know. He
gets to Berlin, it's like mid February nineteen thirty three,
and there's stormtroopers and shit now, and he's like, hey,
the Nazis are taking over. Should we do something about this?
And he is trying, like his first resort wasn't individual

(12:55):
action at night. His first resort was he went to
every meeting he could, including a group so he didn't
like all that much, like the communists and the social Democrats,
and he goes to every meeting and he's like, hey,
what if instead of letting the Nazis take over, we
stop the Nazis from taking over. I've got this wild idea.
You know. He's that other meme, the guy standing up
being like I have an idea, you know, the unpopular

(13:18):
idea guy. He's trying really hard. He's getting people to
talk about it on the streets. He keeps trying to
like just like organize everywhere he goes. He's like hey, like,
and he's going directly the workers. He's like, the parties
aren't stopping it, how do we stop it? You know?
And he's trying to incite riots. He does not successfully
incite them. Nothing is working. On February twenty third, he's

(13:39):
at a Communist Party meeting that is broken up by
cops and no one even fights back. He's like, wait,
what the fuck is happening. Then on February twenty fourth,
the Communist Party headquarters is rated. I mentioned this earlier,
and the Communists are still just trying to play nice,
and he's like, we can't fucking nice while the Nazis

(14:01):
are taking over. That is not an acceptable thing for
us to do. He can't stand what's happening. He feels
like has something has to be done. He wanted it
to be a mass action through the proper channels of
workers organizations. He's going to even the Social Democrats. That's
not working. So he's like, all right, what about fire.
So on the night of February twenty fifth, this is

(14:25):
not the Reichstrog fire, it's two days earlier, he goes
on a sort of failed arson spree. He's trying to
burn down an unemployment office, a castle in the Imperial Palace.
He did this by just kind of walking around and
throwing burning tinder through mail slots. Right, that's why he's
hitting a bunch of places in one night. He's just
like walking all over town being like la la, la
la la. I'm Johnny fire Seed.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
I was just gonna say, the Johnny apple Seed of Arson. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, And none of those buildings burned down. But he's like,
maybe these actions will spark the working class out of
their lethargy. And he there's where I disagree with him.
I think this is a miscalculation, and I think it's
a miscalculation that he had because he's young and he's
from a different country. The communists and even the Social

(15:11):
Democrats have been fighting for a decade against fascism in
Germany and they've been steadily losing ground. In my estimation,
and I am not an expert, I don't think this
was lethargy. I think this was burnout. It was despair
and it was feeling defeated that I think people were
dealing with. So Marnus is like, well, if at first

(15:32):
you don't burn down an important building to spark a
working class revolt, burn burn again. On February twenty seventh,
he does the thing that puts him into the history books,
just in a bad way. The specifics of this night
are argued about even still one hundred years later, well,
ninety years later, nearly never, Yeah, ninety nine years later, no,

(15:56):
eighty whatever, I can't do math.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
I think it's ninety nine balloons, which is a different
reference entirely.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
Yeah, it's a bunch of balloons later.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
Overall, the popular media version of this story is that
the Nazis burned down the Reichstag to blame the Communists,
or at the very least tricked Marnus into doing it.
And then the rough consensus, maybe the majority rather than consensus,
but the rough majority or consensus of historians is that, no,
this was not a false flag attack. Marnus burned the

(16:26):
Reichstag on his own volition. I'm not going to tell
you that's definitely what happened. That's what I think happened.
I feel fairly certain about that, and I'll tell you
why I think it. At around nine pm on February
twenty seventh, nineteen thirty three, Marnus broke into the Reichstag.
Basically he was thinking. He was like, all right, this
didn't work last time because I didn't go all in. Literally,

(16:50):
He's like, I got to go inside these buildings to
set them on fire. Right, He goes in to try
and make sure the place burns. As soon as he
breaks in. People see him break in. It's nine it's
not When I first read that this happened at nine pm,
I was like, do Germans just go to bed really early?
Like what's happening, you know? And then I realized I
read a different source and I learned more details, and

(17:12):
I was like, no, they saw him do it. He
broke in, and he was like, shit, the firefighters are
already coming, the cops are already coming. I better fucking
burn this place. And so he's running around inside trying
to set shit on fire. And all he has is
this like coal lighter, and I think that means it
is a lighter for lighting coal, and not a lighter

(17:33):
that works off of coal. But I could not tell
you because I spent a while trying to learn and
I couldn't figure it out. And he goes around. The
kindling he brought isn't catching anything. He starts setting towels
on fire. He takes off his own shirt and sets
it on fire to try and start this fire, while
the fire department is like outside using his coal and

(17:55):
alzunder his coal fire lighter. He also sets the curtains
on fire. This fire was started in multiple places, and
this is where a lot of the conspiracy stuff comes from.
Either he moved around quickly, which seems the most likely
thing and the thing that most historians tend to believe
that the curtains that he eventually lit like took a

(18:16):
little while and he's like running around from curtain to
curtain and setting them on fire around the building. Or
I think this is also perfectly likely. He had accomplices
and he shut the fuck up and he never mentioned them,
you know.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
Yeah, I mean it could be either he goes over
and lights the curtain and it just slowly starts a
smolder till it goes up it hits that combustion point yep.
Or yeah, but I mean, considering this guy's strength and
bravado in the past that we've learned about him, him
not breaking and talking about others is also very very
understandable and very believable. Yeah, Well, what's weird is why
didn't they bring any accelerant? I think they bring like

(18:54):
lighter fluid or something.

Speaker 1 (18:55):
No, I don't know. I think yeah, and actually that
almost even works. Stwories that like it was just right.
It's because like it's right, and he clearly wasn't like
the most thought out action that's ever happened, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
It almost sounds like a whim like I'm doing it now,
like if you were, because if you're planning.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
This, ZEPM, let's go yeah kind of.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
Because I mean, wouldn't you bring like a can of
zippo or something like whatever the equivalent was.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
Yeah, No, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (19:18):
Yeah, you might think it's way easier to catch things
on fire if he was just like putting kindling in
little mail slots, like yeah, maybe he has a different
impression of how fire works.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
Yeah, totally. He's just running around with a flint striker,
being like why is that working? It's like a stone palate.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
With the string and he's like spinning it in the
right stock. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
The cops are outside because he's like he's burning his
own shirt, right, Like he's willing to burn the shirt
off his back.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
That's what I mean. It sounds like it was almost
a whim like I'm just doing it, Like maybe he
just got the moment or got the I don't know,
but it's.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, yeah. And then there's the least likely thing, which
is that Nazis spies knew he was going to be
starting this fire, so they also positioned themselves to also
start fires at the same time as him, which is
what some people expect you to believe. The mighty Parliament
building of Germany went up in flames. Martis was apprehended
on the scene. I have read both outside on the

(20:12):
street and inside the building. He has the lighter on him,
He's scantily clad because he's been burning his clothes. He
is sweaty and panting. And the most damning part is
that he confessed immediately. He also immediately said that he'd
done it alone and that he had no associations with
the Communist Party, and that he had destroyed the Reichschag
to protest against quote a political institution which was being

(20:35):
used as an instrument to submit the workers to the
yoke of a fascist dictatorship. But you know what isn't
being used to yoke the workers to a fascist dictatorship.
Approximately thirty percent of our advertisers, because nice, you get
the idea of mixed feelings. Whatever, here's ads and we're back.

(21:04):
So what absolutely is true about this action is that
the Nazis are ready to take advantage of it. It
seems somewhat obvious that they didn't plan it. They were
just prepared for it as a probability. After all, they
had a piece of legislation that had been written by
their far right predecessors, as this is the piece of
legislation to pass if the left is any kind of

(21:25):
massive direct action. So once someone on the left did
a massive direct action, they put it into place the
thing that had been written a year ago within hours present.
Hindenberg blows up, No, that's still the zeppelin I tried
to write. Okay, I'm going to go completely off script
and tell you I'm going to call this a fable
because I learned this ten years ago and I have

(21:46):
not fact check it since.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
Beautiful.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
Have you ever heard about how Nazis ruined airship travel?

Speaker 2 (21:51):
I have not. I don't know if this is a
joke or not, but I wish those things still existed now.
The idea of sitting in a zeppelin going over the ocean.
Sounds really cool, and I'm not a steampunk so it
just sounds neat. I know.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
It's like way Greener I used to be a steam bunk,
so he used to write about airship travel and how
Nazis ruined it. Because again I'm running off ten year
old notes here, so treat this as a fable, even
though I believe it to be true. The head of
like airship travel in Weymar, Germany was someone who cared
about I think he was a centrist, but I'm not sure.

(22:25):
He wasn't like a radical, and he wasn't a Nazi,
was anti Nazi, and he cared about safety. And so
the Nazis got rid of him, and then they put
in place this like total yes man who just did
whatever the fucking Nazis said, cut back on costs. Again,
no comparison to what's happening now where corporations come in
and like start changing the way that airline safety works.

(22:45):
That obviously would never happen and no whistleblowers will get
shot whatever anyway, So the Nazis are like, wait, did they.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Take a submarine to the Titanic? I'm lost? Was that
what happened? Oh?

Speaker 1 (22:54):
No saying how the bow? Oh right, no, okay, So
the Nazi fucking started cheaping out on airship safety and
the Hindenburg was like, actually reasonably safe. I know there's
the whole like hydrogen versus helium argument blah blah blah
blah blah, but I'm not gonna get into that. And
then the Hindenburg went down and the entire world looked

(23:16):
at it and was like, oh shit, airships are scary.
They burn again, old information here. I mean it was
like a little less than one hundred people in the Hindenburg,
and like, I think a third of them died, and
like that's a lot. I don't want to be in
a I don't want to be in a space where
a third of people die. Right, I will take a
falling airship that is on fire, or I have a
two thirds chance of safety over a fucking airplane crashing. Yeah,

(23:39):
any day.

Speaker 3 (23:40):
That's what I was thinking, Like one crash, then no
more forever.

Speaker 1 (23:43):
Yeah, that's more or less what happened. Again, based on
information that I thought I was going to put into
the script and then realize my script is already long enough.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Yeah, And from a capitalist perspective, they're not cost efficient.
You can't jam as much crap and people onto them
and sell those tickets for overpriced amounts. Right, So that's
another problem too.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
But it can be so green compared to airplane travel.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
Oh. Absolutely, yeah. They just kind of float along with
very little propulsion required.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
Yeah. Wow, I think I would be terrified to be
on one. I'm gonna be real.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
Why how's it.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
Different even if it was packed with helium? I mean,
it seems like that seems pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
I mean the same reason I don't want to take
a boat across the ocean, just like storms and shit.
I don't know. I mean I bet if I like
did it, I'd become fine with it, you know.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
The idea if it's a little bit overwhelming.

Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah, I'm not like man heights rule, you know, I'm
more of a like Right, I can accept this.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
And it's really funny too when you think about Boy
this is off script, but like World War One, some
of the Zeppelins were used for bombing raids and such,
and those things were notoriously hard to shoot down.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
Oh really, Allied pilots like.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
Oh, they were incredibly difficult, And.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
So I would think it was the opposite for some
reason right.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
Alley pilots were die bombing on them and dropping bombs
and stuff because these things were considered like the dreadnoughts
of the sky. They were very hard to shoot down.
So to go from this World War One militarized version
to this theoretically civilian version that just blows up because
someone like struck a match or whatever. That happened to
the Hindenburg is like an example of where it could
have been and where it went right.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
Yeah, totally, Carl quote unquote not a steampunk casarta. We
call you behind your back.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
As I rant about how cool zeppelins are.

Speaker 1 (25:18):
I know, but they are okay, you know, there's a
couple things that they were right about.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
And you know what, cog wheels are cool too.

Speaker 1 (25:26):
I mean yeah, but they yeah, not as design, not
as design. That's where it all went downhill. So anyway,
my dog is like, would you please shut up about this?
He will just have to deal with it. So within
hours of this fire, President Hindenberg invoked that Article forty
eight that I'm in charge no matter what, even though

(25:46):
we pretend we have a democracy thing, and the cabinet
enacted the decree of the right President for the protection
of the people in the state. Hitler said, quote, if
this fire, as I believe, is the work of communists,
then we must crush out this murderous pest with an
eye iron fist, which is like not very nice of
a way to phrase things. I'm starting to think this
Hitler guy is no good. And it's so interesting, right

(26:07):
because the Nazi claim is that this fire was going
to be a signal for a larger uprising. It wasn't.
It should have been, but it wasn't.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
This again, thinking about like history and understanding the past
and now or then and even now, like when John
Brown instigated his raid against Harper's ferry, as we said
in an episode you said an episode one of this
you know, the South said this is just the beginning
of many abolitionists that are going to do this very thing,
and that's why we must do something about it. And

(26:38):
that didn't actually appear to be true. Like John Brown
had funding and had allies and had he had a
little army, right, but there wasn't like this upswing of
like massive amounts of abolitionist white abolitionist violence that was
John Brown was a bit anomaloist in that regard, like
and so here you see after the Reichstag fire, the
same exact thing. This is just the beginning of many

(27:00):
communist uprisings that are going to strike across all of
Greater Germany. Yeah, that same tool of fear. First of all,
knowing that you're doing wrong, right, you were an authoritarian
piece of shit as the planter class was, and knowing
you're doing wrong and the fear of people calling you
on it through direct action is a powerful tool for
more authoritarianism.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
Absolutely. And so with this law that they passed, there's
no freedom of speech, no freedom assembly, no privacy, no
freedom of press. They legalized phone tapping and stealing mail.
There's also no autonomy of states. Any state government can
be removed. No warrants are necessary to search houses, and
they expand the death penalty to include arson. Around four

(27:41):
thousand people were rounded up immediately without warrants, and I
don't know the fate of all of them. I know
the fate of one of the anarchists I read about
who died in a concentration camp a year later. And
they rounded up four thousand communist, social democrats and anarchists.
This was, as near as I can tell, the day
that ended a ground militant organizing in Germany. Survivors fled

(28:04):
the country or went underground. After this, All of this
happened a week before the new parliament whatever elections for government,
and these elections still happened, which is kind of impressive
that despite these roundups, the Communists won eighty one seats
out of six hundred total. Despite arresting all the competition,

(28:28):
the Nazis still didn't win a majority. Well, they still
had a plurality, right. The Nazis didn't need a majority though,
because what they did is now they had a list
of eighty one new people to arrest, and they arrested
all of the Social Democrat and Communist ministers and therefore
were able to control everything. And the way that they

(28:48):
were able to control everything is that there's a center party,
the Catholic Center Party, and overall the Catholics don't like
Hitler and Nazis, and some of them do really brave things, right,
but they're a centrist party, and so the Nazis are like, well,
all right, we won't ban Catholicism if you just let
us take power. And the Catholics are like, okay, and

(29:09):
let them take power. So not the strongest moment from
the Centrists.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
Yeah, but never underestimate the power of the concept of
the perception of self preservation, right, like, yeah, totally, so
often that carrots is dangled. Yeah, but it's almost always
a lie. It's only self preserved mostly usually self preservation
only for a little while. Right.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
Absolutely, it's so funny that we keep falling into that trap,
even though there's that fucking famous poem you know, or
famous speech it gets turned into a poem. But on
March twenty third, nineteen thirty three, they passed the Enabling Act.
The basically, the Nazis and the Catholics pass the Enabling
Act to give Hitler absolute power, making Parliament meaningless. They're like, uh,

(29:50):
we vote ourselves to suck. Did not matter. Then, when
President Hindenberg died of natural causes, he was eighty seven
in August nineteen thirty four. He actually, right before this,
he was like, before Hindenburg died, he was like, y'all
should fucking you suck? Fuck you, you're being a little
bit too much. I'm gonna I'm thinking about doing stuff
to you. And in response, they had the Night of

(30:11):
Long Knives. This actually gets a little bit beyond what
I totally understand because I didn't put it in my script.
But he dies, he's eighty seven. Hitler announces that the
president and chancellor roles are being combined and he becomes
the Fure, and he's like, you know, I want this
to be like legal. So on August nineteenth, nineteen thirty four,

(30:34):
there's a plebisite basically, when you like get the entire
country to vote on an issue to see how people
feel about it, to see if they approved of the
merging of the two officers and having Hitler be the Fure.
Ninety six percent of the population turned out to vote,
and ninety percent of the people voted yes. Well, this
was the least fair. This was not a fair election.

(30:54):
He probably would have won to be real, right, there
are stormtroopers stationed at all the pole stations. Some ballots
were pre marked, yes, spoiled ballots were just marked into
the yes category. More people voted than there were people
to vote in some places.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
Surryan, So you can I just have a quick TANGI
really quick. My grandma I'm Syrian, and my grandma was
a teacher in Syria, and teachers in Syria are civil workers,
and so when hafs I said Basher's dad was elected
in quotes, they had an election and the civil servants
were counting the votes, and she said that she was

(31:30):
told to drop the no in the trash and put
yes in the yes pile, and so democracy, Yeah, that's
that sounds like the fair good election.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah yeah, but ninety six percent of there's no such
thing as ninety six percent voter turnout. And getting a
situation would ninety percent of people agree on anything is
a human impossibility.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
Yeah, maybe ninety percent of people with a gun literally
their head will say yes, yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
But like in terms of like a legitimate there's there's
no way. There's just that doesn't exist. That is outside
of the realm of human physics.

Speaker 1 (32:05):
And like I'm impressed Hamburg voted twenty percent no and
Berlin voted like eighteen or sixteen percent no or something,
which means that a much higher percentage of people did
vote no. Right, And it is one of these things
where it's like you think the liberals won't act where
I'm ready to vote tomorrow if I could, you know,
like it's not as clearly not enough voting no in

(32:26):
this blood site did not stop Hitler.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
If anything, I would think that they would target the
people that said noo, like they did with the people
that were elected.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
No, it actually seemed like there is actually some bravery
in going out of voting now in this Bloo site,
because like you just watched them murder a whole bunch
of people and their stormtroopers around, and like, no one
knows quite how bad it's about to get, but they
can suspect, you know, they've had a long time to
see what. Hitler was pretty upfront about his plans, you know, but.

Speaker 3 (32:51):
He was hitlering from the beginning. He made it into
a verb earlier, and I thought that was funny.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yeah, And I think it was probably very hard at
that time, to be honest, like coming out of the
violin our Republic, which was this really like libertine progressive space,
like one of the most interesting bohemian times we've seen
in human history. To go from that to full on
conservative dictatorship authoritarianism is a hard thing to comprehend, Like,

(33:16):
how did my country that was, you know, this free
place where going to all sorts of bars and drag
shows and all these things that were going on in
Bohemian Weimar suddenly become this. It's hard to perceive if
you were living through that, it would be hard. Unerstaid
that it can't happen here, that's impossible, Like I bet
that was. There was a lot of that going on

(33:37):
for a while.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. So
that's how Hitler came to power. But this isn't really
an episot about how Hitler got to power. I just
had to explain it because I had to explain the
reichstrog So what matter guy Marnus, and why does history
seem as a Nazi agent? And why at the very
beginning did I say that I'm going to blame homophobia communists, Well,

(34:01):
because the Communists of the reason that everyone thinks is
a Nazi agent. Because as soon as the fire was set,
the Communists and the social democrats, rather than blaming the
Nazis for taking power and being like, hey, it's probably
good that people are fighting that we're bending over backwards
to see you could throw Marnus under the bus the fastest.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
To kind of separate themselves from him.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
Yeah, I think it was a little less like, don't worry,
Nazis were nice, were your friends? It was a little
bit that, right, and it was also just a like
wactual thing. It was a lot of bit that even
though they were like still anti Nazi, right. A group
of communists in Paris collectively wrote a book in nineteen
thirty three. So there's like, he gets arrested right away, right,
he's arrested on the scene, and they have this like

(34:44):
other thing where a bunch of like lefties have this
like other trial for him in a different country where
they're like, let's find out what really happened. But it's
not they're not finding out what really happened. They released
this book nineteen thirty three at the end of the
year while the trial's going on, or maybe a little
before the trial goes on. It's called The Brown Book
of the Reichstrog Fire and Hitler Terror. And this book

(35:05):
is a best seller in twenty four languages and is
the reason that people to this day believe that the
Reichstrog Fire was a false flag attack. The core of
their argument about why Marnus was a Nazi agent is
that they say Marnus was gay, and in fact, all
the Nazis bunch of gays. The Nazis are nothing but

(35:26):
a bunch of decadent homosexual criminals.

Speaker 3 (35:29):
That was part of their argument.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
That's like the whole of that's their main argument. Wow,
that's bold. We don't know whether or not Marnus was gay.
It seems possible. There is the around this time, you
get the report that I've covered on this show. I
can't remember the name of it, in like nineteen thirty
something like, there was a report of study of human
history sexuality that found out that about thirty percent of

(35:52):
maybe like thirty or forty percent of men have had
homosexual experiences. And then you know, so like maw might
have been. We do know he was in love with
a woman once. That doesn't mean much. We also know
that he was a broke, traveling vagabond, and sex work
seems like a way he absolutely could have made money
as well as anything else. I would want him to

(36:13):
be gay. Being gay as cool as hell. Yeah, many
of our advertiser it's not June anymore. No, no advertisers
are pretending to be gay anymore.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
But you know what, no, this is, this is July.
So now they're about disability.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
Oh okay, well he's he's blind. Oh so he's blind.

Speaker 2 (36:31):
There you go. So they support him because of his disabilities.
He's his disability and he's blind. So there is that's
that's what the ad should be.

Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yeah, I mean, you know, I actually do think that, like,
these months are not bad. What's bad is the cynicism
with which capitalist Oh.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
No, no, I hope that wasn't interpreted that way. No,
it's no.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
I think we all know that.

Speaker 3 (36:50):
I think I think our listeners would know.

Speaker 2 (36:52):
Yeah, it's the corporate ucer pation of it, right, It's
that it's that good guy badge nonsense that they put
on their commercials for one month only in this country
while they're doing something horrible in Saudi Arabia. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:03):
No, it's that classic beam of like a warship or
something dropping bombs and it's like Republican Democrat and then
it's like there's a pride flag on the Democrat.

Speaker 1 (37:12):
Yeah, that's all it really means, exactly.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
I think your listeners are smart enough to know that
we don't mean it in any bad way.

Speaker 1 (37:20):
But I hope they're smart enough to know that we
believe with all of our hearts that these goods and
services are absolutely good and we're back. So the core
argument in this book is rooted in homophobia and not fact.

(37:42):
They basically made up an elaborate fairy tale, Hey, fairy tale, sorry,
that a bunch of gay stormtroopers set the fire and
Marnus's pimp had made him take the fall for it,
which he was willing to do because gay men are
pitiful and desperate for affection. He was de sperate for
the affection of these gay Nazi stormtroopers, and also that

(38:05):
they would out him as a homosexual if he didn't
take the fall, And like, look, it's probably a crime
to be homosexual. I'm willing to bet it's more of
a crime to set the Reichstag on fire.

Speaker 3 (38:15):
But also like he probably wouldn't give a shit just
based on his history.

Speaker 1 (38:19):
Like I don't know, No, this is all made up.
It's complete, I know, I know.

Speaker 3 (38:22):
I mean, like that argument is just so thin and flimsy,
so stupid, Like he threw a cop out a window.
We think he fucking cares if you call him gay
in public?

Speaker 1 (38:31):
Come on, yeah, you know right, he'll either agree or
throw you out a window, right, Like so.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
I just want to know. It was this brown book
published by Time Life. It was like the little thing
you put on your on your coffee table. The time
life series of Communists, fire and Arson.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
I you know, I actually it's funny because the response
book that they later write a different people defending him
right is called the Red Book, and so it's like
there's like something going on with how they name these
things that I just like don't totally get, but there's
nothing that holds up in this book. During the months
when Marnus was supposedly plotting with gay Nazis to do
gay Nazi crimes, he was in Dutch prison for breaking

(39:08):
the windows of that agency that wouldn't fund his library
for the unemployed. They also claimed that he'd been kicked
out of the Communist Party for being suspected of being
a police informant Comrade after Comrade came forward to just
be like, that's not true. No one has ever thought that.
Say what you want about this man, and I'm gonna
mostly say positive things except some of the strategic decisions.

(39:30):
He was committed to socialism with the core of his soul,
Like this is like one of the most evil hatchet
jobs in history. Should Marness have started that fire? Probably
not in retrospect. Is it morally justifiable. Absolutely, it's morally justifiable.
They're the Nazis, Like we should set their things on fire.
They're the Nazis.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
Like, right, but it doesn't mean it all right, I agreed,
But it also doesn't mean it's tactically sound, right, that's
the mistake totally.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yeah, And he was on the right track when he
was trying to spur mass action. You know. Yes, I
know people who've gone to jail because they have felt
that their attempts to integrate with a larger social movement,
to participate in things have not gone well. And then
they've been like, well what do I do? And they've
been like, well maybe I should torch some cop cars

(40:18):
or whatever, you know, and then gone to prison and like,
I don't know, it's just a pattern. I see.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
Well, I mean he tried to motivate an entire group
of people that he thought were going to actually have
the backbone to do something, and when they don't, he's
left with this, considering his life's experiences, I could I
could see in his mind he's left with this, like, well,
someone has to do something, and I guess that's me yep, right,
And that's what happens.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
Yeah, Yeah, And sometimes you're John Brown and sometimes you're Marnus.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
You know, although John Brown wasn't alone, as we said, right,
he was funded and backed, so he wasn't totally isolated.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
Yeah. No, Actually that's actually a very good point. And
like and Marnus had a like it was part of
a movement, but was kind of acting outside that move
meant even more than John Brown was. That's a very
good point. Now, the Nazis would have one hundred percent
consolidated their power regardless. I'm going to talk about that
a little bit more later. This was the excuse that
they happened to use. I personally do not think history

(41:15):
would look fundamentally different if Marnus had stayed home that night.
I think we're talking about the difference of a week
or two. In fact, the Nazis had talked about kind
of waiting until after that next election before they started
arresting everyone, because then they know who to arrest.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
You know, I guess you could say what he did
was he turned out to be an accelerationist for what
was an inevitable reality. And if you know, if there
wasn't an arson fire, they would have picked and chosen something,
or they would have just created something out of whole cloth.
It didn't have to be an event, would have to
be like we know of a plot. They would have
just made it happen.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
Right, Yeah, yeah, done.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
Joke about him being an accelerationist when he didn't have one.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
That's true. He was an accelerationist without a can of
Zippo lighter fluid, Like yeah, that's that's true.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
Yeah yeah. So his trial, five people were put on
trial for the Reichstag fire. It was Marnus aka the
one who did it and confessed to doing it and
would have done it again, and then some other people,
the leader of the elected Communists in the parliament, and
three Bulgarian Communists. The Communist accusation against Marnis was that

(42:20):
he was a gay Nazi wanted the gay Nazis to
gay Nazi like him. The Nazi accusation against Marnis is
that he was a Communist party member who had been
part of a massive communist conspiracy to overthrow the government
and institute communism, which is closer to the truth. He
was a council Communist who was hoping that his individual act,
or possibly a small group act will never know, would
spark a popular revolt against fascism. The Nazis had wanted

(42:43):
to get the Social Democrats blamed for it too, but
it didn't work. The Social Democrats in Germany are just
so astoundingly centrist that no one would buy this. They
were a huge reason in the public's mind as to
why the country didn't fall to communism in nineteen eighteen.
Nineteen nineteen was the Social Democrats, so they were like, nah,
could have been them. The public was willing to blame

(43:04):
the Communist Party. This is almost equally absurd. The German
Communist Party was parliamentary to its core at this point
and only believed in mass action and not individual action.
The Communists and the Social Democrats both came out to
condemn the fire, despite having been saying for years, oh,
the Nazis aren't existential threats to democracy and human life.
But they're like, you can't set their stuff on fire.

Speaker 3 (43:28):
Peacefully protest, that's all you gotta do. Just peacefully protest.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
Yeah, stand in your free speech zone with your sign
and it'll be fine.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
Exactly so they know who you are. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:39):
Yeah, no throwing rocks, no burden shit, history will change eventually.

Speaker 1 (43:44):
Yeah, and you throw cops through windows. What the fuck?
I used to make pins that said hucking rocks at
cops is not a crime, and I made them as
little pins. And then one time a cop was giving
me a three hundred dollars ticket for sitting on a
sidewalk eating a sandwich. What And I was like, oh God,
he reads my pin, my life is about to get
so much worse. But he did not read the pin.

Speaker 3 (44:05):
That would be a moment where my stomach would be
in my throat.

Speaker 1 (44:08):
Yeah. Yeah, I was pretty used to being hassled by
cops at that point in my life. Three hundred dollars
for sitting on a sidewalk, Yeah, it's a way to
try and get people to move out of town. They're like,
we don't want homeless people in this town. We're going
to give you three hundred dollar ticket. We know you
can't pay it, so you'll probably leave rather than pay it.
Little did they know I was like actually housed. I
had just gotten food from a food cart and was

(44:29):
just like sitting on the sidewalk. But I still dress
like I'm a crustpunk. But like, you know, anyway, but
you didn't have a dog, did you? No? No?

Speaker 2 (44:38):
Yeah, I mean It's my understanding is that, besides having companionship,
the dog frequently makes it harder for them to fuck
with you in such a simple way because they don't
want to deal with the paperwork about the animal.

Speaker 1 (44:47):
Oh it makes some sense.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
Yeah, I mean that's what I've been told from Krusty's
like around here. But I don't know if that's fact
or fiction.

Speaker 1 (44:55):
Yeah, there's a lot of myth building that we do
when we live in strange lifestyles. But it might be true.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
You know, I wouldn't doubt. The bureaucracy is an annoying
thing to deal with, and I could see some lazy cogoing.
I don't want to deal with freaking animal control or whatever,
so it makes the next person to pick on easier.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
Yeah, no, it makes sense.

Speaker 3 (45:17):
Right.

Speaker 1 (45:18):
So together, the Communists, the social Democrats, and the Nazis
all agreed this fire was the greatest crime of our
time and Marinus is the worst person in history. They
disagree about why he's the worst person, right, some of
them are like, he's a Nazi, he's a Kami, right O,
Like he's gay? Yeah, oh he is even worse. Yeah, no, totally.
The other four co defendants had alibis and had nothing

(45:40):
to do with it, and even at this early stage
under Nazi control, they were exonerated. The whole time that
he's on trial, fully aware that the rest of his
supposed comrades are throwing him under the bus, he never
says a single word against any of his Code defendants,
despite the words that they say against him. I want
to quote an anarchist newspaper from nineteen thirty three talking

(46:03):
about that, like during the trial quote, he has said
nothing that might in any way damage his Code defendants.
He has not even tried an elaborate exposition of his
political and social views at the trial, most probably for
fear that they might be interpreted as akin to those
of the four communists the German government is trying to
link to the Reichstag fire, who he wishes an all

(46:23):
justice to exonerate. So he's like not even going to
get into the like, well, I'm a comedy, but like
not that kind of COMI because he's afraid that it'll
be used against the communists. You know, his co defendants
did not offer him the same grace. One called him
an narcosyndicalist, which I think they I think it was
like derogatory, like in you know, I just think it's funny.

(46:45):
It's fine be an narcosyndicalist. One of the Bulgarian communists
fought for him getting the death penalty. Wow, he wanted
the Nazis to kill this council communist because he'd quote
worked against the proletariat. Jail guy. Yeah, hate that guy.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
Oh, I'm sure, I bet you noe know. Those people
had a fun rest of their life regardless of this.

Speaker 3 (47:06):
That's fair.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
Actually, that's true. And I'm going to talk about what
happened to the people who wrote the Brown Book in
a moment.

Speaker 3 (47:12):
Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
For the most part, the libertarian socialist movement aka the anarchist,
the anarcho syndicalists, the council Communists, the left communist blah
blah blah blahlah. The people don't like Bolsheviks. They were
the ones defending him. They set up defense committees and
shit in a bunch of different countries. And the first
day of the trial, folks published the Red Book. And
this was a refutation of all of the lives of
the Brown Book. It is filled with all of the

(47:34):
character references of everyone coming forward and being like no
You're just entirely wrong. You've entirely made this up. This
man is a very committed socialist. I haven't read The
Red Book yet, and I'm terrified to read it because
of like it might also be like, in no way
was he gay. That would be terrible. He's good and

(47:55):
not bad. So I'm like afraid of finding that. But
what I do know is that and Weimar, Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld,
one of the famous researchers of human sexuality and history,
had once written about the anarchists, being like, oh, that's
where that's that's where you find the gay lefties. All
the gays are anarchists, so you know, I'm sure there's homophobia.
But if you've read The Red Book, message me, but

(48:18):
I won't notice it because it's kind of get filtered
into my unread messages on Instagram, which is the only
public way to reach me. And I don't read my
unread messages from different people I don't know, so it
won't work. But you can try, and I sometimes look whatever. Anyway, Honestly,
if you've read The Red Book, you probably like know
me through various connections to not that many people in
this world who are likely to have ever read this.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
All five of them are already direct friends or contacts.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
Yeah yeah, anyway. As for the editors of the Brown
book that he's a gay Nazi fairy tale, there is
about two different ways that like Stalinist communists in the
nineteen thirties and forties died. One of them is that
you get killed by Hitler. The other one is that
he had killed by Stalinists. It's a crapshoot as to

(49:04):
who has killed more communists, Stalin or Hitler, because these
two were killed by other Stalinists. One of them was
murdered by his fellow Stalinists in nineteen forty the other
went on to hunt down socialist and anarchists during the
Spanish Civil War before he was then turned on by
his own side and hanged in Prague in nineteen fifty
two for being counter revolutionary or whatever. The fuck is

(49:25):
not a good idea to be an authoritarian. As for Marnus,
he was convicted and he was sentenced to death. On
January tenth, nineteen thirty four, three days before his twenty
fifth birthday. They marched him out to the guillotine and
took off his head. Damn that man did a lot
in fucking twenty four years. Yeah, the Nazis refused his

(49:49):
family's request for the body, and he was buried twice
as deep as usual in an anonymous grave under a stone,
devoid of any inscription. He was actually exhumed last year
in twenty twenty three, because they wanted to run toxicology
reports on his body, because there's all of this, Like,
people still argue about this a lot, right now, right, what.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
Would they what would toxicology show?

Speaker 1 (50:12):
So he was so quiet and like almost sleepy during
his trial that people thought he might have been drugged
by the Nazis. When they exhumed his body to look,
they found no positive proof of that, but they weren't.
You can't prove negative proof on one hundred year old corpse,
right right, right, So we do not know. It makes

(50:36):
sense to me this story of this, like wild adventurer
who is going blind, who knows his time is done,
who is just trying to stay quiet to not let
anyone else get in trouble for what he's done, and
goes to his grave. I don't need any convincing that
he was drugged.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
Yeah, I agree, accepting his fate, but at the same
time being brave for those around him. Yeah, and the
potential I don't know if this was going through his
mind at all, but being a martyr really, like, I mean,
all those things could have been going through his mind.

Speaker 1 (51:10):
Right. Yeah, he also knew what a hatchet job had
been done on him.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
You know.

Speaker 1 (51:15):
His fellow Communists like used their defense argument was basically
the Brown Book. They were like, now fuck him though
he's a Nazi. You know, that's got to be heartbreaking.
Like a couple of different articles I've read about have
talked about like the second death of him or you know,
because he's like also just killed by history. And when

(51:37):
the Nazi government fell after Carl, would you say that's
the largest military effort in the history of humanity?

Speaker 2 (51:44):
Oh? Absolutely, The Eastern Front has never been ever seen
before and hopefully never again. But World War Two, the
Eastern Front in particular, but all of it combined is
absolutely the most the largest conflict ever seen easily.

Speaker 1 (51:59):
Yeah. After everyone got together and destroyed a lawful lot
more buildings than just the one. They put the Nazis
on trial, and the prominent Nazi Goring put it bluntly,
no Nazis were involved in the burning of the Reichstag
and the Communist ministers would have been arrested eventually anyhow.
In fact, he said it would have been more useful

(52:21):
if they had waited a few weeks because they didn't
know all the Communist ministers yet, because the elections hadn't
happened yet. In nineteen fifty nine, a journalist wrote like
seven hundred pages of evidence about Marnus had indeed acted alone,
and at that point it became the general view of historians.
Marnus's brother Yan kept fighting for his brother's legacy. Marnus

(52:45):
was tried and retried again and again. After his death
in nineteen seventy six, his sentence was reversed to eight
years because they're like, well, he burned a building. You're
not supposed to do that. You know, wait, how does
that am? I? It's just for history. Oh, he's dead, right,
Like they they're trying to be like, well, let's find
out what the real truth and justice would be, right, okay,

(53:07):
you know they're LARPing, yeah, totally justice system, yeah okay.
In nineteen eighty he was acquitted, and then in nineteen
eighty one they reversed his acquittal and he was convicted
again to eight years in prison. I feel like he's
been through enough, you know, I know. And then in
two thousand and eight he was finally pardoned. And then

(53:27):
in twenty thirteen a book came out that was like, no,
he was totally a Nazi. And I haven't read that
book yet, but it's like, I think its core argument
is that, like the fire was started in multiple places,
blah blah blah, not physically possible for one man, which
is how I first ran across the Like, this man
would not have told you if he had friends there. Yeah,
there is no part of me that thinks that this

(53:48):
man couldn't keep a secret to his grave. Like you
do not look at this man and say, here's someone
who hasn't thought about what's involved in revolutionary struggle, the
person who's been struggling since he was well born, but
ten you know, Yeah, either.

Speaker 2 (54:04):
One of those situations is just as plausible as we
said earlier. And also the fire succeeded in damaging the
Reichs dog significantly. But yeah, it was also such a
state of ill prepared to do what he planned to
do too, which is oddly and I would think if
there was more people involved, they would have had even
though they had success, they would have even more success.
I don't have to put that in a better way.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
I think that you're probably right. And that's like how
I ended up. Like I started off kind of doing
this research being like, oh, because I knew enough to
know he was like a pretty solid comrade, and that
also he knew how to keep his mouth shut. So
I was like, oh, there's other people and he kept
his mouth shut. Whatever you because I've run across that
time and time again in my history research, right, But no,
you're right. Like by the end, I'm like, no, it's

(54:45):
probably him alone, And I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, right,
maybe we will find out. There's no part of me
that believes that he was a Nazi agent, But maybe
we'll find out that the Nazis like ran over and
start some more fires or or knew he was going
to do it, and like they.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
Probably saw him do it at nine pm and they
nine thirty, maybe through a matching or something. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
Well, I mean, at least if this had happened nowadays,
ring door camera would have provided the footage to the call.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
Yeah, totally, and he still would have done it because
he was not afraid of I mean, he tried to
swim the channel twice just to get enough money to like,
fucking yeah walk to China with you know me.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
I feel like this might be another reason why he
didn't make it a huge effort to defend himself, because
I feel like he's been through, like interacted with enough
authorities to realize, like, I wouldn't do any good. Yeah,
like he kind of accepted his fate.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
Yeah, no, totally. And that is the story of Marnus,
And it is the story of how the Reichschrog fire
was not an inside job, and how almost all the time,
when people want to say something's a conspiracy or that
it is an inside job, they're wrong. And when we

(55:52):
assume that something was an inside job, we're often taking
an agency away from people who make bad decisions for
good reasons, even if we were the opposite team. Right.
Imagine those J sixers, right, They're all being accused by
their own side of being false flag. And I think
that's funny as shit because I fucking hate them all,
But like it's also almost heartbreaking, right because they're like,

(56:15):
we're doing it. Come on, everyone, we're gonna defend democracy
by staging a coup or whatever fucking's going through their heads.
And then everyone's immediately like, ah, those are Antifa, Like
like imagine how heartbreaking that would be. And I just
like get so like I don't know, and this is
like not universally true. There are false flag attacks, right,
But what I think usually happens is that everyone is

(56:38):
ready to play the hands that they have been dealt.
And the Nazis absolutely had a contingency plan for exactly
this situation and then used it. So whenever you're like, ah,
they were so ready to capitalize on the following yeah,
we should be ready to capitalize on bad things. That
happened was when I used to get docks by Nazis.

(56:59):
I just like use it to sell more albums because
I was like, oh, yeah, these people are trying to
murder me and everyone I love. They hate my music video.
You want to see my music video? Fuck it? You know,
we play the fucking hands we're delt like yeah, it
doesn't mean I made up my own I mean whatever
to get like three thousand views on YouTube. No one
actually thinks this, but like.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
Well that's I think essentiallyest thing I think, like maybe
it's humanity in general, Maybe it's just the way our
brains work, Maybe it's societal who knows what the how
these we get to where we get to. But I
think the simple thing is is that when it has
been proven without a doubt or close to it, that
it was some form of conspiratorial action, then that's worth considering, right,

(57:40):
But it should not be the jump to default.

Speaker 1 (57:43):
Right.

Speaker 2 (57:43):
The default should be the simplest answer possible. And that's
probably what happened. And if it was dumb to boot,
it was probably even more correct because people do dumb stuff.
I'm not saying he did something dumb or not.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
I'm saying no, I mean Marus kind of did something dumb.
I just it didn't work out.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
Yeah, But I'm just saying that. I'm just saying, simplest
answer with a touch of dumb is a very human thing. Yeah,
And that's where we should just default to totally.

Speaker 1 (58:08):
Well, that's the restag Fire episode that I was like, man,
am I doing this? But I'm doing it, and I
did it, and I hope we'll see you all next
week when we talk about more cool people who did
either cool stuff or questionable stuff.

Speaker 2 (58:23):
Sometimes one or the other Right, they don't even know
when they're doing the action. It's like how the action
turns out, turns out to be if it was cool
or not right, I mean to a degree.

Speaker 1 (58:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
So, glooping back to John Brown, his failure turned out
to be only effective in that in the long run
it made it work in a different way. But that
could have easily gone to just like this idiot got
himself killed, like that could have been the end of it, right, totally,
So this could have also turned out differently if that,
If things had just lined up differently, or they hadn't

(58:53):
thrown them under the bus, who knows what could have
come of it.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
Yeah, if Germany had had a civil war to try
and stop Nazis, world would have looked pretty different. They
might have lost the civil war, but they would have
fucked up the Nazis in the process.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
Well, when you reach up to that top shelf and
pull out that jar that says chaos on it and
open that lid, you literally don't know what's coming out.
You just don't like that's you open the It is
what's advertised on the tin, And that's totally Sometimes it
works out and sometimes it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (59:20):
Totally. Well, if people want to open up a jar
of the YouTube, I got nothing, Carl, what are you
up to?

Speaker 2 (59:30):
Oh yeah, I mean my normal thing. If you haven't
seen me already, you can find me on YouTube in
range TV, or you can find all my decentralized distribution points,
which I've been talking about for nine years now in
range dot TV. Even though everyone watches on YouTube. There's
an example of something like that. Boy, if we had
been decentralizing control of the media for the last nine years,
maybe we'd be in a better place today.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (59:51):
Yeah, that's a whole other conversation. But anyways, I do
a lot of topics based on firearms, historical content and
the intersectionality of the social implications of those things combined
for good and bad. So if that's a topic that
interest you that's different than the normal firearms stuff, you
might find out there in range dot TV. And thank
you for having me here. This was a really I

(01:00:12):
didn't know what we were going to be talking about,
but I'm really honored and thankfully you brought me onto
the show again. Yeah, especially for this topic. It's a
thank you appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
I was like sitting there and I was like, Oh,
Carl this week, I was like, ah, it's perfect because
I was like, I mean, it's not a gun episode, right,
but it is absolutely a you know, history of World
War two and history of conflict, and you know the
social stuff that comes before the larger military conflict and things.
So I was I was really excited to have you.
If folks who are listening want to play a tabletop

(01:00:41):
role playing game I wrote, it's called Pan Number City.
I wrote it with two other people, and it is available.
I was gonna say wherever you get, but well, I
guess it's probably available wherever you get books. Should we
probably should buy it from a game seller or from
us at Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness. If you just
look up pannumber City and it's fun and you can
play in a kind of vimar our style but high

(01:01:01):
fantasy revolt against a god king. Everyone's like running around
on motorcycles that explode and playing jazz even though everyone's starving,
and people hang out and talk to rats. If you
want to watch me play this game with Jamie Loftus
playing a rat king someone who hangs out and talks
to rats, you can find that on YouTube. If you
look up a number city. That's what I want to plug.

(01:01:24):
I really like the game I wrote, Otherwise I wouldn't
have written it. Nice.

Speaker 3 (01:01:29):
Merger also wrote a book that you should pre order.
That's what I'm gonna plug.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
Oh yeah, the Sapling Cage and duh. See y'all next week.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.