Radio War Nerd, Episode #48—Italy in WWI
Italian Front in WWI
After barely surviving a camping trip in the Italian Alps, the War Nerd returns to Turin to tell the little-known, gory story of the Italian Front in World War I. It begins with a comically loathsome celebrity poet, Gabriele d'Annunzio, and ends — after hundreds of thousands of gruesome pointless deaths, and a lot of half-baked Nietzschean blather — in Mussolini's Fascist takeover . . .
Total Time: 2:17:26
Comments (12)
Yeah I know it's a decade on, but I'm listening to classic episodes and I wanted to get something in. Both from reading books about Italy in WW1 and talking to old Italian relatives who remembered things their parents and grandparents said about that time, part of the reason Italy went fascist in the 20's even though they were on the winning side of the war was there was a sense that the other Allied powers looked down on them. Wilson, backed io by the British and French famously denied Italy some of her war claims, and the Italians felt cheated by this. They also felt, not entirely incorrectly that some racial bias played a role, that they were looked down upon by liberal protestant Anglo-Saxons. I think it's sort of like Japan, in that they too were on the allied side in WW1 but shifted hard to the right in the 1920's and 1930's in part because they felt the old powers didn't respect them. You can be a winner and still have a wounded nationalism.
We should perhaps do another version of this episode with Annibale.
This has be the best podcast you ever did. The problem with handling recent events is that one tends to react to the noise and it is often difficult to tease out more poignant historical trends
Thanks. A little cultural and chronological distance does help though, and that war is far away enough in both senses to speak about honestly. Plus I had help from my friend Annibale.
A shot from <a href="https://gif-central.blogspot.com/2014/03/sound-of-music-machine-guns.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">"The Sound of Music", War Nerd edition</a>
Wow, I just came back from there too! Wonder if we passed by each other!
Brilliant episode thnx
Thanks. There's too much history around here. It was hell getting ready for that one.
You guys were cracking mad jokes on this episode. "There are a lot dangerous windows around here." Ha ha.
You could say Europe Pre WW1 was like Murdock in the A-team for real !
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is just a PR firm for Neil DeGrasse Tyson he's nor particularly smart compared to those in his fields Atheists and Astrophysicists. He has a bad habit of making stuff up to fit his narrative like changing quotes and such. But then again he's a Republican from New York with the hallmarks of a political operative.
don't know anything about neil. has he published something of note, or is he just another semi-employed physics phd talking about things outside his field of expertise?