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About this Episode
In which we discuss the aftermath of World War 1, the reasoning behind the creation of Interpol, the proto-deep state, and decades of anticommunist scheming.
Check out THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED HERE
Transcript
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World War One has happened, right?
And this is the one thing we didn't want to happen.
If we were, you know, wealthy, influential European elites of the time,
we were talking in, it was either the last episode or the one before it,
about how, like, the specter of the 30 years while, you know, this apocalyptic,
continent-wide conflagration that involves all these different major powers,
is something that had terrified and it had remained in, like,
the institutional memory of the European elite for centuries.
And now, yeah, it's happened again.
And obviously there's the idea, there's the argument that
World War One was actually just the opening shot in what became a second
30 years long war as well.
So, yeah, Europe's got egg on its face geopolitically right now.
And after World War One, there are all these different new states.
There are all these different new political settlements emerging, right?
And we've got six new states carved out of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire.
We've got Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland,
and Austria itself is now just this tiny,
piddling little rump that's an eighth the size it used to be.
And all of these states have, they have new stumps, they have new banknotes,
they have new legal papers.
And so, if you are, like, an enterprising criminal who specializes in
forgery or counterfeiting or, you know,
long cons, short cons, something like that,
then this is, this is your kingdom come basically.
This is a bounty to be heard, right?
Nobody knows what these new emblems look like.
Nobody knows what is an official, like diplomatic bag, you know,
you can just draw something at home and be like,
Oh, you haven't heard about the new state fume?
Between Yugoslavia and Italy, yeah, this is where that's from.
Okay.
And the other thing about World War One is that it created this
need for like total war states.
This was a first in history, really.
And so the entire sort of productive capacity of different countries was
repurposed and dedicated towards fighting World War One.
So that meant everything was subordinate to this need to finance and equip
these huge armies for four years.
I don't know the exact statistics off the top of my head, but
have you guys heard about the, like, just as an example in the first month of
World War One, the number of shells, the French and the Germans were
using it, it used up something like 10 years production inside that
opening 30 days.
It was fucking insane.
How, yeah, how just how big and how violent and how
how resource intensive, you know, the war was.
I think the resource, resource minister,
I always forget his name, but the German resource,
resource minister, resource minister, I think he like estimated, like,
we can only keep doing this for like 11 months.
And then the Haber Bosch process makes sure that you can sort of like
synthetically make, you know, phosphor and like, you know, blow up things.
Like with the industrial production of the necessary chemicals, like reaches
it, like, I mean, and this was supposed to be for like agriculture, right?
And then it, like, you know, it just jumps to another level.
They're like, okay, well, then we can keep doing this, you know, yeah.
So, yeah, Rattenau, I think, isn't it?
Rattenau, yeah, maybe.
But yeah, no, it's a day.
The plans were like skewed to say the very least.
Yeah, I mean, not, I, I work it off on a tangent too much about this,
but I mean, I do highly recommend anyone listening to this.
Try and read in to World War One.
I feel like it explains so much about,
yeah, like the, the modern, the truly modern nation state, you know, because you,
they're in this situation where nobody had ever seen anything on this scale
before, this level of destruction and just indiscriminate carnage.
And yet at the same time, because of like industrialization,
these states in Europe could really absorb a lot of the damage as well, which meant that
there becomes like this, this race between a nation state sort of building up
the capacity to absorb damage and then respond to it in kind and sort of
deal out damage.
And you just get into this insane spiral, like an arms race, basically.
And it forces like innovation in violence and in state violence.
And what it meant is that governments were now feeling in
bold and to actually turn to these European ruling classes.
These, these no built nobles and aristocrats and say,
you know, you actually need to contribute towards this.
Considering this is kind of like in a sense, it is kind of an aristocrat war.
You know, this is happening because of the insane sort of balance of powers
that's been born out of these, you know,
introfam familial relations and networks and shit like that.
So three major castes, right, in England,
and Germany, for example, yeah, yeah.
And I always like that.
The thing about the Kaiser is he was kind of seen as the the weirdo geek,
you know, the weirdo geek cousin that could be lost to do everything.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so this begins to like erode and drain the wealth of the European
upper classes because a lot of their money comes from like rent and bonds.
And it's now being sort of, I don't want to say what's the term?
It's not being requisition, per se, but it's been drained away to pay for this war.
Right.
And at the same time you have like these industrialists, these captains of industry
who come to the far and they begin to gain like more prominence and importance,
they begin to prove their worth to the state,
but it also means that they're under slightly more control and direction from the state.
Yeah, this gives birth, I guess, to both big pharma and big camp.
Yeah, yeah.
So they're really a player now.
Yeah, I mean, that's, I've already said it,
but that's what's especially fascinating about world war one is you can see
all these different seeds being planted that will come to bloom throughout the rest of the 20th century.
It's pretty fascinating.
And you have like these historically powerful ruling elites.
No, places like Austria, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Russia,
the longer this war goes on, the more catastrophic is their loss of like legitimacy,
you know, because the war just bleeds the countries of wealth, of prestige,
damages their reputations internationally.
I mean, Germany is just, well, we all know it's just the complete fucking pariah state
after world war one and it undermines confidence in them like domestically as well.
To the point where, you know, in Russia, like the, the Bolsheviks and the,
the communists like embrace radical defeatism because they realize that the only
where we are going to get what we want out of this is if the current ruling order
is completely destroyed by the war and creates the space for us to, you know, slip in.
And so yeah, you, the war ends and you've got this situation where like the relationship
between the elites and like the mass of people has experienced this incredibly
profound like transformation.
You've got all these veterans that are returning from the war.
And nobody can really nail down why the war started, why they were fighting it,
why it lasted for four years.
But the people coming back from fighting it.
No, they won't fucking pain in some way for it.
They won compensation.
And so a lot of European states are kind of forced to grant more and more
concessions to these like increasingly well-organized labor movements.
And there's an academic called Jeff Ellie or Ealy, I think he's called.
And he's argued that world war one and it's aftermath sort of accelerated the
struggles between mass movements and establishment elites, which I mean,
it seems pretty obvious on the face of it.
Yeah.
And it eventually institutionalizes democratic politics.
You've got like expanding suffrage.
And this is only going to become the norm from that point on.
You know, you've got the women's vote is coming.
And so this era of patronage and caught influence where you have a sort
of an imperial family at the car and then all these hangers on and
popeteers in the shadow sort of trying to win favor and influence,
you know, the cost of history.
That sort of coming to a close that can't be done as overtly as it was before.
And so what?
Yeah, and what a lot of these industrialists and these aristocrats and then
ability and stuff, what they start to do is they go back to the drawing
board and they turn to like political capture basically.
So they begin financing parties and movements.
They bargain with some sections of the working class against other sections.
And they use the wealth and connections among what we talked about before.
Like the boys clubs, you know, in intelligence, in industry politics,
to guide democracy in a direction that's more favorable to their interests.
And I put this in the notes and I don't know how much or not we want to get
off on this, but I've been thinking about the idea of if we could point to
this period as like the beginnings of what people come to call like deep
states are, you know, politics, I guess.
I think so.
And yeah, it's again, this is just such an interesting period in
world history, not just European history because absolutely everything is
still up for grabs.
Nothing is actually settled yet, you know, we may be getting into it a
little bit further down the line this episode.
But if you look at what you have the Russian Revolution and then you have
like what happened in Germany, you know, and if that domino had a fallen,
we could be living in such a different world.
Now if Germany had gone left instead of the direction it did going.
Right, right.
So, yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right?
Like, because if we do suggest that there is this the beginning of like a
proto deep state here, which I do think like there is, you know,
not only do we see in the 20s, yes, the creation of, you know,
the institution that we are going to talk about, which is like, you
know, initially, like we said, a voice club, a gentleman's club,
more of a deep state phenomenon still, you know, it's still in in the
days when they call it a commission, you know, it's not really called
Interpol.
It's unclear who's a member is.
It's unclear like who should pay and what the purpose of the commission is.
We have, you know, all the other ones, the twoless society of like all
these, you know, Felicia aristocrats of like a pan German vision, which is
going to fund and organize the veterans right to fight against this
problem, right? Like because that is the opposite, right?
The reason why there is a proto deep state evolving at this time is
because, of course, the greatest crime that has happened during this part
at this time is not all the people taking advantage of the the forging
and the counterfeiting and all the long and short schemes, et cetera.
No, the worst thing is that like the workers have taken over the whole
fucking state in Russia.
Yeah. And now everybody wants to do the same thing.
Everywhere else like from, you know, Hungary to Slovakia, you know,
the Soviet in Bavaria for a short while, there's, you know,
the war just continues in Ukraine between whites and and these terrorist
groups, which are funded by, you know, everything from the French secret
police to to this, you know, interests, a command shaft, the organization
of German industry, we have things in the Baltic keep on going.
We're like England is involved on, on, you know, with their fleet,
blowing up Soviets at one point and blowing up German Freikorps soldiers
at another and like all this is taking place even though the first world
were supposed to have ended.
So like, I think they only like, you know, for the people who are
off the status quo, I mean, it's not hard to see.
I mean, we can make the list much longer, like almost every place has
some kind of like explosion of this kind.
And of course, they think that the only way to solve this is to,
you know, like the only thing that still exists is the police in a way,
right? Like the armies have all been blown to pieces.
And here are these like, yeah, you know, semi functional
police forces, especially in this, in this old, you know,
empire that, you know, was the biggest in Europe, which hasn't
have now become many small states, which is Austria, right?
This is where the, with headquarters of that police for used to be.
So it's not so surprising that they will then be the ones who,
who, who gets assigned this role of like an international police to,
to fight the problems in each of these individual countries that have
been, you know, split apart from it.
Because they used to rely on the headquarters of Vienna anyway.
So they will, you know, continue to do that now, but in a slightly
different fashion, right?
Yeah, this seems to be, you know, like it's, it's not really like,
I think that's why this time around Interpol becomes like a real option.
Whereas when it was like in Monaco, it was like, yeah, cool.
Why wouldn't we have a boys club in, you know, the biggest and coolest casino?
But now it's all like on a more, you know, material and practical level,
you know, it's not just vibes anymore.
It's sort of like if you want to have all lower and order in all these old
countries, which are not a country anymore, we need an international police,
you know, at least in the beginning, yeah.
And I think that's sort of like where they find themselves at this time,
and all right?
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's sort of hard to overstate really just how
much the Russian revolution fought with these people's heads.
And they, you know, they, they still carry the, like the,
what would, what would they call it, what would the Israelis call it?
The epigenetic, the epigenetic trauma, right?
Like to this day, you know, all these like old families in Europe,
they still carry the, like the trauma of the, of the Russian revolution.
And, and so yeah, it's, it's this like terrifying demonstration to them
that like a sufficiently popular mass movement can just radically upend,
like the social and property relations of a society.
And it's the property relations more than anything else that concerns them.
And it's seen as this like contagion that can spread, you know,
to other parts of Europe.
And so yeah.
So six years after this revolution, a cop in the middle of Europe,
he continues the work of the Prince of Monica.
And this is Johan Shobba.
Am I saying his surname, right? Shobba.
I think, yeah, Shobba.
Yeah, I think Shobba.
Yeah.
So 1923.
Yeah.
Very, very interesting guy.
Our first real Interpol guy.
Yeah.
The first man from Interpol, in a sense, he sends out this invitation in 1923
to every single police chief.
Like he can think of who's done anything of any know whatsoever, you know.
So Tokyo, Berlin, Cairo, London, New York, Cincinnati, wherever, right?
He invites them all to a summit because he's now got in his mind.
The idea for one guy who he doesn't invite though, right?
Who's that?
Oh, the Soviet Union, my friend.
Yeah, yeah, he parted it.
Yeah.
There was, I was trying to find out if there was any
pre-revolutionary Russian establishment figures present at this conference in some capacity.
Yeah, there has to have been, there has to have been plenty of those white Russians.
Yeah, because they're at the very least, I would imagine,
there will have been a lot of Ukraine.
They'd already sort of prior to the revolution.
They'd already established like these outposts all over Europe.
They had headquarters in Paris.
I think they had a little unit set up in London as well.
Germany, Italy as well, I think.
And their job was just to catch like radicals and, you know,
dissidents who'd fled Russia and had gone, we're trying to go underground.
And their job was to catch them and send them back to Russia to, you know, to fetch trial.
So, yeah, I imagine they did have some people at this, this conference.
And so, yeah, this is where we'll, we'll fully meet Johannes Schober.
So, our guide, Johannes Schober, he was now ordinary police chief
because he was also the chancellor of Austria.
He held dual positions, very influential positions at that.
And throughout his life, he held no less than 10 different high ministerial positions,
leading the ministry of education, finance, commerce, foreign affairs, justice.
And also minister of the interior at different stages in his life.
I think when I read this, I don't know if you reacted to this,
but this has to be some sort of record, it feels like record.
It's, I've never met anyone that's like the minister of education, finance, commerce,
more and more affairs, justice and minister of interior at the same time,
or not the same time, but like the same, yeah, in one life span.
It's technically really two different countries as well, right?
Like because, you know, he, he's an old dog, right?
Like he was there from, from before as well during the Austro-Hungarian times.
Yeah, exactly. And then in Austria, the split, when they lose the war.
No, but so, so this was the first that I was thinking that they don't make him like this anymore.
And he was, he was a shoe-shiner, right, from the beginning.
He came from the bottom, right? He worked his way up through hard work.
Isn't that the case?
Yeah, it's an idea.
Yeah, yeah, of course, of course, but I'm in with, it's, I still think it's, you know,
because his father, his side, they came from money and prestige, right?
Of course, and, but I still think like at this stage, like in the nation state and the building,
you know, they, they really had to be more hands on a lot of the upper classes.
Yeah, so because, and especially, I heard is talking to some Austrian guys before that like,
they were all like polyglots in the Austro-Hungarian empire, right?
Like they had so many languages that they had to speak.
And, and I think this is something that we should keep in mind.
So even though you joke that he's like a shoe-shiner, like, of course, it comes from privilege.
But I think it's, it's, it's not the same type of, you know, fail-san,
fraud, that was, that's more popular today, right?
I mean, these people are part of building the institutions, which, which the fail-san's are going to inherit.
Like they, these people have, yeah, it's not, it's not like a headset or a watch the name of this guy.
The, the guy in the U.S. right now.
The Secretary of Defense.
The war minister.
Yeah, hasn't he changed, hasn't he changed the name to the, yeah, yeah.
I mean, he really looks like a frat the boy, right?
Like an alcoholic frat boy.
Drunk Kimler, like this, yeah.
And we should give, like, a short speech to maybe of Johannes Schoberg as well.
I said off-mic to Matt, you know, that nobody has ever managed to look as much as the monopoly character as this guy does.
Mr. Money, like, it's really.
Yeah, he is the listener should, should Google and see a picture.
Yeah, it's like wearing a top hat and this old fancy suit with a pull up collar.
And, yeah, nice glasses without, what's it called?
The things on the side of the glasses.
The, uh, my arms.
Yeah, the arms.
Oh, no, yeah, arms, you know, like those that just rests on the nose, right?
Yeah, and if you frown, they fall off.
Like, it's mannerism.
Like the aristocracy really have a weird sense of fashion, you know,
like any the minimal effort of, like, man, your labor and they sound it will follow.
Yeah, but that's what it's supposed to indicate, right?
It's the same with the, you know, the long nails of the Chinese taxi driver is to show that, like,
I don't work with my hands that way.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
So anyway, this guy, then he's born in 1874 in Perg in Austria, in Upper Austria.
And so he was around before the first world war, as you said, in the Austrian area and empire.
And his family came from above money and prestige, as was common.
And in Austria, for the listeners, don't know, it's a Catholic country.
It's not a lot of Protestants.
So the same was the case for Johannes Schober.
And his parents combined the ethos of obedience to the church and state.
And, but also they were in favor of the broader Pan German.
Forever, that was going around at the time, which is, and I think he had, like,
which is, if you want to explain, like the Pan German, what it is, it's like that all German speaking.
People should become like one nation, right?
So like the parts of Switzerland, that speak German, where a lot of like the Protestants are from, like,
from the mountains, at least, then the rest of Germany, obviously, Austria, those part of like a Czech Republic,
even some northern parts of Italy, right?
They should all become one country, right? Like that's the pan German idea at this time.
Yeah, that they had, and this is something that is worth mentioning, because it's only based on language, right?
So for example, for the listeners that have read some Leonin or Stalin or other communist thinkers and leaders,
usually the language is only one part of it, right? When we talk about the nationality.
But for these guys, it's just very superficial.
It's just like everybody speaks German, okay, then we should be the same, because we're the same people soul.
Exactly. And also worth mentioning is that it includes the German speaking population at, like, the borders of France, etc.
And this was something that was part of the buildup for the war.
A good rule of thumb throughout the history of Europe is whenever you encounter someone talking about how all the German speaking people
needs to be under one umbrella, run, just run the fuck away as fast as you can, because it never ends well.
Matt, have I told you my dad's favorite joke gone, like one German is okay.
Two Germans, they start singing. Three Germans, they start marching.
Yes, yes.
It's correct. It's funny because it's true.
That's exactly.
All right. Yeah, but so he was a folks part high. Is there idea, right? That's what he's a member of.
Yeah, he's a member of this even leader, maybe at one point.
Yeah, yeah, the way around leader, but not party member. Sorry.
Yeah. And it's, uh, uh, means the greater Germans, people's party.
And, uh, and he was a career civil servant after going through the like all of the education that is expected of him.
And a man of his stature, he wanted to have a career within the state body apparatus.
Right. This was something that was very popular in the in the German states.
We're like them.
And I think even in Sweden at the time, I don't know, was it the same in Britain?
Is it like universal at this time, or is it something that is more aligned with Germany, Austria, etc.
That like this was seen as a higher calling, you know, to be a statesman.
Yeah. It was pretty common in England, I would say, especially like the idea that you, you know, people of good breeding, you know, they go to the right school.
And then they get some kind of, yeah, civil service job, you know, become a diplomat or something like that.
And it helps you sort of move, you know, amongst the elites and find out how this is before NGOs, basically.
Yeah. Because I think they replaced the function of this.
Yeah.
Today in Sweden, at least it's like the, the highest members of society, they don't want to get involved in the state anymore.
They leave that for like the grants.
Yeah.
I'll always move to Dubai, no, rather than get the hands down.
But so he was basically groomed from an early age to become a statesman.
And he was assigned to the in the start upon completing his postgraduate training.
And as I mentioned before, he was multilingual.
This was very common in Austria at the time.
You had to be able to speak, of course, German, Austrian, German.
But also Hungarian, right, as well as a whole slew of other languages.
I think they had now I'm going to just make something up and lie here.
But it's not only like two official languages.
I think they had like five or six.
Like these Austrian guys told me before, but I didn't listen to too closely.
I know it's more than two anyway.
Because there was a lot of minorities within the empire.
And he was also fairly close to Edward VII of England.
And he oversaw the King's protection details during his summer visits to Austria.
Yeah, I didn't know about this. This stuff you added, right, man?
Yeah.
Like that he was quite involved in overall and seems like in like international affairs in this way.
The diplomats, nobility, royalty, etc., etc.
In a sense, you can find like his mirror in someone like saying kind of like an Alan Dulles.
Although Dulles was worked in the private sector for a bit, but he has a similar trajectory where he's a civil servant
who he can sort of leverage his position to sort of move amongst all these different
elites, you know, in Europe and America and whatnot.
And like Dulles, he had a knack for intelligence work and surveillance as well.
Or certainly like, that's what Dulles told people he had a knack for.
But you know, it's the same sort of digger in Austria's history.
Yeah, because we should never forget that like these guys, they are basically managers and middle managers.
So they're not doing the actual work themselves.
They're not on a like a stakeout following around like the radicals.
Of course, there's somebody else for that.
But they're the ones sitting behind the desk reading all the reports.
But this side of it, then, you know, like to be somebody like Dulles, for example, because I mean, this is the old still, you know, in many, many ways.
This is still the old Habsburg Empire to all these people who might introduce before, who have been like, you know, robbed of their wealth and who are like right now in a kind of conflict with the bourgeoisie.
Like, yeah, they have like, you know, relatives all over the place.
And I read about this other guy, like another comparison that like in Vienna, we see already like, if we go back just shortly, like I mentioned,
of the first episode when we were towards the end of the 1700 and the absolute monarchy period.
I think this is the first time when you see also this kind of secret police people like Matt, you suggested before, you know, like when they get to, when they eventually, you know, now in the second wave, get put on a, on a government payroll.
I think even during the absolute monarchies, there was a sort of period there towards the end of the 1700 to do the same thing.
There was like this guy called Franz Gotthardi, who was made as a front, the sort of overseer of the theater in Vienna.
He came from Hungary. It's a Hungarian name, his original name.
And he was put there, yeah, like a front, but actually he was working for the Habsburg Empire to set up like, yeah, like one of the first secret police forces to sort of check on the enemies of the aristocracy.
So sort of like, yeah, the Jesuits in so far that they represent Catholic Church, the Illuminati in so far that they, you know, represent maybe nobility that doesn't like the absolute monarch and yeah, the Freemasons of the bourgeoisie, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's like, this is the place where this should happen. It seems like.
And you know who Johannes reminds me of like another guy that actually like can compete with like the amount of, you know, ministerial positions, et cetera.
It's a Winston Churchill, yeah, yeah, because he was also like minister of six or seven different ministries, et cetera, and had like a long career.
And I think you jumped pocket is as well, right?
Yeah, and like reading about Johannes Scherber, it's basically like he is what would happen to like Winston Churchill if they would have lost the war.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess.
So, but they're very similar, right?
And I think like they they come from high up bringing, but isn't it the case with Winston Churchill as well, Matt that he's like not there.
Like, you know, from the top 10 families, yeah, he's more of a like a bootlicking family.
Yeah, he's from I think he's from the Spencer family.
So he's from the same family as Princess Diana.
Interestingly, yeah.
Which again, like by our standards, they are incredibly uppercruous, but by the standards of the uppercruous, they're kind of their version of like, you know, the striving bourgeois, the aspirational bourgeois or whatever.
Yeah, exactly.
And we have to like the listener has to remember that like if we maybe I'm going on a tangent here, but like if we, you know, rewind like back during the feudal days, etc.
Like a lot of nobility, they got their lands and titles for good service.
Yeah.
So even among the nobility, because to us mere mortals, we can just say, oh, well, he's an obel and he's an obel and we think that they're alike.
But you know, you have this in Sweden, in Germany, we call them like Urudel, like the original nobility, you know, like the ones that can trace their lineages back like a thousand years.
And then you have the ones that got their titles, like maybe in the last 200 years, and they are seen as like new money.
But to us, they're all the same, right.
But so this is something just to have in mind when we talk about people like Johannes or Winston.
But yeah, so going back to understand the intra class conflict, basically, like why they have intelligence on their own people, sort of, you know, like even though these are rich people, they still want to check on them.
You know, if they believe that they're going to start a revolution or like they did in 1789, for example, yeah, they're not all friends.
Okay, let's go.
Yeah, so anyway, he was made the head of the Office of State Security, and this is the year before the outbreak of the First World War.
So during the old empire, right.
And he plays a major role during the war as a leading counter intelligence officer.
And he's above all else loyal to the law and order and the maintenance of the proper social relations, which means he was spying on the royals as well as guarding them.
And he wanted to basically keep the status quo.
But as we all know, Austria lost the war.
And the empire was broken up into smaller kingdoms.
And as we will see Johannes being a very pragmatic man, he doesn't just have like a mental breakdown.
Or maybe he has, but he like, he recuperates quite quickly and starts to build on another project, right.
And this is, I think you can take over a little bit, Markus.
Yeah, I guess I like to think about this like as the Battle of Helm's Deep, right.
Like if the communist are the orcs, now we're like, we've broken through like the first wall.
Then Shobri is like, yeah, back to the, to the keep, right, where the, where the big, I can't remember what the big trumpet is called.
But he retreats back to that, right, with the last rampart of the broken empire, which is the police.
And I think like considering everything we've been talking about now, it doesn't surprise anybody that like, yeah,
he just goes like full berserk mode.
And like, just like, I think everybody knows in Germany about the Freikorps, right.
So they, in Austria, they have the same thing called the Heimwehr.
So in Swedish, it's Hemvanet.
I think you call it territorial army, maybe, in England, right.
Where Gareth did his service, Gareth from the office.
He's always like, yeah, I was in the territorial army.
The TA, isn't that what you're, yeah, it's like sort of.
So he organizes that, the Heimwehr, to, to beat back the revolutionary forces in, in Vienna.
And in Austria, so whole, which leads to, I think the big event is when there's like 86 men, women and children killed.
During a demonstration, outside the palace of justice, this is in 1927.
So I can't remember when did we put down the first sort of, I mean, this is a little bit after,
Interpol, I've been founded, but it's sort of like, yeah, sort of one of the first things that he does to sort of.
And if the final things, he does to sort of like neutralize this conflict and end the,
if we think that like the class war continues a little bit after the First World War,
this is like his big, big moment, you know, when there's a victory.
And then Vienna on the ghost is sort of like, just as what the Weimar was also sort of social democratic compromise,
where, you know, they, you know, had an unholy alliance of recruiting these right-wing parliamentary forces,
even terrorist groups, you know, like people that they themselves labeled terrorists later,
they originally hired to fight back against the unions, against the demonstrators,
against the, yeah, the working class as a whole, basically.
And we've talked about, talked about that already, like in the parliament series, you know,
like how this is sort of like the purpose of social democracy in many ways.
And now we have a third example of this.
And yeah, it takes place in the, in the midst of the development of Interpol as well,
that like under this veneer of red Vienna, there's a black Vienna brewing kind of, you know.
Yeah.
There's something I find quite interesting about what happened here in 1927 as well.
So from what I can gather of reading about it, it wasn't quite like a false flag attack.
You know, it was like he said, Marcus, like these fascist paramilitaries got out of hand
and attacked this crowd.
And then the crowd assumed that the police had been in on it, so they attacked the police.
And then, yeah, Shobba told his guys to just up and fire to let restore order.
And that's when they killed the 86 people.
Now in later years, Shobba was held, yeah, he was held in contempt by like the socialist
and the social democrats as someone who had, yeah, like collaborated with fascists
and Shobba for his part is supposed to have been really upset and hurt over this accusation
because he always saw himself as this apolitical arbiter of what was right and proper in Austrian society.
He never saw himself as taking sides, which I know it sounds like an excuse, but I actually think
it helps to understand like where this mentality comes from right.
And I'm kind of, I'm kind of making a reach here, but not much of one.
And it's a bit of a tangent, but not much of one.
There's a book called The Anglo-American Establishment.
And it's by a guy called Carol Quigley.
And he gets into this thing called the Roundtable Group, right.
Which I think we may have mentioned it on the show before at some point.
And that was founded in like 1891, partly in response to this growing wave of mass radicalism,
you know, like anarchists and communists and socialists and all the rest of it.
And it was basically made up of like this angler file network of establishment operatives, American and British
who would do a deal with anybody as long as it would serve some their idea of like the great a good, you know.
So they would work with, in the years to come, they'd work with communists, they'd work with fascists,
they'd work with colonists or, you know, whoever it was that they saw as useful to their broader project.
And I think that when we're discussing like the creation of Interpol and how guys like Sherba thought of their role,
it helps to understand that that's what they all thought is that they actually transcend politics.
And all we're really doing is just staring the ship as best we know.
And you know, these fights and disagreements between fascists and communists, they kind of like beneath us
because it'll all come out in the wash eventually, you know.
You'll see that there was always a bigger plan in place.
And so I think that like it explains how Sherba at once, he's almost like liberal and progressive in some ways.
And then he'll order his guys to open up on a crowd of unarmed protesters other times.
So I just thought I'd sort of get that in there because it's that creation of Interpol.
If it was purely reactionary, that would be a lot easier in a way to process.
But it was actually more nuanced and cerebral rarely the way these guys were thinking at the time.
Yeah. And this is what I mean when I talk about that, you know,
his education and like the upbringing of people back in the day when they had like it was a project.
And they were building towards something.
And then they were always trying to, you know, like they would get high on their own supply and sip the cool aid and think that they would like,
Oh, I just represent order and if we want to keep the streets safe, et cetera, et cetera.
But they had the skills and like the tool set of using like a liberal democracy, for example,
if it would serve their purpose, et cetera.
And we will see later when we go to like Hitler's Germany for instance or like if we see the US today,
like they've lost this ability to play both sides, right?
And this is why somehow like guys like Johannes are more scary to me.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, even in like it's not just order, right?
Like they have all of this strange, you know, far reaching projects here, you know,
like how you can have at this time, like the eugenics movement, right?
This is frozen in the 1920s.
And it's supported by like all sides of their bourgeois parliament, right?
Like you have social-democrats agreeing with it, you have liberals agreeing with it,
you have fascists agreeing with it, all under the sort of master signifier of modernity,
which they, yeah, it's.
Yeah, because every, every like minister within the cabinet, for example,
they are so like it starts to become so atomized.
So the show where when he's like within the police, for example,
then it's like, yeah, to fix the order.
But then you have X, yeah, X amount of other guys that do the exactly the same.
But unlike you say in the academy, for instance, or in business.
And somehow it all ties together into a cohesive project that is lacking today
when there's just like grifting each other.
Right.
Yeah.
And I think also it's, it's very true because
Shobber's role is also to be this sort of more apolitical guy.
Like, and that's why he's scary.
Like you say so, but because he is the president.
But then there's also this other guy, Dr. Oscar Dressler, who is way more political.
We're going to see like he is more interesting, I think, for I think our more, yeah,
apolitical angle.
And he's the secretary general.
And I don't know, like we have quite a lot on him.
And things are going to get really strange from here on.
Because of course there's so little information about what's going on during this period,
which Winston Churchill called the gathering of the storm right.
There's going to come a point where that sort of social democratic neutralization
doesn't function anymore.
And then of course we all know what happens, like who the liberals on the social
democrats have paid away for.
And Oscar Dressler plays this game a lot better than Shobber.
I mean, Shobber even dies a little bit too early.
I think to really become a player.
But it's Oscar Dressler sort of the face of Interpol.
The guy who goes to all the banquets and the guy who is like, you know,
trying to make Interpol into a household name in the various, you know,
blue uniformed head quarters all over Europe, right.
And yeah, I guess we should mention that like at the first conference,
unlike all the other conferences, right.
This is the first one at least according to their own history,
which is the success.
I think we're on the fourth one by now, right.
We had the one in Rome, first and Saint Petersburg, then Monaco.
And now finally here, 130th, 136 delegates show up.
And that doesn't mean 136 countries.
Some people are also just there like representatives of there.
I think the New York sheriff, he's there like just like because he's a policeman.
He has no authority like from the US to be there, which again,
shows this like thing that we've been talking about.
This is the commission days, you know, it's not really the Interpol days proper.
But yeah, the only ones who don't send anybody, I think,
or they must have sent somebody, but like great Britain.
It's like the big exception here of all the Western European countries at least.
And they're not in one place.
Yeah, I mean, they're too good for it.
They're too good for it.
They're too good for it.
I mean, the reason in I think is that 1921 represents
like the greatest extent of the British Empire's control in the world.
That was when that was the true peak.
And so they were thinking, well, this is going to less forever.
What do we need anything else for?
They always had this practice of like developing these informal partnerships
with foreign police forces and spook outfits.
And they just do this on an ad hoc basis, like as and when they needed to.
And MI5 and MI6 to be fair were probably like the best of their kind,
you know, the two best intelligence agencies in the world at that point.
And so they met police.
They didn't really have a need to collaborate too closely with Interpol
because they had MI5 and MI6 on their doorstep.
You know, they literally just it was a carriage ride.
Yeah, it was a carriage ride across town.
You could find out everything you needed to find out about somebody
who had a warrant who'd fled the country or something like that.
And of course, because of the empire,
the British also had a really well established, well trained,
well entrenched colonial police network with attendant diplomats, ambassadors,
emissaries of the British empire all over the place who functionally were spies.
So they had that as well.
And that's something incidentally that still continues on to this day.
If ever you see a British politician appear who was once a diplomat of some kind
and served overseas, there is a very good chance they are probably MI6,
but that's not a hit in all there really for this.
So yeah, and I think at this time, I also think they didn't take, you know,
the communist threat as serious that it would because coming out of the war
and just like a few years later,
they would probably be more concerned about keeping their position
like within the inter imperialist struggle.
And as time goes on, they will see that like the real threat is from the left and the communists.
And then they will start to collaborate with others.
Yeah, I think being an island nation does play a big role in that as well.
They see communism and socialism as a thing that really only threatens
the stability of like continental Europe.
But we are safe here, you know.
And we, like I say, we have the best police force in the world
and the two best spy outfits in the world.
So what do we need to worry about, you know.
And I think it's true what you say that it grows out of like also there,
or it gains a lot of strength from this, yeah, the colonial network
because we suggested before, or you mentioned at least,
they are the Sullivan and Cromwell origins of CIA, right?
Like how it starts at, you know, in the business core in Wall Street, right?
And I think the man I mentioned before, Franz Kotardi,
like the first head of the security police of the Habsburg Empire towards the 1700,
he, again, I think he was a, he was a business man,
but he was like in the, yeah, the colonial goods trade too.
Like he was a coffee tradesman and a sugar tradesman, I think.
So, yeah, I think this connection seems to go, you know, way back.
At least back to the end, to the mid 1700s.
And the mid 1700s.
And of course, yeah, the royals have always had, since time immoral,
always had advice, right?
People who they, I mean, that's also why they marry off their children
to infiltrate other royal houses.
It's like, they think like risk, the risk game all the time, I imagine.
Right. So, yeah, we discussed here a little bit the difference, I guess,
about Schrober and Dresler, the purpose, or the many conditions and reasons,
why we see this happening in the, in the center of the old empire.
Yeah, there, there is this question about the archives, right?
Like before we jump in to see how this antagonism between being apolitical and political,
like when this comes to the test for the first time.
So, like, it's going to come, like when the 20s, you know,
it comes to an end and the storm really starts to gather, obviously.
You know, like when, when England, for example, like we just said,
can no longer pretend like communism isn't a threat.
And also when, yeah, the social democratic neutralization has failed in Germany and in Austria.
And the fascists are sort of like on the march, right?
28, isn't it March on Rome?
For example, in 27, right, in Italy, right?
From there on, we're going to see like nation after nation, right?
In Europe, turning towards some kind of fascism.
And I guess the last thing we've maybe just mentioned one thing here about like,
what's interesting, I think, about the archive.
So, like, because everybody's still looking to dress and show up, right?
Like of all these other states, because they still have the archive of like,
who is a criminal? And like, I mean, it's going to last for a few,
maybe one or two generations, like the validity of this archive,
even though these other countries are new countries.
Of course, they would like to remember who are we going to, you know,
be on the lookout for, also like in every day, please work.
And so, this record, and there's so much like bullshit about it
in the books, many of the books that we've been reading, you know?
But you can find things that we today wouldn't, you know, allow,
or no state would allow it, like at least officially in the West, you know?
Like, they are looking who is a gypsy, right? Who's homosexual?
And when you look at the cards, there is all this physiognomic statistic, right?
You know, like you often see things like Jewish nose, or like big nose,
Jew-type and things like that. And this is already, you know?
So if this, the first permission was today as well, right?
Yeah, of course.
I saw one, I saw one that said agiatic eyes,
and I gave that a thought for a few seconds.
I was like, what the fuck?
Yeah. And I think what's interesting about this, like, why is it there?
It's not just plain racism.
I mean, it is plain racism, but it's also because they think this is science at this type.
And it's really interesting. I've been looking also.
We're not going to go into it, you know, too much like about criminology.
But there's a lot of interesting developments at this time.
For example, this guy, who we're going to see later, the Swedish,
in the Pullman, Harry Serdemann.
He's a part of this big movie.
Revolver Harry, yeah.
He is like part of this whole movement,
which is happening in the 20s and 30s,
of like sort of introducing science to police work,
not just racist science of like, you know, profiling with fissog into me,
and fronology, but also things, you know, like ballistics,
and you know, fingerprinting, and like all these things,
which the court are not accepting as evidence, you know,
you can't come into the court and be like,
we think, like we've made a recreation of the crime scene,
and this is how we think it, how things went down.
You know, this is the first time these sort of things are starting to happen.
And in order to give it, you know, in order to convince the court,
they need, the police needs to become more scientific, right?
And that's how criminology is sort of born,
to sort of, for them to already start creating evidence.
I mean, not from scratch, but like, you know,
to organize data from crime scenes into something that can be called evidence,
things like ballistics, fingerprints.
I think this is one of, I can't remember when it is if it's in the 30s,
but it's one of these famous cases, right?
When dog hair is used for the first time to prove that somebody was a guilty
of a particular crime, you know?
And that couldn't, you know, just 20 years early,
that would have been impossible, like, you know,
people would have been like, that's witchcraft.
I suggest that like, you can use, you know,
dog hair to prove like that there's a connection.
I had a certain, for example, the Swedish,
um, interbull guy who is part of like the cover-up in the post-war.
I think in the 30s, he also develops one of those machines
where you can compare the lines on the bullets, right?
So you can see if a particular gun shot the particular bullet.
And again, this is the first time this is sort of used in the court to say something like,
yeah, this is obviously the same gun that shot this bullet because we have,
you know, done test shootings with it.
And here you can see the pictures from the comparison, et cetera, et cetera.
So yeah, a lot of interesting things is happening in the world of policing at this time.
It's not just interbull.
