Dan Carlin

Especially as an audiobook, this was a slightly better edited version of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. Some people apparently like that podcast, but I find it overly chatty, directionless, and basically a rehash of wikipedia-level information about a topic, read by the author who thinks repeating how much he "feels something is important" or whatever many times in slightly different ways will somehow make it interesting.

I don't know why I expected the book to be better, but...it wasn't.… (mere)

In "The End Is Always Near", Dan Carlin muses upon the many times in the history of humanity, and particularly Western civilization, that "we" (the dominant empire of whatever era) has suddenly crashed into ruin. Usually the downfall of the superpower of the time is followed by a long age of chaos and barbarism- and then new empires rise to assume the mantle of civilization. Carlin points out that terms like "civilized", "dark ages" and "barbarian" are highly subjective and relative to the point of view of the chronicler of events and later historian.

His chapters are essays in roughly chronological order, starting with the fall of the Bronze Age empires of the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia between 1500 BC and about 1200 BC (the age of the Trojan War and the explosion of the mega-volcano on the island of Thera in the Aegean Sea), to the Atomic Age- when we achieved the power to eradicate civilization entirely.

The book was published last year, 2019, before the Covid-19 Pandemic, but Carlin includes an especially interesting chapter on the history of pestilence as a threat to civilization. The golden age of Athens in antiquity was brought to an end by its long, ruinous war with Sparta, but the Athenian Plague of the fifth century BC also played a major part in the decline of the city-state from dominion over the Greek world. The bubonic plague that ravaged Constantinople in the reign of the Emperor Justinian prevented him from reasserting Byzantine power over the lost provinces of the West and reuniting the Roman Empire.

The Black Death of the 1340's swept through Europe, killing at least a third, or as much as half. of the population. One effect was that it greatly weakened the hold of feudalism. The surviving peasantry, mostly held in serfdom before the plague, were emboldened to claim abandoned lands and to defy the surviving aristocracy.

The last great pandemic, before the current one, was that of the Influenza of 1918-19. Starting, probably, in the U.S. Army training camps of the Midwest in the spring of 1918, it was carried on troop ships to Europe with the American "doughboys" of Pershing's army. It spread rapidly among all the armies and civilian populations of Europe. In the nations at war, news of the contagion was suppressed by wartime censorship. In neutral Spain, the deadly flu outbreak was freely reported by the press. Thus, it became the "Spanish Influenza". After a lull during the summer of 1918, it came back in a much more deadly second wave in the autumn. It was far worse in those American cities that did not shut down public events and close theaters, schools, bars, etc. The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19 killed at least 50 million people worldwide, over twice the death toll of the Great War.

Carlin goes into some detail in his account of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the time when humankind came closest to Armageddon. He praises the Kennedy brothers, President John F. and Attorney General Robert F., for not heeding the advice of their military "experts", including General Curtis LeMay, who would have gotten us into World War III, in which case I would not be here to write this and you would not be there to read this. Carlin notes that we survived the Cold War, but the nuclear arsenals are still with us, as lethal and potentially apocalyptic as ever. He does not have much to say about the existential threat of climate change, but that awaits the judgment of future historians.… (mere)