Corruption in the ancient world | HistoryExtra - "‘There's an interesting study by Scott Campbell in the 1950s, actually went to Greece, and looked and looked at a mountainous people there, and determined that what looked like was looked like corruption from the outside was attached, in fact, based on entirely internalized value system where basically, outsiders weren't trusted to do the right kinds of transactions. Therefore, it was okay to, quote unquote, cheat them, because they didn't understand the right, the right code.’"
The Northman: bringing the Viking world to life on screen | HistoryExtra - "‘What are some of the challenges in bringing the Viking world to life on screen?’
‘I think actually the, the gaps. We're used to sort of things like reconstruction drawings. I'm I'm known particularly for my enthusiasm for those, not shared by everyone, I would say. When someone gives you the chance to recreate a Viking Hall, a royal Hall, and you realize you don't know what Viking tables look like, or benches, I mean, a table is a flat thing with legs, probably. But exactly what it looks like is is, is an educated guess. And if we left out all the things that we were unsure of the actors had been moving around in a fog. And there's also other things, Robert put it very well, when he emphasized how an awful lot of what we know of Viking Age clothing comes from finds from burials. And the costume team have done marvelous work. And really, they're very, very impressive clothes. But as Robert said, If you could imagine a Viking Age time traveler being able to see the movie, it's very possible their first question is, why is everyone dressed as dead people?’"
Operation Mincemeat: WW2 espionage on film | HistoryExtra - "‘Operation Mincemeat was probably the most important deception operation, military deception operation ever carried out. That sounds like a very extravagant claim. But it is true. It is certainly the oddest. I mean, it is a very, very strange and wonderful and bizarre story. It involves a group of what Churchill called corkscrew thinkers. These were amateur intelligence officers, they weren't professionals. They weren't James Bond types. They were, they were a whole mixture of sort of strange people who were gathered into intelligence during the war. And there was, there was a what sounds like a very simple but was actually a very difficult challenge facing them in 1943, which was to, everybody knew that the key sort of nodal point in the Mediterranean was Sicily and and the massed armies in North Africa after the successful North African campaign. Everybody knew they were going to attack Southern Europe. And the obvious place to attack was Sicily, because Sicily governs the central part of the Mediterranean. So from the point of view of intelligence, what they had to try to do was to convince Hitler then instead of attacking Sicily, this vast Armada was headed elsewhere, namely Greece. And this was a hugely elaborate deception operation. It involves all sorts of different bits and pieces, but at its heart, lay Operation Mincemeat, which was dreamed up by two characters by the unimprovable names of Montagu and Cholmondeley… they would get a dead body, they would equip that dead body with a completely new personality, and uniform and a backstory, and then they would ship it somewhere with false papers where the Germans would find it… It comes from the mind of novelists. This whole plot was dreamed up either by people who already were novelists or who wanted to be novelists. And so originally, the idea came from and this is one of the discoveries I made when researching this, the original idea came from none other than Ian Fleming, the, who was then working in naval intelligence, he was the assistant to the head of Naval Intelligence, John Godfrey, who would eventually become the model for M in the James Bond stories. And Fleming was his assistant and he was tasked with drawing up ideas to bamboozle the enemy. That was the plan at the beginning of the war. And he derived his ideas from another novelist. I mean, bear in mind that Fleming at this point had not yet written any novels, but he was an avid reader and consumer of novels and there was one in particular called the Milliner’s Hat Mystery... [They] then set about framing this operation as if it was a novel… It's not just, you know, a name and a rank and a serial number, but a father, a backstory, a nicotine habit, a kite flying habit. And eventually at the core of the story was a sort of romantic story. They did plant love letters in his wallet… they would take it in turns to to be William Martin, to be Pam the lover. And then it began to tip over into something more real. So you've got this fascinating interplay between a fantasy that they're creating, and, and a kind of real romantic element that begins to emerge at the heart of the film'"
Spain’s tumultuous story | History Extra podcast on Acast - "‘You introduce readers to this history with the idea that Spain has no national story that it can celebrate with comfort’...
‘I always point to the Spanish National Anthem as the as the proof of this, anybody who's ever watched the Spanish football team… before an important football match, and they've played many, over the last decade or so, you know, winning World Cups and European Cups, you'll get two teams lined up before a match. One team will belt out their national anthem, with all its words, and the other team just hums along. And that's the Spanish team, which hums along because it has no national anthem, except for a tune. And it has no national anthem, because it's never managed to reach agreement over what the words would be. And we all know what national anthems are. You know, they're sort of adulterated versions of history. And Spaniards can't actually come to an agreement about what that should look like, you know, what, what the Spanish national narrative is, and, and we're still there. People tried to write that, the words to the national anthem from time to time, but it always fails...
I was a journalist at the time, going to the first the first exhumations of mass graves from the Franco period. And I would go and a couple of other foreign correspondents would go, but no Spanish press would turn up. And it was because it you know, people were scared of the past, they were scared of their own history, now scared that revealing it would suddenly bring back all the old arguments. And we would go back to the old violence as well, but it would spark another civil war. In fact, that hasn't happened. And all those arguments are out there. And to me, that's a sign of the maturity of Spanish democracy that you can have the old arguments, but without everybody wanting to get into a fight or starting to, to, to kill one another. But what it does mean is we haven't reached any agreement. And so we are still arguing about how that past should be, should be treated. Should the monuments be taken down? Should the old streets be renamed? Should the people who, the mert-, the people who belonged to the death squads, should they be named? Is there some route through the courts, for people to demand justice for things that happened to them even in the 1970s, you know, some of the perpetrators are still around. And Spain has largely tried not to do that. I think, in the hope that everybody will die before everyone who was involved will die before you, you get to that point. And you get these sorts of bizarre situations where Spain is trying historic crimes against humanity can, in Latin America, it's taking the Pinochet regime to court. But it has an amnesty law in Spain, which was passed in the 1970s, which means it can't do the same to its own dictatorship. And one of the great ironies is that now, the families of the victims are taking their cases to Argentina, on the basis that under international law, you have a right for your case to be heard anywhere else if it can't be heard at home, if it's a human, human rights case’"
Stasi poets: creative writing & the Cold War | HistoryExtra - "In their battle to control the citizens of East Germany, the Ministry for State Security employed a variety of weapons. Among them, rather surprisingly, was poetry… the Stasi tried to instruct its agents to write better poems and win the Cold War through creative writing."
15 minutes of fame: Hildegard of Bingen, medieval polymath | HistoryExtra - "'She'd always had visions... she doesn't go into a trance-like state. She's not taken over or possessed. What she actually describes... it seems to be migraines. And the auras she describes, the zigzag edges on the shapes that she sees, the colours, even the colour ranges, they're all the things that are described by migraine sufferers. So she's having these migraines and she's interpreting them as gateways to the divine, to the spiritual, to the otherworldly. But then I think something big happens, and I'm the first person to propose this and I may be wrong. But it is happening around her 40th year... her visions change in their complexion, they become more intense. They take over her whole body and she becomes really really hot with them. And then she hears a voice telling her to go and speak, to talk to people. And so what I think happened, probably, is she was going through the menopause... the intensity of her visions increases, well, that is a side effect of the changes in female hormones and yes migraine sufferers experience much worse migraines after they've gone through the menopause...
There are women in the medieval period who have agency that is equivalent to if not exceeding those of their male counterparts. So Hildegard is on the same platform as people like St Bernard of Clairvaux. She's in touch with Thomas Beckett. And she's, all these other guys are all on her world stage and she is outshining all of them. She is the one getting the international book tours. She is the one hat the Pope wants to talk to. And so it makes us reassess not only how women were treated by men in the medieval period, but also how men have been perceived, because she's not surrounded by a host of misogynists. She's surrounded by a society that is building her up, supporting her, propping her up... You find this other host of extraordinary women around her. So there's Elisabeth of Schönau. She's another visionary who wrote beautiful works. And the one who nobody knows about... Herrad of Landsberg...
Even today, authors don't get collected, edited versions of their works made, and yet in her lifetime, she was so much of a superstar that they put all her stuff in this one book"
The feminist cope is that they were still suppressed because they were so brilliant, they think even though they were treated well they were still shortchanged
Hollywood history: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "Hollywood was so far flung from the rest of the United States at the turn of the century... Los Angeles... was several days' travel time from the East Coast. So it was quite a big move... [Hollywood] was a village with several homes. Around 1907 I think it got a hotel.. they'd found a place where they could film where there was plenty of space and they could film in the mountains, there was desert across the mountains, there was the ocean of course... it was a great place to film on location outdoors... a lot of moviemaking equipement was under patent at the time... going out to the West Coast meant you could dodge some payments. So some of the more strapped filmmakers were eager to be far away from the East Coast where a lot of the film studios were then...
It was truly global apart from the Soviet Union. The Soviets banned Hollywood films. That meant that whenever Hollywood needed a villain, they made them Russian. Because they didn't have to worry about offending the Russians, the Russians weren't paying customers. But they were wary of offending other countries because most other countries, the industrialised countries, did show films and they did import American films"
Ellis Island: everything you wanted to know - History Extra podcast | Acast - "'It's one of the most persistent myths. No. Basically 99.8% of cases, names were not changed at Ellis Island. And the reason for that was there was no process for legally changing names at Ellis Island. They're simply processing immigrants. They're, the only place where an immigrant's name would be written down were ships' manifests, and those were created at the port of departure, and those were created by the steamship companies who wrote down the names, and the officials at Ellis Island just read through them...
It's true that many immigrants' names were changed. Were shortened, were Americanised. Most of the cases of name changes were that the immigrants changed the names themselves. The immigrants wanted to Americanise, wanted to assimilate, were tired of people mispronouncing their names"
Winter is coming: the Anglo-Saxon year | HistoryExtra - "'It's often said that any Christian festival is grounded in pagan roots. Is that actually quite a difficult thing to be clear about?'
'It is really because quite often in our modern world, we kind of assume that something which is related to agricultural cycles, it's probably pagan. If it's related to solstices, it's probably pagan. But actually the medieval church, medieval Christians were really interested in agricultural cycles and natural cycles. They didn't think of them as non-Christian. And things like harvest festivals are also in the Bible. They come from Jewish tradition as well. First Fruits, Festivals or whatever. So there's no sense in which they're incompatible with biblical Christianity or anything like that... people are celebrating festivals that are meaningful to them within a certain cultural context, a social context and putting labels on them like pagan or Christian or whatever is often sort of you're risking being anachronistic and projecting our assumptions back upon the past'...
'We today are much more divorced from the natural world'...
'You convert to a new religion but the agricultural work throughout the year carries on in the same way'"
Sci-fi history: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "It's a kind of impulse that stays broadly the same all the way through from the beginning. So someone like Thomas Moore, he sets up an Utopia on an island -
Eu-topos, which means no place, but also the good place, so it's like a pun. And it's quite clearly a sort of political statement about what the hell's wrong with England and what you can do to put it right...
You get really weird things happening. So in 1980s, some listeners might remember that Ronald Reagan had this whole project called Star Wars which was to put a defence system in space. That was written for him by a group of science fiction writers. Robert Heinlein, Grape Bear, were heavily involved in that. They write a report out of their science fiction, which then became government policy. It's extraordinary the influence that those science fiction writers had. They were all very politically motivated to help the Republican Party to in a sense extend the Cold War into Space itself. And so perhaps this vision didn't work because it was science fiction, yet it got billions of dollars"
Halloween traditions: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "You can look at newspaper reports from 19th century America and find numerous reports of things happening on Halloween which were acts of mischief, quite serious acts of mischief, actually... you can havr these mischief nights where mostly young men... go out, perform acts of mischief... it was particularly strongly associated around All Hallow Tide and Halloween, so you do get newspapers reporting, oh god, they're at it again right through to the 1930s. They're quite serious, things like greasing railway tracks... knocking over outdoor toilets. When it cames to the rise of the car, puncturing tires. You know, quite malicious sort of stuff. This is lots of young men roaming around getting freedom, and the term trick or treat derives from the idea of trick. But essentially the sort of mischief night was not about going around, we'll do this unless you give us money, but there were elements of that"
The Inca empire: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'Construction work, and there must have been a huge amount of labour going into building these stone structures of elaborate palaces and things like that and contributing to things like the military. In a sense, we might think of a lot of that as almost like forced labour. Actually in the Andes... it's always made into a festival. People are being given drink and sometimes even encouraged to sing in things while they're doing the work. Interestingly, there are Spanish accounts of, when they were first constructing some of their churches, of getting the people in Cusco to come and work there, they would have to dismantle Inca buildings, take some of that stone, rework it and build a church with it and yet they would dress up in some of their finery and be singing as they were doing it to make it a festival event as they did that construction. So we shouldn't see that labour as always being a drudgery. Sometimes it was actually, you might think that was a clever technique, but that was made into a festival to get them involved in doing that work with energy...
Clearly... some of these activities were competitive. So while you were doing construction work you woould compete as two groups to do as much construction as possible. So you would make that into a festival. So the Inca, one of the comments that's made today is that... in Peru and Bolivia they have more festivals and saints' activities than many other parts of the world, and that is because they enjoy a good festival, getting together. And those festivals are not necessarily avoiding work, sometimes they are to do work associated with them but then they'd be some drinking and singing and dancing. There are always very good dancers at these events'"
A family history of the world | HistoryExtra - "Everyone used to tell you that Hitler and Stalin were monsters because they were ill-treated as children... Hitler was ill-treated and Stalin was beaten by his drunken father. And of course, actually their childhoods were relatively kind of conventional and commonplace by their periods. People did bear their children in the 19th century. Fathers used physical punishment. Now that's completely unfashionable in the West...
America, the greatest republic in the world, is actually been ruled by a series of these family connections. The Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Trumps are all big families in the book"
How is Tutankhamun’s legacy shaped by colonialism? | HistoryExtra - "We think of Tutmania, this fervor for Tutankhamun, we think of it as a Western phenomenon. It was really a global phenomenon. There's already a huge interest in Ancient Egypt, going in to 1922. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun is on fertile ground... In Shanghai, it was actually seen in an anti-colonial land, sympathy for the Egyptians against the British colonial government...
It's totally stuck inside the body. Think about bathtub sized kind of coffin. The body is totally stuck, wrapped up inside this coffin. Soaked through with the kind of oily libations, perfumed with tree resins, you know, lovely, it would have smelled lovely at the time. Not in the 1920s. In Antiquity, it would have smelled wonderful, when it's poured all over the body. But the whole thing is stuck fast. And the textiles are really in a poor condition. So rather than being able to get the body and all wrapped up body out and put it on an examining table, they kinda have to dig it out the coffin. And they do that working from the chest down because there's the gold mask, they can see bits of the gold mask, they can see that it's there and they clear the mask as much as they can, but then they realise it's totally stuck to the bottom of the coffin. So they work from the chest down and when they're down to the level of the, basically the body itself, which is just skin and bones, they decapitate the body, they remove all the rest of it, and then they have to prise out the mask inside with the head inside, and Carter describes using heated knives to gradually liquefy or soften all of that resin and prise the wrapped up head out of the mask. So the object that we see today, the mask, and many of the objects from the tomb, many of those almost 5000 odd objects, have undergone heavy restoration and repair in order to look like treasures"
Desk killers: the psychology of committing crimes against humanity | HistoryExtra - "One of the myths of the Holocaust is that you couldn't be transferred out of your unit if you were appalled at what you'd been ordered to do. It used to be said that if you didn't obey the orders, you would be shot. Now, a lot of research in the last 10, 20 years has shown that that's actually quite untrue, and there were people, there were people in the security units and the police units who had been asked to commit killings of civilians, executions on the Eastern Front, who did request transfers, and they were transferred"
Powerful pages: the beguiling history of books | HistoryExtra - "'Form affects what we expect to read and shapes what we read... I began to think the form of books might have been slightly overlooked in some arguments that we think have been all about content. I went back to the famous trial, the trial in some ways that stood for the liberated 1960s, that the Lady Chatterly's Lover, DH Lawrence's book by Penguin Books were taken to court for obscenity in publishing this. And I was thinking about... this really famous line from one of the prosecution lawyers which said would you want your wife, would you want your servant to read this book? And that just sounded like a blast from the Victorian past or something. But I was thinking, why did he say that and partly said it in a patrician way about protecting people from obscene material as he saw it? But I think he said it because what Penguin had done was to publish the book as a paperback. And the paperback was cheap, it was widely available. And I think it's quite clear if you look at the Lady Chatterly's Lover trial that if Penguin had published Lady Chatterly's Lover as a hardback book, which because of its cost, because of the way it circulated, would've been kept for quite an elite in society, there would'n't have been theoutry. So Lady Chatterly's Lover was as much a trial of the paperback as it was of the obscenity of Constance and Mellors' love affair. So form really mattered there... it helped me see why the Beatles had not written a song called Hardback Writer...
The first American Bible that's to say the first Bible that's printed in the New World, printed in the middle of the 17th century is actually printed not in English but in the Algoquin language of the Native Americans...
That was a dangerous book in that it was, it spearhead the destruction of a whole way of life and a whole society. But there's a wonderful twist in the tale of that story. Of course this language didn't have a written form till John Elliot the Puritan cleric sort of devised an orthography, a way of spelling it out and devised a printed form for it. One of the consequences of his translated Bible and of the settlement that it was part of was that, the eradication of that language. Everybody started to speak English and this Algonquin language was almost completely forgotten. And it's been a project in the last 10 years to relearn it and it's been because of this Bible that set out the language that's sort of, it's like an ark, which has preserved the language...
The Catholic Church had a long history of trying to ban books and there's a lovely moment in the 17th century where... a Protestant says, if we want to know all the things that are rude about Catholics, the Catholics have produced a lovely list for us already. So if they don't like it because it's anti-Catholic, we must love it and here it is already"
A forgotten witch hunt in New England | HistoryExtra - "'These are really by our standards, very poor people. And so a split pudding might be rather a disastrous thing, if all your, you know, your, your resources for that day have gone into that pudding. And it seems in this story, there's another level to that, that I'm not going to do, not gonna go on excessively about the steam pudding. But there's another part of it, where the the woman who makes her husband probably feels embarrassed that she can't provide a proper meal for her husband. Men and women have to measure up in the community and to one another. And so that one of the roles of a woman is to put food on the table. So if she keeps getting it wrong, it looks perhaps like someone is making, not just making her look foolish, but actually trying to drive a wedge between her and her husband, even if it's over something like her cooking...
The belief in witchcraft is a much more finely balanced thing than I think that a lot of people assume. And that really means that people aren't obsessed with witches, they're not, they don't blame everything on witches. They're not always attacking witches. Witches, are not constant daily scapegoats for every misfortune in daily life. You can have a general background belief in witchcraft, you know, do you believe in witches? Yes, of course, everybody believes in witches. Do you know of any witches? I can't think of any or somebody, somebody once said that she was a witch, but there's no evidence for it. And that's. So there are two different levels there, between the theoretical belief in witch, witches, and the practical belief, and it's the practical belief that's so difficult. So even if the theoretical belief is universal, actually, practically finding the evidence to convict somebody in a court of law, and, you know, take their life away, is a much, much more difficult thing. And that's why we generally see very high rates of acquittal...
Witchcraft belongs to a mental world, a universe of thinking, which contains God and Providence, and angels and spirits and all those things. And in fact, much later on, when there's more skepticism about witchcraft, some of the defenders of the belief in witchcraft, defend it precisely because they don't want this whole thing to collapse. They feel that if you start attacking the idea of witchcraft, then maybe you're promoting atheism. So you know, no devil, no God, it’s that kind of idea. So it's a serious belief in this world, it just doesn't necessarily mean that everybody's acting on it constantly, all the time. So there's a great deal of uncertainty, even a great deal of skepticism about whether an individual who is on trial for their life really is a witch...
The ideal household must be one when the husband and wife behave properly towards one another. The household where the man, for example, needs to beat his wife, is a household that's failing, that's not acceptable, even though this is a patriarchal society. But that means that men should be able to govern their wives and their communities by consent. And if not, they are weak’"
Libraries: a book lover’s history | HistoryExtra - "‘Thomas Bodley, a great founder of the Bodlean library in Oxford, he did so much for the development of library culture. Yet he also said that he didn't want idle books and riff rafts in his library, by which in the early 17 century he meant books in English'...
'Paperbacks became very common from about 1935 onwards with the foundation of Penguin Books. And these were offering books for sixpence, which was the price of a packet of 20 cigarettes, whereas the new hardbacks would cost about 15 times that much. So instead of going along to the public library, waiting in line, getting yourself on a waiting list for the latest novel, you could go to the bookshop and buy a handful of of penguins. And what of course, Allen Lane, the the the founder of Penguin never really anticipated was that Penguins would become collectible. He thought of them very much as disposable books. Read it, pass it on to a friend. And indeed, some of the early Penguins from the war time, have the notice in, when you finishe this book, please take it to a local post office, where it will be handed over to a soldier in our fighting forces. And it was anticipated that a book of that sort would never come back for the front, it would simply be discarded. Well, what we know is that Penguins, because of their careful color coding and their lovely uniforms and the jaunty Penguin symbols, they became collectible very early. And public libraries really struggled to keep up with this. Eventually, they sort of made their peace with paperbacks. If you go into a branch library. Now you'll find that romances, Mills and Boon or Harlequin will make up quite a lot of the stock because they their most valuable customers into, in terms of loyalty are the people who read romances. But the problem is that most of the people who value libraries as cultural in, institutions, don't use them. And when we talked, we talked when we were preparing this book to a lot of people who were campaigning to retain libraries threatened with closure in, in mostly in our cities. And when we asked them, did they use the libraries themselves? They very often say, no, they didn't, but they thought they should be preserved for other people. But the other people tend to use libraries for totally different purposes now. They want to use the computers there, they want to read the newspapers, they want to use the children's libraries for their their small children, and they want to keep out of the cold. Now all of those are very important social services. And branch librarians spend a lot of their working time now helping people on computers through difficult forms, like claiming Universal Credit. But it means that the space for books diminishes’...
‘There is such a diverse world of literature out there, that it's very difficult to have a public library that offers that same diversity, that same breadth to every single person who comes through the door... if they only take one copy, then there will be a great waiting list for months and months for it. But if they buy 100 copies, and everyone will borrow one, the books are then returned and the left with 100 copies, they need to store somewhere, while everyone's already read the new great best seller. And this is something we see in a lot of smaller branch libraries in the UK, that, you know, the browsable stock that they have on offer in the library is often very small compared to what you may find in in a bookshop. And indeed here at here in St. Andrews, our local public branch library has about 2000 volumes that you can browse, our local bookshop has 30,000. So this and, you know, this key experience of browsing is I think, what so many people enjoy about libraries, and the, what they enjoy about bookshops, because it allows them to find something new, something they hadn't expected, something they didn't know, they wanted. And this is also the reason why book shops are doing so well at the moment, is because we cannot truly recreate this experience online...
When collecting became something which you could aspire to many, many books, books would be an important symbol of your status in society. I sit in my office and I’ve students visit. And they always do me the credit of imagining that I've read all of the books in my, my office, and I never disabuse them of this. Because it's such, it's such a very, it gives me authority before I even open my mouth. But one of the interesting things that our research has revealed is that the books which survive in libraries through the centuries are not necessarily the books which had most influence at the time. Because the books which were most widely owned, and most eagerly read were often quite cheap. They were read intensively, and they were read to destruction. So they survived them far less well, rather than the sort of large tomes which were used for consultation, not reading. So the library remains that we have can sometimes give a rather misleading impression of the societies they came from’"
I remember when people in the UK were protesting about local libraries closing. As I suspect, it was just virtue signalling since they didn't use them themselves
Watergate at 50: the making of an American scandal | HistoryExtra - "One of the great problems is that no one spotted that the idea of sending five people who had no previous experience of house breaking into a building with multiple possibilities for being spotted. I mean, the extraordinary thing is that they weren’t spotted the first time, because this was the second go round of this particular attempt to burglarize the DNC. So it's an extraordinary physical event. But the gathering of campaign intelligence through fair means or foul is not uncommon, but doing something quite so open to being discovered, is quite an extraordinary piece of political stupidity to say the least... As soon as it was made aware, not only that these individuals could be traced to the White House. But also they had significant incriminating material on their possession, which directly linked them to the White House and committee *something* President and to potential money laundering too because remember, and amongst all of the paraphernalia they were carrying, were 10s of 1000s of dollars in sequential numbered bills. Every single alarm bell was going on, why they went in with all of that, why they carried identifying material as to their identities, that is *something*, even when they gave false names, which is what happened at the arraignment. So right away, there was panic about what the hell to do about this. And therein begins the cover up...
Nixon's predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had a primitive form of recording system in the White House which recorded many of his conversations, and indeed, they are now in the large part in the public domain. From that, however, Nixon, decided, partly out of the fact that he believed that he was constantly being misreported and misinterpreted, wanted to set the record straight. And also, of course, he was a hubristic egotist. He loved the idea of all of his utterances being saved for posterity, so that people could see how much of a genius he was. So there's, there's a whole raft of reasons why, why Nixon’s unique recording system... he can always correct the record, especially if you have an enemies list as long as Richard Nixon had, which, of course, was one of the great secrets of Nixon… so long, he had to keep it in a book"
Obviously Watergate was a false flag. No one could be stupid enough to screw up that badly (since Muslims like to say that terrorists dropping their passports shows it's a Mossad false flag etc)
Writing the history of the modern monarchy | HistoryExtra - "You've got to make the case for the need for greater openness. And the same principle applies to royal files as applied to files on the intelligence community, in that the late 1990s, the penny dropped within the security service MI5 that obessive secrecy about their historical record wasn't doing them any favors because the only time that material, information on the security service reached the public domain, hit the press was when there was a scandal, when someone would, leak for self-interested reasons. And that generally didn't do the security service any favors in terms of its public image. So it decided quite cannily to start releasing files in a measured way to the National Archives. So then you can actually shape your public image and I think that the same thing is true of the Royal Family"
