Who’s the best real-life example of “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” and what happened?

[u/DrCompenomics]

[u/nikogrande]

If you’re any sort of history buff at all, I cannot recommend enough Blueprint for Armageddon from Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. No story of any war anywhere has gripped my soul like that one…. Note: it’s 24 hours long

[u/cairdeas → u/nikogrande]

Any recommendations on where to listen to it? 13 years old now and it doesn't look like it's on the show's feed anymore.

[u/Doikor → u/cairdeas]

You can buy his older stuff from his website

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blueprint-for-armageddon-series/

There is also a bundle with all his hardcore history episodes for $100 there.

[u/cairdeas → u/Doikor]

Thank you!

I'll also add a recommendation for "The War that Ended Peace" by Margaret MacMillan, which also takes a pretty long road to the great war.

[u/Beachsbcrazy → u/cairdeas]

There’s a channel on Spotify called This Too Shall Pass that has the full series

[u/komstock → u/nikogrande]

Blueprint for Armageddon made me hate war in a way I never thought I'd be capable of. I listened to it in my early 20s and I realized all of the men who were being blown up for...next to nothing were all men just like me with my same capacity for interiority and my same capacity to feel and my same capacity to love.

People talk all the time about all kinds of conflict. People say 'never again' about a lot of events. WWI is the top of my 'never again' list.

Never has there been such an utter waste of humanity that caused such permanent destruction. Every other atrocity in the 20th century is tied to it.

“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”

“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night