Podcast Review: Hell on Earth, The Thirty Years War

Matt Christman takes dead aim at Ken Burns

Capitalism’s birth from the grave of European feudalism, like Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein punching a fist out of its own tomb, has never been more ably described than by Matt Christman and Chris Wade of Chapo Trap House in this year’s 10 part series about the Thirty Years War, “Hell on Earth”. In fact, The Thirty Years War has never been so widely learned about, ever. Below, the lifetime revenue chart of the Chapo podcast (from Graphtreon) shows just how good the series is. A rocket ship of the Trump era’s online political media, Chapo’s previous revenue high, $174,174 per month, was reached at the exact moment the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign reach its own peak, March, 2020.

Like Bernie’s evaporation, Chapo immediately declined and stagnated, despite pandemic lockdowns giving a bump to podcasting in general. What now? The 1618 Defenestration of Prague to the rescue! From Chapo’s post-Bernie low of $156,733 monthly, Hell on Earth’s impact on Chapo’s bottom line is today $24,000 monthly since the rollout began in October, 2022 for its premier on January 11, 2023. That’s over a quarter of a million dollars a year, making Hell on Earth the greatest single revenue impact on the Chapo podcast outside of Bernie himself. This means Millenial Dudebro History Shit is so sustainable, Matt and Chris have assured their own futures. Well done boys, go get that bread.

Before this, almost no one had the slightest inkling about The Thirty Years War; some feudal conflagration shit on a long list of other dumb Euro wars breezed over in high school history class. Anyone who bothered at all about The Thirty Years War largely reduced it to the war’s concluding 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which gave the world of international relations theory the concept of “Westphalian sovereignty”; the foundational creation of today’s idea of the nation state. Other than that, it is ignored, almost as gone as an Egyptian pharoah. No more.

In often mind numbing detail, Matt and Chris do a very Gramscian analysis of this cataclysm, the feudal old world dying (for centuries, horribly) while the new world of capitalism struggles to be born. Hell on Earth is thus a story of cultural hegemony in the feudal masses, whose conception of values and order was first truly destroyed by the Black Death, 300 years before the war, then Martin Luther’s reformation, 200 years after that. The 30 years of apocalytpic destruction at the end of this centuries long sclerotic death, from 1618-1648, can best be described as a rotting corpse spawning countless horrors so vast, only the detached internet memed irony of two millenial dudebros can do it justice. One of those spawned horrors, the capitalist order of today, itself now rots like the feudal order it replaced. Have you seen Ukraine lately?

Hell on Earth matches then exceeds its predecessor’s panache, 2021’s premier of the Hell franchise, Hell of Presidents, a tour of every American presidency. Music plays a key role in both productions, original compositions and performances credited every episode. Bravo Matt and Chris - you’ve created jobs for artists! Even mapmaker bros! Online podcasting is rarely ever this engaging, humor anchored, artistic, original, fresh, and impactful. Naturally, this brings us to The Grateful Dead.

Bootleg recordings are, quite literally, the only reason anyone still thinks about, talks about, or even knows existed a band called The Grateful Dead. Their studio albums made no marks, but their bootleg concert tapes are still today sought after talismans, the holiest of rock and roll relics. Jerry Garcia and the crew embraced bootleggers with both arms, inviting them to set up mics in a dedicated fenced off area right in front of the stage of their every performance for, ahem, 30 years. As the Chapo boys no doubt expected, both Hell series were quickly bootlegged, originally paywalled at Patreon, but of course soon pirated to YouTube, which is where I listened to them this week. Find it yourself - that’s part of the fun of bootlegs! The Grateful Dead quickly realized there simply is no way to pay for this kind of marketing. Private property played no role; the point was to share.

A character groping for the new order in Hell on Earth’s end days, Englishman Gerrard Winstanley led a group called The Levellers, derisively known at the time as The Diggers, who sought amidst all this hell a kind of proto-communism on common land. Winstanley is perhaps the first man on earth to argue in print that the new order born from the dead one should eradicate private property, as Matt says, “pre-dating Marx by 200 years”. In his 1649 pamphlet “The New Law of Righteousness”, published after yet another king’s head came off, Charles I, Winstanley argued against private property, in the godly manner of the time -

And so selfish imaginations taking possession of the Five Sences, and ruling as King in the room of Reason therein, and working with Covetousnesse, did set up one man to teach and rule over another; and thereby the Spirit was killed, and man was brought into bondage, and became a greater Slave to such of his own kind, then the Beasts of the field were to him.

Private property may have killed the Spirit, but in fact, the only reason I listened to the Hell on Earth series is because Hell of Presidents was pirated to a kind of public ownership before it. The enormous Chapo revenue bounce of the second Hell series is no doubt partially a result of 2 years of the first Hell series (which produced no revenue bounce itself) floating around free as a bird like a cassette tape of the Dead at Winterland in 1976. Matt, Chris, trust me here - let your fans put your genius on that long strange trip of bootlegs, and you can do no worse than Jerry Garcia, now an eternal sainted Santa of good vibes.

Irony being the key here, the entire Hell franchise is a winner, so what fresh hell comes next? Matt has announced his next topics are the Spanish Civil War, and yet another obscure, never discussed turn in the arc of history, the Seven Years War. But it seems to me Matt’s true destiny, clear by his glee in the above picture, is the American Civil War, where the never ending sewer mold of The Lost Cause has left documentary history about as sclerotic as a Bohemian duke tossing a count from a window because God. Ken Burns, your days as America’s Historian are numbered. Matt Christman is coming for you, straight from hell.