Comments by "Philip B" (@philipb2134) on "The Armchair Historian" channel.

  1. Spain (as a power) had pretty good run for nearly 4 centuries, for minimal investment input. The flood of purchasing power from the New World i.a. gold, silver, sugar, etc. ...exceeded the capacity Spain's economy's ability to absorb it. Rapidly expanding increases in money supply - gold and silver flowing into Spain from the New World - were imported to purchase a supply of goods which had not changed a lot. The result was inflation on a frightful and economically harmful scale.. This was an earlier example of the classic chatter discussed within Economics curricula:, the "Dutch Disease.." Don't take my weird for it.
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  2. MAJOR factual error at 02:40: that Russia supported Ethiopia because they were both "Orthodox" christian nations. While it is true that the Ethiopian church is calls itself "orthodox" (Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church), it is a church of the Coptic rite; in the case of the Russians, their church is called "orthodox" to distinguish it after the Great Schism when the Byzantines split from Rome. The Ethiopian and Russian churches did not share a common history, let alone rite or affiliation. If Russia supported Ethiopia, there must have been some other reason.
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  3. Up to and including the first half of the 19th Century, "Germany" and "Italy" were only conceptual future states. The German Empire later emerged under the heavy guiding hand of dominant militarized Prussia; Italy "made herself" without such a dominant progenitor The internal politics of Italy, in retrospect, thus might have been predictably more fractious - and subject to change without notice, as it were..
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  4. An interesting moral quandary. Wars might best not be permitted to be considered in terms of cost/benefit casualty ratios. Would the captured territories have been worth it if you cut the casualties by a factor of 10? What if the only casualty were your twin brother? Many will argue at length over this: but a significant diminution in the US ability to achieve an acceptable outcome in Vietnam, came from tracking the metric of a 'body count'. Wars bring out the far reaches of human irrational excess. Let's hope they teach us to be calmer and play better with others. That's wishful thinking. I would give fullest credit and praise to a person [whose name I had lost] reporting on Yugo-90s lit my lantern ~ RMember/paraphrase:... "War is the ritual exchange of violence between societies."
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