Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Frederick The Great - Biography" video.
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Frederick displayed interest in many women - like the girl from England that someone proposed to be his bride. But his father instead married him away to an awkward ugly girl that he was not attracted to, and that can explain his lack of interest in her and his childless life. Frederick's servants did however hear the couple making love from outside the room, so all this talk about him being gay is probably just a way to either tarnish his reputation, or an attempt for the gay community to claim another celebrity into their own camp on very loose grounds.
His friendship was a very deep one. But being best friends is not the same thing as being homosexual.
Frederick's childhood was a terrible one where his father did beat him up and humiliated him, and denied his son all pleasures in life... music, philosophy, fashion, reading latin, speaking French, partying with friends, marrying a pretty girl etc.
And he was forced to endure pointless boring hunting trips with his father and his endless military inspections. And when his foolish father got outmanouvered in the game of world politics by Brits, Austrians and others, then he took out his on his son.
It simply felt better for him to take out all rage on someone else and blame him for all the faults in the world instead of fixing himself. His father was a simple man who hated fashion and philosophy, he was a christian fanatic while his son was an atheist. And he was a man who liked to live a spartan lifestyle and expected everyone else to do the same, and his entire Kingdom was forced to eat saurkraut so the government could save money and build a large military.
Fredericks father was a physchopath opressor who wished his oldest son to be dead. And Frederick's did beat him very badly, and encouraged him to commit suicide. And later on would he also murder Fredericks best friend in front Frederick's own eyes in an attempt to break his own son down and once again feeling sadistic joy in taking away everything that Frederick held dear.
Katte shared many of Frederick hobbies and he was a loyal servant to the Hohenzollern family so it became natural that this solidier became a close friend. And Frederick needed good friends in this harsh and lonely time when he was in the mercy of his father and no adult to stand up for him and protect him. So Frederick and his sister and Katte was of course then people who stood very close to Frederick.
And it is not hard to understand why Frederick feared for his own life and felt a desperate urge to seek freedom from his fathers opression.
At first did his father want to kill both Katte and Frederick, but in the last moment did massive diplomatic protests from Kingdoms from every corner in Europe come in and demanded that Frederick's life would be spared and many felt pity for the young prince. So Frederick William had not much other choice than to back off from his plans to kill his own son for high treason in a kangaroo court. So to safe face he would allow his son to live, but instead try to get him to admit desertion and get a confession that he was unfit to rule the Kingdom and force him to abdicate, and his best friend Katte would be murdered to break Frederick down and if not pushing him over the edge to commit suicide, so atleast break his will to fight on and give up his ambitions to become King.
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@aymarafan7669 "the Great" is a title used by bad men as well, like Charlemagne or "Karl the great" as he is known as in German. Charlemagne murdered heathens and did crusades and forced his religion on other people and he gained children with large numbers of women (and perhaps even his own sister according to some mythological tales).
Alexander the Great was basicly a Hitler of antiquity who destroyed mulitple cities like Thebe and Persepolis and commited genocide on one ethnic group after another.
So of course are many persons named "the Great" not so great people.
Frederick the Great on the other hand was a great person in my opinion.
He did not create constitutional democracy, but on the other hand would only an idiot judge a person from the 1700s with the same standards as we have for people of our own day. Abraham Lincoln would be called a racist if he presented the same views on blacks as he held back then, when the normal thing was to be a racist. But fact remains that Lincoln was a great man who abolished slavery and the blacks have him to thank for their freedom. And Aldous Huxley who fought for the rights of blacks in the civil rights movement also held quite racist views. And Fredrika Bremer who fought for womens rights here in Sweden, did see women as intellectually inferior to men. So I don't think we should judge people with the standards of our own time, but instead we should judge people for the standards of the time in which they lived.
And the same goes for Frederick the Great.
Frederick was a man way ahead of his time. He abolished torture, while other countries like for example Britain did use flogging as a punishment on their solidiers. Frederick the Great was raised by religious fundamentalist father and knew how opressive religion was, so he gave everyone religious freedom regardless if they were protestant, catholic, calvinist, jewish, muslim, or an atheist like himself.
In my opinion was this a great achievement, since other countries still burned witches and applied the Bible like sharia law. King Charles the XII in Sweden did for example take the law of Moses and make it the new Swedish law during his reign. And the Austrian emperor Josef II burned jews.
Frederick the Great also created freedom of the press, and he was the only King in Europe that was not interested in trying to improve stories about himself to make himself look better in history books.
While other countries like France did burn books and forced Voltaire to flee from the country for mocking religion and criticisng the government.
Prussia was also the great power that is today is known as aggressive and militaristic and the Sparta of Europe. But facts remains that this image is false, since Prussia was the great power in Europe with most years in peace during the 1700s, and the share of tax money the military got was less than in many other countries as for example Austria.
Frederick the Great also had another mindset than other rulers. Louis XIV of France said "I am the state" - which means that his will was the law and that he was not accountable to anyone but himself. Frederick on the other hand said "I am the first servant of the state"... which means that Frederick saw himself as equal to the rest of the people in his country to the duty of serving the country's interest. And as a servant he would be held accountable to his own country and his own people.
One could argue as you Frederick haters do and say that he was still a ruling dictator as the other kings. But on the other hand do I think it is undenible that Frederick took his job as King very seriously unlike other Kings who only took their farmers tax money to spend on luxuries and wasted their time on sex and delicious meals.
Frederick on the other hand woke up 6 AM every morning and began answering 30 letters or so by government officials. And later that day he would speak to his ministers or generals and inspect his troops or visiting farmers or merchants and listen to their concerns. So he worked very long hours each day, and the only few breaks he took was used for playing flute or having philosophical discussions.
Frederick the Great was also a man who fostered the industrial revolution in Germany, and the man possessed a great talent for finding great men for important positions in government. And Silesia would togheter with England and Belgium be the first place in Europe to enter the industrial revolution, thanks to the many succesful state-owned mining industries there. Frederick the Great was also interested in new technologies and he started to make porcelain in Prussia, and his country became the first in Germany to grow potatoes. So when Germany suffered from a great famine and millions were threatned by starvation, did Frederick and his military magazines filled with potatoes open up to share the food with the startving people and save many lives.
It is true that Frederick held contempt for the Polish, jews and despised the German language, and the idea of a unified Germany and that he mocked religion. But Frederick was on the other hand a man who also was capable to look beyond his own biases. He could respect the great talent of General von Ziethen, and he didn't turn him away only because he was a warm believer in Christianity. And eventough he thought that aristocrats would usally make up better officers, he would still not deny poor farmers the right to become officers if they could display great talent for the job. So he was indeed a believer in meritocracy.
He wanted to abolish serfdom, but the restistance towards such a reform was too hard for him to being able to finish that task within his own life-time.
So to summerize, do I think that Frederick the Great was one of the greatest rulers who have ever lived. He was a man way ahead of his own time - Almost like Leonardo da Vinci in that sense.
His ideas spread to the rest of Europe, and gave us all some of the freedoms we have today such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. He created the enlightenment which would replace all opressive religious dogma. And his school system is still used in many modern countries around this world, including my own: Sweden.
He had a few flaws of course. He started one war of agression in 1740. But on the other hand was Europe in the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s a place where this was normal and every country had to decide if it would eat up other lands, or become eaten itself. So we should not judge Frederick by measurements of today, but rather see him and judge him according to the standards of the 1700s.
And in that light, one could say that he was actully a great King in many ways. And not just a brutal uncivilized warlord or a lazy wasteful indifferent King who drank wine and slept with women all day long.
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I think people underestimate men like Frederick the Great, Gustavus Adolphus, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Those mens brains would have been of great usefulness regardless in which European country they would have been born into. Adolphus and Frederick were more than just warrior kings. The former spoke a half-dozen languages fluently and was a gifted administrator and a great speaker who could get his solidiers to follow him everyware, and he was a loved husband, and even the lowest ranked finnish farmers in the Swedish Kingdom loved him for his fairness, as he stamped out the plunder and opression the Finnish nobility caused their people.
And Frederick the Great was revolutionary with his ideas of religious freedoms and freedom of the press. He saved thousands of lives by introducing potatoes in Germany against the protests of superstitious farmers who thought they spread syphilis. Frederick built canals that improved trade, and he built up the first modern school system in the world. He was also a gifted flute player and a man who enjoyed the company of gifted men like Voltaire, Kant, and Bach.
So Frederick are one of those few men which I would consider to be a timeless genius. And he would still have remained a great man even if he had lost the seven years war. Just the same way as men as Hannibal deserves to be remembered as one the greatest Generals in history despite he ended up with losing the war despite his three masterpieces at Cannae, Lake Trasimene, and Trebia.
And now another topic. It is possible that history could have ended differently and that no one would have heard about our celebrities in history had they failed at a critical moment. George Washington could easily have lost the battle of Yorktown, and then USA would never have been created. Had the weather just been a few degrees warmer in 1658 then there would the ocean have not frozen into ice so that the Swedish army could have moved their forces to the island with Copenhagen on top of it and forced Denmark to sign the most humiliating and disasterous peace deal in their history.
Instead would the situation have been the total opposite. The Swedish army would have fallen into the ice cold ocean water and entire regiments would have drowned or frozen to death. And Charles X of Sweden would have been remembered as a reckless gambler who destroyed the Swedish army by throwing it into the ice cold water
while the country was at war with Poland, Russia, the Netherlands and Denmark at the same time, and while Austria and Brandenburg were also acting very hostile.
He won the war against Denmark and is now remembered as a great conqueror King and brilliant strategist. But in hindseight can we say that he was a gambler and unfit as a king when he took such large risks that could have totally destroyed the Kingdom. The Swedish navy was too weak to sail the men to Denmark without getting sunk by Danish and Netherlandic ships. So starting a winter campaign in the small hope of getting some ice on sea was a crazy gamble that easily could have gone wrong.
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