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Radio War Nerd EP #126 — Early Portuguese Empire + Yasha Levine on Cambridge Analytica (Patreon)

Published:
2018-03-23 14:12:26
Edited:
2018-03-23 14:15:42
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Guest: Yasha Levine, author & journalist

Recorded March 18, 2018

We know far too little about the extraordinary & savage story of how 15th-16th century Portugal "pushed faster and farther across the world than any people in history" despite being a relatively poor, barren strip of the Iberian peninsula . . . We discuss some of the larger-than-sci-fi characters like Da Gama, Almeida, Albuquerque, Magellan — the deadly voyages, and battles at Cochin, Diu, Hormuz . . .

At 1:55:10 — War News: Afrin fell to Turkey. East Ghouta largely conquered . . . Comparing stories on Yemen vs stories on Aleppo or Ghouta . . . 

At 2:26:40 — Yasha Levine joins us to talk about the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook election scandal, which just happens to be the subject of his new book "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" . . .

Maps

* Map of Da Gama's voyage around Africa 

* Map of Portuguese landings on India's west coast

* Map of Battle of Cochin (1504)

* Map of Battle of Diu

Total time: 3:09:29

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

Kurt Ellis

You guys rail against people who are genuinely concerned about the rise of nazism and hate. Its all just a bunch of sore loser Hillary people. This is real. You laugh off Steve Bannon as if he was just another Washington pundit hangers-on. He is not. Him and his crowd are dangerous

xnfec

Good episode. The Spanish ended up fighting a kind of forever-war in Morocco and an episode from the Morrocan perspective might be interesting. There is a book called White Gold - by Giles Milton which tells a story of Morrocan slave raids until the 18th century - they raided as far as the English coast. They were fighting the Spanish as well then and were considered a power. You mentioned that part of the Portuguese Legacy in the region is names. The CEO of Air Asia in Malaysia is a Malaysian of Indian (possibly Sri Lankan or Tamil) descent called Tony Fernandes. He also owns Queens Park Rangers football club in West London. The Portuguese came first to the empire building game but hung on until the end. They handed Macao back to the Chinese in 1997(?). Interestingly, I've heard that they allowed Portuguese passports to a lot of the population which the British did not do. The Portuguese hung on to Diu and Damao and also Goa until 1961 when the Indians kicked them out and occupied the territories. The Indian state allows them federal status - Diu is the smallest state in India. The Portuguese did not recognize the Indian occupation for many years and on a trip to Lisbon 15 years ago, I found that what I would call Indian food in the UK was called Goan food in Lisbon. I met a taxi driver who told me he was from Sao Tome (an island off the west coast of Africa) who told me that many of the former colonial citizens chose to go to Australia rather than return to Portugal following their divestment of their colonies in the 70's. Arguably, the French have hung on to more of their empire by converting large territories to actual parts of France. They tried it with Algeria but have managed to hang on to lots of territory regardless. The British have a few islands here and there but not to the same extent though they and the French have converted their territorial empires into empires of debt. As regards Gaspar da Gama being Polish, there were Poles fighting for the Ottomans in the 19th Century. Also, the Ottoman representative at the Congress of Berlin was Prussian. I've also read that the Mongol emissary to the Hungarian Court was English so people were moving around a lot even in the Middle Ages. You mentioned the funders of the Portuguese and Spanish expeditions. I've seen it argued that a lot of the cruelty of the conquerors was fueled by the debts they had incurred to just be there. Regarding Cambridge Analytica/Russia, I have come to the conclusion that the Russians are the patsies. In his book McMafia, Misha Glenny tells if an encounter where his interlocutor recounts a meeting with a Russian intelligence operator. Glenny's contact says that it was impossible to tell if the Russian was working for the Government, an Oligarchical interest, a criminal gang or all three and that the Russian would have seen no contradiction with this. The Google model allows people to make money by acquiring eyeballs on ads - hence the Macedonian troll farm. It is possible for American interests to pay for these services to help them achieve an end and for them to have total deniability and a ready-made culprit to point the finger at. The Russians are so compromised that they make the perfect villain.

Aeron Glemann

Some clarifications (it’s frustrating to hear this misinformation repeated). _FB doesn’t sell data_. It’s an advertising platform like any other - you are billed by the advertising inventory you purchase - just with more advanced and accurate targeting criteria. _FB developers don’t pay for access to it’s data_. FB APIs (<a href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apis-and-sdks)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apis-and-sdks)</a> are provided for free to app developers in order to make apps that leverage the social nature of the platform. If your app charges users FB takes a % of that, just like with apps on Google's and Apple's platforms. Why would FB give away data to developers? I thought this was a fair answer: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/move-fast-and-fake-things/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/move-fast-and-fake-things/</a>

Stephen Joseph

Laughable about the part where the Portuguese supposedly mistook the Hindus for Christians on their first encounter in Kerala b’cos they thought their call out (presumably during a religious procession, something which Hindus are fond of doing) to their deity Krishna somehow sounded like Christo. Unbelievable, that’s crap to me ….. surely the Portuguese could distinct the blue Krishna to Jeez, Anyway not a bad episode. Btw there is an enclave in Malacca where the older folks still speak Kristang (old Portuguese language, barely understood by current Portuguese people). I still know some cuss words as we used to live there in the mid 60’s. The Portuguese folks were known to us then as ‘Gragos’ (meaning shrimp). Not advisable to call them that nowadays….

Wyrd

ABout Africa being always portrayed as too small on maps... when you project a curved surface on a flat plane you have to necessarily fuck something up, because mathematically speaking you reduce the dimensions by one. (A surface is 2D but it is curved in an aditional dimension) The more realistically you depict the dimensions the more you fuck up the contures of objects (or landmasses) on the map and vice versa. So you can either have a map that shows the right forms of the landmasses or the correct dimensions. people tend to instinctively go for "correct contures"

Sérgio Teixeira da Silva

On the advantages the Castillians had over the Mexicas and Quechuas, it wasn't steel, horses, or firearms nearly as much as disease, killing-focused tactics (in comparison to the Mexica, that were used to capturing enemies to sacrifice), and, most of all, that they were simply the leaders in a much larger faction in a civil war - the Castillians were hugely outnumbered not just by their enemies, but their Mesoamerican allies (the Quechua were recovering from a succession dispute). They later enlisted Mexicas and others to conquer the rest of current Mexico (see: Indian Conquistadors); by the way, much native nobility kept their titles and privileges, not being distinct today simply because they were absorbed into the white, Castillian-speaking, Roman Catholic nobility, so their descendants today are white Mexicans like any others. Two suggestions for future themes would the other mamluk dynasty (that of India; or, the previous Muslim conquest of northern India), and the Ottoman-Portuguese proxy wars (e.g. Abyssinia-Adal and Aceh-Portugal Wars). There's nothing much surprising about the Portuguese sailing up the Congo - the Kongo Kingdom, which the Portuguese made a vassal, was in the lower Congo region, partly in modern Angola. Did John say the Swahili Coast had a humane society? OK, it might beat the butcheries the Portuguese committed on arrival, but most large Sub-Saharan economies were to a large extent based on selling slaves - one reason the former-Ottoman/Arab countries aren't blacker is that the black male slaves were disproportionately castrated. On guns in pre-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa: at that time, the Swahili (East) Coast definitely had them, the Sahelian (right south of the Sahara) empires were just getting them introduced with *extreme* prejudice by the Moroccans, and Guineans and Central Africans didn't have them at all - Kongo, Ndongo, and Matamba all adopted them (and Roman Catholicism) from the Portuguese. Will our descendants think we were stinky? Only if technology/wealth keeps increasing, which seems to me nothing like sure ... On who fought with "honor"/fixation on close combat: its said that Ismail I of Iran went to fight the Ottomans at Chaldiran, and said "It'd be cowardly to charge them before they ready their defenses, and besides, God is with me!". He was wounded, retreated, and his capital was sacked. He became an alcoholic - he'd been competent until them. BTW, someone needs to do something about the Safavid Dynasty. About the samurai, their traditional weapons had been the bow and the spear/naginata, and in the Warring States period, they adopted mass firearm use at least for common soldiers, and many samurai were proud of their personal mastery of firearms; the sword worship was what happened when there were peace and gun control, and samurai had no reason to carry more than a sword, as a symbol and maybe for duels and personal defense. I read somewhere the hypothesis that the military reforms by Shaka (possibly among others), shifting focus towards close combat, were inspired by Portuguese tactics on Mozambique. <a href="http://historicalleys.blogspot.com.br/2009/01/portuguese-attack-on-calicut-4th-jan.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://historicalleys.blogspot.com.br/2009/01/portuguese-attack-on-calicut-4th-jan.html</a> has a great description of Fernando Coutinho as "strong of arm, great of belly, weak of brain"; BTW, Portuguese "nh" is just like Spanish "ñ". Mark compares the looting to 1001 Nights because, not being a nerd, he didn't play Dungeons & Dragons (the old versions of which come complete with racism against savages to be stolen from). Technically, Portugal was never part of the Kingdom of Spain - there was a number of legal separations not only between Portugal and the rest of Iberia, but between the other parts, which were formally multiple kingdoms, too. When I said the Castillians invaded the Americas, above, that was because the Castillian (in the Americas) and Aragonese (in the Mediterranean) possessions belonged to a single king but under different laws. I'd heard many people in Angola, few in Mozambique and almost none in Timor-Leste spoke Portuguese. Recent official statistics seem to say, that in order, it's 39/3/about 0%, in order, as first language, and 71/50/25% that speak Portuguese at all. With the Ambundu (from around Luanda) being only 25% of the Angolan population, it does suggest danger to their Kimbundu language. With the report that only about 600 people in Timor-Leste spoke Portuguese upon independence, increasing that to 25% of the population speaking it as a second language looks pretty impressive - it may have helped that the separatists alledgedly used it the most. The Ottomans, from conquering Egypt in 1517, had Indian Ocean access (and used it to fight the Portuguese, as per above). And, well, the Egyptian Mamluks had it first. Ming ships were huge, but not ready to cross open ocean. And the Chinese hadn't spent much effort on learning ocean navigation. (Not that they couldn't have solved both had they not stopped even trying.) On the "softness" of Imperial Chinese power, Mong Mao and Dzungaria would disagree. (And someone should cover Dzungaria.) When the Mongol invasions of Japan failed in part due to weather, the monasteries demanded (and got!) payment from the government, for summoning the divine winds (kamikaze).

xnfec

The Portuguese are often referred to as Britains Oldest Ally. It did not do them much good as the British would bully them over Africa (stopped them going into current day Zimbabwe - thus linking Mozambique with Angola) and strog-armed them into entering the first world war. There is a throw-away line in Robert Graves' Goodby to All That referring to the conditions in the Portuguese trenches. If you want t do a show on the Mameluks in Egypt, John Glubb wrote a good history of them. Glubb is interesting in his own right. He commanded Jordan's forces on independence and fought in the 1948 war. Though they eventually fell out, Jordan's old king Hussein attended Glubb's funeral.

xnfec

In the Uruguayan countryside, the people don't say they speak Spanish; they say they speak Castillian. At least that was the case when I was there a long time ago. These days, in the internet age, who knows?

Antoni Gumbau

Portuguese had a show. Will Spain ever have one? There are currently many books in Spain bringing a different point of view to the Spanish Empire (more achievements, less black legend). Cheers from Barcelona

Sérgio Teixeira da Silva

Which ones do you recommend? Also, do they want to call the author of "The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise" ? But anyway, is Catalunya España?

Antoni Gumbau

As of now It is, I'm affraid 😊. There's professor Elvira Roca Barea Who made an superb book about Empires and the Black Legend that they Carry. That would be a great show.

Paul M

Fantastic episode. Small things on the early Portuguese exploration, though. It's actually a myth that the conquest of Constantinople started the Portuguese and Spanish Imperial periods. You even alluded to one of the reasons this wasn't true. The spice trade didn't primarily go through Christian Constantinople, but through Mamluk Egypt. The Mamluks had been middlemen in Cairo since 1250. There also weren't any price spikes to spices after 1453. I don't have data on cinnamon, etc., but I do have data on black pepper, which was by far the most popular spice. The price spikes were earlier in the 15th century (between 1409 and 1412) and the prices had gone down by the 1450s. (Pure speculation, but the price spikes were at the same time as the Ming Treasure fleets, which bought up large quantities of spices.) The Portuguese also didn't initially set out to go to India. As you also said, there were some Ptolemaic maps that had Africa going to the bottom of the world. The initial goal was to get West African gold. They did view the Muslims of Morocco and the Sahara as enemies and they were often hostile. The idea was to get around and established trading forts on the Guinea coast, bypass the Muslims, and get rich in the process. They didn't find the gold at that time because it was more inland, but each naval success inspired more naval success. As they got farther down Africa, they started to believe it possible to sail around it and get to India. They did hope to bypass the Venetians and possibly the Mamluks and make a ton of money in the process. But it wasn't because the spice trade was cut off or disrupted by the fall of Constantinople because it had no impact at all. The 1490 discovery of the Cape of Good Hope ironically helped Columbus get funding for his westward voyage. Some in Europe had hoped that Africa was a lot smaller than it turned out to be. Columbus was armed with crazy theories about the shape and size of the Earth (smaller and pair-shaped) and at least some in Spain were willing to take the chance he was right to avoid the long, difficult journey around Africa. There were definitely ancient people who thought the tides were connected to the moon, but it wasn't agreed upon. I know by Galileo's time, the moon was the leading theory, but that was after this battle. In 1615, Galileo published the argument that the tides were caused by the motion of the Earth, thus proving the Earth moved. Galileo had been forbidden from teaching a moving Earth as any more than a theory without providing proof that the Earth moves. So, the commander could have been operating under an unproven belief about tides or he made the observation himself. He wasn't the first to make the connection to the moon, but that doesn't mean he didn't make the observation independently or that his beliefs weren't more important or influential than others.

Eva Lacy

Hmm, I feel like your analysis of the impact of the internet on politics could do with some more nuance. While there are many documented failures of corporations trying to influence people over the internet the fact is that's where the majority of political conversions are occurring. The quality is a lot lower than you'd want but that reflects more the standard of education than the medium. I would argue that the biggest impact that the internet creates is community building between people who would have otherwise have had no cause to meet. It is informing a huge amount of the beliefs of the average person, and while the beliefs were common before you can almost predict the words coming out of the mouths of your friends by whatever memes are currently doing the rounds. If the subject is not something they are well versed on. You've spoken about the decline in journalism which occurred well before the internet reached saturation, however before the internet someone like me could never have gotten 7000 views in a single day working from a budget of 100 euro a month as a hobby. In the before times that would have been jobs for journalists. It's the reason why so many flock to your podcast, to fine relief from the cheap analysis. However don't underestimate it's impact, and it's not going to get any easier. I would suggest considering any recent revolutions and the impact social media has played, I would argue that since the Arab Spring it has become a mechanism for governments to identify "dangerous elements". Spotify can find me music that suits my tastes, surely a natural language processing tool hooked up to a neural network with a criminal database as training data can help with picking up someone acting against American national interests. So why are all these failures, well honestly it's because data science in the wrong hands is creepy and they don't have to worry you with the burden of they knowledge.

Siddharth Vodnala

Hi John, Mark: Would love to see a future episode on the Mongols, who've shaped our world more than people usually guess.

Sérgio Teixeira da Silva

If that was done, I'd like to hear Mark on the "scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tatar" thesis.

James

Yes! Please - I would also like to hear from Mark on that, or more broadly, on the long term influence the Tatars have had on the Russian people.