Podbit · Empire: World History
American schoolchildren know Washington as the father of the nation. The Haudenosaunee knew him as the Town Destroyer. Washington ordered General Sullivan to raze 40 to 50 Native American towns in upstate New York — a scouting expedition for future white settlement.
Where this was said
At 14:53 · chapter starts 13:00
The film's opening sentence, Burns reveals, acknowledges that the Revolution engaged more than two dozen nations — European as well as Native American. [1] — Ken Burns "For 150 years before the Revolution, Native American nations were active economic, military, and diplomatic players on a world stage. They …" 12:55 This is not a courtesy gesture. For 150 years before the Revolution, many Native nations had been economic, military, and diplomatic players on the world stage, visiting London, Paris, and Madrid. Burns is emphatic: a tribe like the Shawnee was geopolitically as significant as the colony of Massachusetts, Virginia, England, or France. Treating Native peoples as a single undifferentiated mass is as absurd as treating all Europeans as one thing — they have distinct identities, centuries and millennia old. The Europeans arriving in North America have seven or eight generations of continental experience; the Native peoples they encounter have 600 or 700. Failing to extend proper historical dimensions to Native Americans, Burns argues, is the foundational distortion of American history.
Factories that replaced coal engines with electric ones in the early 1900s got only 6% efficiency gains. Those that redesigned their entire factory around electricity got a 3x productivity improvement. Swapping AI tools into your existing structure will give you 6%. Rebuilding around AI will give you 10x.
Lebanese terrorists backed by Iran were holding American hostages throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan had loudly campaigned against negotiating with terrorists — putting him in an impossible position that his team quietly decided to ignore.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the US openly supplied Iraq with weapons, training, and intelligence. At the same time, Oliver North was secretly funneling missiles to Iran. The US was playing both sides of a shooting war.
Oliver North traveled to Iran under the alias 'William P. Goode' with a fake passport. CIA Director William Casey allegedly gave him cyanide pills so he could kill himself rather than be tortured if captured. He returned safely and the deal moved forward.
The Pentagon sold missiles to the CIA for $3,700 each. The CIA sold them to Richard Secord at cost. Secord sold them to Iranian middleman Ghorbanifar for $10,000 each. Ghorbanifar charged Iran even more. The profit — including $3 million in interest in one Swiss account — was diverted directly to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran in 8 shipments over more than a year. Only 3 of 7 hostages were released. Three more were taken. The net result was zero freed hostages and a full-blown constitutional scandal.
On October 5, 1986, a CIA Contra supply plane flew a weapons drop at 2,500 feet in broad daylight. A Sandinista soldier shot it down. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfuss, had borrowed a parachute from his skydiving brother. He was captured, paraded in front of cameras, and told the Sandinistas everything he knew.
The CIA supply operation used a front company called Southern Air Transport, widely known to be a CIA cover. Crew members of the downed plane carried their Southern Air Transport employee IDs in their wallets. One also had a business card directly linking him to Oliver North's office in Washington.
When the scandal broke, Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall conducted what became known as a 'shredding party,' destroying a day's worth of documents. The full truth of Iran-Contra may never be known because of what was fed through that shredder.
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