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Практика английского по видео: Who Was the Greatest Leader in History

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  1. What do you think makes a great leader?0:02
  2. Maybe if you have other examples throughout history and great, again, let's use that term loosely.0:05
  3. Now, I was going to ask for a definition.0:13
  4. Great uniter of whether it's evil or good, it doesn't matter.0:15
  5. Is there somebody who stands out to you, Alexander the Great, talking about military or ideologies and some people bring up FDR or I mean it could be the founding0:22
  6. fathers of this country, or we can go to, was he a man of the century, up there, Hitler of the 20th century, Stalin, and these people had really amassed0:34
  7. the amount of power that probably has never been seen in the history of the world.0:51
  8. Is there somebody who stands out to you by way of trying to define what makes a great uniter, great leader in one man or a woman maybe in the0:55
  9. future?1:05
  10. It's an interesting question and I want to have thought a lot about because let's take Alexander the Great as an example because Alexander fascinated the world of his time,1:06
  11. fascinated ever since people have been fascinated with the guy.1:15
  12. But Alexander was a hereditary monarch, right?1:18
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  1. He was handed the kingdom.1:22
  2. He's fascinating.1:25
  3. Right, but he did not need to rise from nothing to get that job.1:26
  4. In fact, he reminds me of a lot of other leaders, Frederick the Great for example, in Prussia.1:30
  5. These are people who inherited the greatest army of their day.1:36
  6. Alexander, unless he was an imbecile, was going to be great no matter what because if you inherit the Wehrmacht, you're going to be able to do something with it.1:42
  7. Alexander's father may have been greater, Philip.1:52
  8. He Philip II was the guy who literally did create a strong kingdom from a disjointed group of people that were continually beset by their neighbors.1:56
  9. He's the one that reformed that army, took things that he had learned from other Greek leaders like the Theban leader of Pemynondas.2:07
  10. And then laboriously over his lifetime, stabilized the frontiers, built this system.2:16
  11. He lost an eye doing it.2:23
  12. He his leg was made lame.2:25
  13. I mean, this was a man who looked like he built the empire and led from the front ranks.2:28
  14. I mean, so and then and then who may have been killed by his son.2:33
  15. We don't know who assassinated Philip, but then handed the greatest army the world had ever seen to his son, who then did great things with it.2:37
  16. You see this pattern many times.2:44
  17. So in my mind, I'm not sure Alexander really can be that great when you compare him to people who arose from nothing.2:46
  18. So the difference between what we would call in the United States, the self -made man or the one who inherits a fortune.2:55
  19. There's an old line that, you know, it's a slur, but it's about rich people.3:02
  20. And it's like he was born on, he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple, right?3:06
  21. Philip was born at home plate and he had to hit Alexander started on third base.3:12
  22. And so I try to draw a distinction between them.3:18
  23. Jengus Khan is tough because there's two traditions.3:21
  24. The tradition that we grew up with here in the United States and that I grew up learning was that he was a self -made man.3:24
  25. But there is a tradition and it may be one of those things that's put after the fact because a long time ago, whether or not you had blue blood3:30
  26. in your veins was an important distinction.3:38
  27. And so the distinction that you'll often hear from Mongolian history is that this was a nobleman who had been deprived of his inheritance.3:41
  28. So he was a blue blood anyway.3:49
  29. I don't know which is true.3:51
  30. There's certainly, I mean, when you look at a Jengus Khan, though, you have to go, that is a wicked amount of things to have achieved.3:53
  31. He's very impressive as a figure.4:01
  32. Attila is very impressive as a figure.4:03
  33. Hitler is an interesting figure.4:06
  34. He's one of those people because, you know, the more you study about Hitler, the more you wonder where the defining moment was.4:08
  35. Because if you look at his life, I mean, Hitler was a relatively common soldier in the First World War.4:16
  36. I mean, he was brave.4:24
  37. He got he got some decorations.4:25
  38. In fact, the highest decoration he got in the First World War was given to him by a Jewish officer.4:27
  39. And it was he often didn't talk about that decoration, even though it was the more prestigious one, because it would open up a whole can of worms you didn't4:32
  40. want to get into.4:39
  41. But Hitler's.4:40
  42. I mean, if you said who was Hitler today, one of the top things you're going to say is he was an anti -Semite.4:42
  43. Well, then you have to draw a distinction between general, regular anti -Semitism that was pretty common in the era and something that was a rabid level of anti -Semitism.4:47
  44. But Hitler didn't seem to show a rabid level of anti -Semitism until after or at the very end of the First World War.4:57
  45. So if this is a defining part of this person's character and much of what we consider to be his his evil stems from that, what happened to this guy5:04
  46. when he's an adult, right?5:14
  47. He's already fought in the war to change him.5:16
  48. So I mean, it's almost like the old there was always a movie theme.5:18
  49. Somebody gets hit by by something on the head and their whole personality changes, right?5:21
  50. I mean, it almost seems something like that.5:25
  51. So I don't think I call that necessarily a great leader.5:28
  52. To me, the interesting thing about Hitler is what the hell happened to a non -descript person who didn't really impress anybody with his skills?5:31
  53. And then in the 1920s, it's all of a sudden, as you said, sort of the man of the hour, right?5:40
  54. So that to me is kind of fast.5:45
  55. I have this feeling that Genghis Khan, and we don't really know, was an impressive human being from the get go.5:47
  56. And then he was raised in this environment with pressure on all sides.5:53
  57. So you start with this diamond and then you polish it and you harden it his whole life.5:56
  58. Hitler seems to be a very unimpressive gemstone most of his life, and then all of a sudden.6:00
  59. So I mean, I don't think I can label great leaders.6:06
  60. And I'm always fascinated by that idea that and I'm trying to remember who the quote was by that that great men or Lord Acton.6:09
  61. So great men are often not good men.6:16
  62. And that in order to be great, you would have to jettison many of the moral qualities that we normally would consider a Jesus or a Gandhi or, you know,6:19
  63. the Martin.6:28
  64. These these qualities that one looks at as as the good, upstanding moral qualities that we should all aspire to as examples, right?6:29
  65. The Buddha, whatever it might be.6:36
  66. Those people wouldn't make good leaders because what you need to be a good leader often requires the kind of choices that a true philosophical diogenes, moral man wouldn't make.6:38
  67. So I don't have an answer to your question.6:48
  68. How about that?6:50
  69. That's a very long way of saying, I don't know.6:50
  70. Just linger a little bit.6:53
  71. It does feel like from my study of Hitler that the time molded the man versus Jengaskhan, where it feels like he, the man molded his time.6:55
  72. Yes.7:06
  73. And I feel that way about a lot of those nomadic confederacy builders that they really seem to be these figures that that stand out as extraordinary for one in7:06
  74. one way or another.7:17
  75. Remembering, by the way, that almost all the history of them were written by the enemies that they so mistreated that they were probably never going to get any good7:18
  76. press.7:25
  77. They didn't write themselves.7:25
  78. That's a caveat we should always get to basically.7:26
  79. No matter who Native American peoples or tribal peoples anywhere, generally do not get the advantage of being able to write the history of their heroes.7:29

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198 слов в минуту — быстрее, чем 60% каталога
Уровень CEFR
B2
Слова, которые стоит знать
caveat, gemstone, beset, ideologies, jettison, slur
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