I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 8-15 February 2026

Posted on February 16, 2026 | Leave a comment

The Rest is History Episode 638 Revolution in Iran: The Hostage Crisis (Part 3) On 4th November 1979 students broke into the US embassy and took 72 hostages in what they thought would be a short 3-day takeover. At the time Iran was governed by an interim government, but power was increasingly held in the hands of the mullahs, who feared that mooted reforms would undermine the revolution. This was not the first attempt that students had made on the embassy: Khomeini himself called off an earlier protest at the embassy a short while earlier. By now there were few US embassy staff left, and Ambassador Sullivan (who Carter never liked anyway) had been sacked and not replaced. Sullivan warned the US not to let the ailing Shah into the US, but he but he ended up being let in anyway after going first to Romania, then Egypt before dying on 27 July 1980. We need to remember that 1979 was only four years after the fall of Saigon, and the images from that were still strong in public memory. Six embassy staff were able to escape, and the others were split up and sent to separate prisons. They were held captive for 444 days. Khomeini’s initial response was to kick them out, but he later changed his mind when he saw the hostages’ symbolic value. The US thought that they could negotiate their release, but Khomeini and his government didn’t want to release them. Each side saw the other as Evil, with religious overtones of the Great Satan. By this time radical Islam had spread world wide, and there was a sense of Western failure. Carter was facing election and he needed to do something so on 22 March 1980 Carter unveiled his plan to rescue the hostages.

Journey Through Time Episode 64 The Spanish Civil War: A Nazi Training Ground (Episode 3) The Battle of Jarama, on 6-27 February 1937 was an attempt by Franco to dislodge the Republican fighters east of Madrid. The International Brigades, including the Lincoln Battalion, were sent in completely unprepared, with insufficient and mismatched ammunition, insufficient maps and poor communications and the battle was over in hours. Technically the Republicans won, but it was a huge psychological defeat for them. Both sides used the battle for propaganda purposes: the Republicans lauded the ‘noble sacrifice’ while the Nationalists reveled in the German expertise to which they had access and they denied the atrocities committed. The role of foreign correspondents was important: Hemingway supported the anti-Fascist loyalists and their sacrifice, and by this time Kim Philby had arrived and was embedded with Franco as a British journalist but was feeding intelligence to Moscow. The International Brigades rebuilt themselves, but now they had more political oversight. Despite being volunteers, deserters were executed because they were an army. By Spring 1937 there were two competing narratives: one that the International Brigade were being used as cannon fodder versus the idea that ordinary people could stop fascism.

The Rest is Classified Episode 102: Putin’s Secret Army: Criminals and Cannibals (Episode 5) By 2022 Russia was making its plans for Ukraine, and because it was framing it as a ‘special military operation’, Russia found itself having to turn to the Wagner mercenary forces again because they didn’t want to officially call up troops. At its peak, Wagner had 85000 troops in Ukraine, sourced by going to the prisons and offering a pardon to prisoners in exchange for 6 month’s fighting: a good deal if you were facing a long sentence. However, the Wagner troops were used as cannon fodder, or “meat waves” where they were used to exhaust the Ukrainian troops before the better-trained Russian troops came in. By this time, Prigozhin was no longer coy about identifying himself with Wagner or the Internet Research Agency. He had aligned himself with hypernationalists, and was pushing to have full mobilization of Russian Troops.

Episode 103: Putin’s Secret Army: The Coup That Almost Brought Down Russia (Episode 6) By now, Prigozhin’s Wagner group was not the only mercenary army fighting in Ukraine, and the Ministry of Defence (which had never liked him and wanted to distance itself from him) was happy about the competition and not having to rely so heavily on Prigozhin. At the Battle of Bakhmut, Prigozhin’s troops were being used as cannon fodder, perhaps deliberately by the Ministry of Defence. Prigozhin began producing videos criticizing the leadership for incompetence and lack of support. When the Ministry of Defence ordered all mercenary troops to be under the directives of the Ministry, Prigozhin marched back to Russia, calling for people to rise up and join him. They didn’t. The President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko (an ally of Putin’s) talked him down, and suddenly it was over. Had the march on Russia been a coup or a negotiating tactic? Two months to the day after the march on Moscow, the jet in which Prigozhin and all his leadership group were travelling plunged to earth, with all on board to die. It was all over, although Prigozhin showed the brittleness of the Russian system, and was the most significant elite challenge to Putin’s power.

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‘And the Women Watch and Wait’ by Catherine Meyrick

Posted on February 13, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 435 p.

Especially in the wake of the centenary of WWI, there has been no shortage of books about men’s experience in war. They’re usually big fat books, often named for a battleground in large letters, with the (male) author’s name is letters much the same size. Women’s experience- especially the experience of women who didn’t go to war but instead stayed home waiting- is less often documented. And the Women Watch and Wait is based in suburban Coburg in Melbourne, and it captures well the dissonance between suburban life and battlefields far away, the agony of curtailed and delayed communication, and the emotional peril of allowing yourself to fall in love.

Kate is a young country girl who has been sent down to Coburg as company for her Aunt Mary, whose two sons have volunteered and been sent overseas as part of the first contingent of soldiers to be deployed. As well as the excitement of staying in Melbourne, Kate is excited that her boyfriend from Gippsland, Jack, has been sent to the nearby Broadmeadows Training Camp, and there are more opportunities for them to meet up before he leaves than there would have been had she still been in Gippsland. Time is rushing on, as the rumours of the trainees’ departure mount, and she is excited when Jack proposes to her. At this stage, there is still hope that ‘the boys’ will be back by Christmas, and there seems such pressure of time to commit, to get married and start up a married life. Jack leaves with his detachment, and Kate is left with her aunt, working in her aunt’s grocer shop, teetering between excitement to receive mail, and yet fearing what news the mail might bring. News does arrive, and she, along with the women among whom she is living, has to readjust her hopes for the future.

I’m probably a particularly critical audience for this book, because as it happens I’ve been writing a column for the newsletter of my local historical society for the past ten years or so that looks at events at the local Heidelberg level one hundred years previously. Just as Catherine Meyrick would have done in researching this book, I’ve followed the local newspapers closely, consciously looking for women’s experiences, reading every page and even the advertisements and classifieds. This has given me a close-up knowledge of one suburb, (albeit a few suburbs away from Coburg) and how the world-wide events of WWI impacted the social and political life of a community. I must say that she has nailed the local aspects, and I found myself nodding away to parallels that arose in her book which also occurred in Heidelberg.

The book is arranged chronologically by year, starting in 1914 and going through to 1919 with an epilogue. It has over sixty short chapters- too many, I feel- and the frequent changes of location made it feel a little like a screenplay. She integrates political events of the day, like the conscription debates, into her narrative and, again, she captures this big event playing out in small halls and conversations so well. I particularly liked that she explored the WWI experience from the Catholic viewpoint, something that is not represented well in the local newspapers that I have read.

It’s a difficult thing to undertake huge amounts of research, then to let it go in case it smothers the narrative (an advantage that historians have over novelists). At times I felt that small local details were made too explicit, but I’m also conscious that I may have read this book differently to the way that other people might read it. At an emotional level, the book rang true with love, fear, vulnerability and strength being lived out not in trenches but in suburban houses and streetscapes.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: purchased e-book. Check https://books2read.com/AndtheWomenWatchandWait/ for availability

Read because: I noticed that the author had linked to several of my posts.

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Real Attention Challenge Days 10 and 11

Posted on February 11, 2026 | Leave a comment

Well, both these days were a bit ho-hum. Day 10 Looking Deeply into your Food involved eating mindfully, contemplating a small piece of food in its color, shape, texture, light, and shadow, then imagining its history: the dirt, the crops, the hands that harvested it. Well, I chose a white peach, which had a very strong peachy smell, very juicy and no doubt had a completely industrialized history as it came from a supermarket.

Day 11 Alone with Others involved going somewhere in public, sitting comfortably and watching people come and go, paying special attention to how your sense of self changes in the presence of complete strangers. I actually do this often. Sometimes I get involved (at a distance) from their situation- eavesdropping on their conversations, trying to work out where they’re going and who the people around them are- but other times I observe them as if I’m going to write about them, formulating my descriptions of them in my head. To be honest, I am a rather nosy person, although I rationalize it as being ‘interested’.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 February 2026

Posted on February 11, 2026 | Leave a comment

The Rest is Classified Episode 101: Putin’s Secret Army: Wagner’s Control of Africa (Episode 4) As the French withdrew from the Central African Republic, Yevgeny Prigozhin and the infamous Wagner Group saw an opportunity to make themselves useful to the Kremlin by globalizing his model and applying it to new conflicts. After all, the East Indian Company had used this privatized company model of colonization way back in the 18th century. In the end, is there a difference between mercenaries and a government contractor? For quite some time, Prigozhin denied any involvement in Africa, adopting some fairly risible disguises when flying in for meetings. He made a deal with Sudan in exchange for gold; he took advantage of the Civil War in Libya after Gaddafi; in Mozambique different countries were pitching for deals. In exchange for his security and information warfare, he received mining concessions. Ever the publicist, he was heavily into branding, and started making his own publicity films in Africa, starring his own troops. But by January 2022 he came into conflict with the Russian Ministry of the Defence who, he felt, were locking him out.

The Rest is History Episode 637 Revolution in Iran: The Rise of the Ayatollah Part 2. The Iranian Revolution, despite being characterized in the west as ‘medieval’, is a classic 20th century revolution, with the involvement of the petite-bourgeousie, young unemployed working class men and students but also with the addition of clerics and religious students. The Shah neither repressed nor appeased the protestors, and U.S. President Jimmy Carter was completely out of his depth. He appointed the dovish Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State (of course, Tom points out the irony of having a man called Cyrus being appointed to Iranian (Persian) affairs given the historical Cyrus the Great) as well as the hawkish, anti-Russian Zbigniew Brzezinski as National Security Advisor. Needless to say, the two men did not get on. In October 1978 the Sunni, Arab, Baathist Saddam Hussein expelled Khomeini from Iraq, and he went to Paris where he made himself very available to the world press, who were happy to report his anti-colonial, anti-imperialist views. He did express to the international press his radical view that the mullahs should run the state, but he was quite open about it in his taped lectures which were sent home to Iran and circulated widely. On New Years Eve he issued a call for nine days of protests, and by 19 January 1979 the Shah had agreed to leave, wanting to go to California, which led to more conflict between Vance and Brzezinski over US’ responsibility to the Shah. On 1 February 1979 Khomeini returned after fifteen years’ exile and was greeted by crowds. Brzezinki was urging a coup, but the US Ambassador to Iran, Sullivan, rejected this plan, arguing that there were fears for US businessmen and that oil prices would skyrocket. Meanwhile, back in America, evangelical Jimmy Carter was convinced that US was gripped by a spiritual crisis, exemplified by what came to be known as his televised ‘malaise’ speech, calling for people to use less oil- not the sort of message Americans are accustomed to hearing from their President. Khomeini announced the export of Sharia Law, and the increasingly ill Shah was stuck in the Middle East.

Journey Through Time Episode 63 The Spanish Civil War: Fighting Fascism With Hemingway and Orwell (Episode 2) Despite their governments’ squeamishness about getting involved in the Spanish Civil War, combatants from more than 53 countries came to support the Republicans under Comintern. In fact, the Lincoln Battalion, a force of volunteers from the United States who served on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War from January 1937 until November 1938, was the first racially integrated US military force. Despite the Republican fighters’ enthusiasm, they were amateurs: some came to Spain intentionally, others just happened to be in Barcelona for the 1936 Peoples Olympiad, set up in opposition to Hitler’s Olympics, which ended up being cancelled anyway because of the outbreak of the Civil War. The Republican effort was working class, but its public image has been largely shaped by the writers and photographers who attended, who had the contacts with publishers to get their work out. Women were involved too, defending the feminism in Republican Spain compared with the sexual violence amongst the Nationalists, who were not beyond using systematic rape. The Republican military training was more ideological than practical. Because of Spain’s neutrality during WWI, the Nationalist troops were not particularly experienced either, and the battle-hardened leaders from the foreign legions took control in Franco’s army. Nonetheless, the battle for Madrid was hard fought on both sides.

Late Night Live Barry Jones on a life of public service and the state of politics today Barry Jones might be 93 years old, and in frail health, but his feats of memory are amazing. Obviously interviewer David Marr was apprehensive that Jones might ramble on and kept him on a fairly tight leash, even ringing an imaginary bell when Jones went on for too long. I couldn’t believe how easily Jones could bring to mind names and acronyms in a wide-ranging conversation: none of the -oh-it’s-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue lapses of people half his age. I loved his discussion of the ‘numinous’.

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‘Amity’ by Nathan Harris

Posted on February 9, 2026 | 1 comment
2025, 308 p.

I loved Nathan Harris’ debut novel The Sweetness of Water, which I read soon after it was published in 2021. This second book, Amity bears several similarities to his first book, both set in Reconstruction era America, and both telling the story of a journey. Given that these were the qualities that attracted me to The Sweetness of Water, encountering them again was a pleasure rather than a drawback.

Set in Louisiana in 1866, it is a journey saga, told in two alternating parts. It is not immediately clear who is the author of the first-person frame story, focussing on Coleman, or what is the status of the interspersed ‘June’ stories, that focus on Coleman’s older sister June. Both June and Coleman had been ‘owned’ by the Harper family, and although ostensibly liberated after the Civil War, both were still bound to the family, if not legally, then through coercion and emotional manipulation. Two years earlier the siblings had been separated when Mr Harper took June, whom he had pressured into a sexual relationship, on a wild-goose-chase into Mexico in search of silver. Coleman, a sensitive and rather stilted house servant had been left with Mrs Harper and her adult daughter Florence in Mr Harper’s absence. When they received a letter from Mr Harper summoning them to Mexico, they followed: Mrs Harper and daughter expecting to reap the benefits of the get-rich-quick scheme, and Coleman hoping to find his sister June. Unknown to Mrs and Miss Harper and Coleman, June, revolted by Mr Harper had escaped and finds sanctuary in Amity, a town of emancipated African-Americans surrounded by displaced Native American tribes. As she is heading north, in search of safety and the dream of reuniting with her brother, he is heading south with Florence in response to Harpers’ summons, which Mr Harper wrote more as a lure to bring June back, rather than any intention to share his never-found wealth with his wife and daughter. In the harsh frontier territory the two separate journeys confront bands of Indian and Mexican army renegades, hustlers and refugees as any sense of safety is shattered by multiple betrayals and power switches.

Coleman is an odd character. Self-educated, he speaks in a formal, stilted tone and his loyalty to Florence breaks down in the face of so many threats that he feels unable to overcome. His formality makes it hard to warm to him, but by the end of the book you know why Harris has written him this way.

Harris writes landscape beautifully, and he captures well the ingrained cruelty of enslavement revealed not only through actions and betrayals, but also through the brusque and frankly shocking way that the Harpers spoke to their ‘servants’, despite the legal change in their circumstances.

I really enjoyed this book. Perhaps Harris could be criticized for re-writing his first book again and not moving beyond the Reconstruction Era of the immediate post-Civil War, but given that this era has been so shoehorned into a pro-South Gone With the Wind narrative, we need to hear more about the Black and Native American experience instead.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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Real Attention Challenge Days 8 and 9

Posted on February 9, 2026 | 1 comment

Day 8 was quite easy. Called ‘Practising Stoicism’, this challenge involved offer a sincere compliment or expression of gratitude—to a coworker, a barista, or a stranger on the sidewalk. Stoicism has a reputation of being dour but there’s also the aspect of making other people’s lives better. I didn’t find it hard to offer a compliment to a fellow volunteer at the historical society: I did it first, then thought- “hey, I can use that for my challenge”. She seemed rather pleased at the compliment, and I felt pretty good about it too. I actually do try to compliment people just as a matter of course.

Day 9: Adventurous Listening required taking a walk in your neighborhood and choosing 5 sounds that capture the energy of where you live. I walk down to the museum every Monday anyway, through a long narrow park that was previously a golf course. The five sounds I heard were quintessentially Rosanna Parklands: 1. the loudspeaker from the Monday morning assembly at Rosanna Golf Links Primary School. In fact, there may have even been competing assemblies, because I think I heard the assembly at Rosanna Primary School as well, on the other side of the railway line. 2. A train going past. One of the things I love most about where I live is the easy accessibility of the train. 3. The crunch of gravel as people walked towards or past me. Rosanna Parklands always has people walking there, any time of day. It’s a very popular park. 4. Magpies. Being a decommissioned golf course, there are large expanses of open space which the magpies just love. Such an Australian sound. 5 The radio blaring from a builder’s ute. Because blocks are fairly large here, there is lots of redevelopment going on. For some reason, tradies HAVE to have the radio full volume to regale neighbours and passers-by with Bloke Radio.

I was listening for the sounds which best exemplified the park, and there was no surprise in any of them: I could hear each of them any Monday morning. However, sustained listening for quintessential sounds did make the walk seem faster.

Actually, I took this photo last November before the heat and lack of rain turned everything to brown. And I have no idea why there is no-one there.

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‘Yoorrook Truth Be Told: Official Public Record’

Posted on February 7, 2026 | Leave a comment

In his book, Killing for Country David Marr relates his frustration when trying to find indigenous voices while researching the history of the frontier wars. An Indigenous colleague told him: “You mob wrote down the colonial records, the diaries and newspapers. You do the work. You tell that story. It’s your story.” (p. 409)

In the raw wake of the Referendum result, I felt as if I just wanted to curl up and have it all go away, and I can’t begin to imagine how First Peoples felt. Surely if people knew, there would have been a different result, wouldn’t there? (Would there?) I thought back to the sessions I attended in the local Aboriginal meeting place where we set out timelines and participated in activities- but how every single person there was already committed to ‘yes’. But this is our work: making the dispossession, massacres and injustice part of our (i.e. non-Indigenous) history. Our history generally- not just for the already committed but the sceptical and cynical and antagonistic as well. I don’t know how you do that- a public information campaign perhaps? The first step is right here with this official publication, in writing, with the authority of First Peoples themselves, to be put alongside with the Convicts-Squatters-Gold-Anzac trope of the textbooks and curriculums we grew up with.

In our post-truth zeitgeist, where we all have our own ‘truths’, it seems incongruous that when it comes to ourselves personally, as individuals, we want ‘the’ truth. It seems to draw on a long-buried childhood urgency to assert that you are right, and the other person is wrong. In insurance claims, in relationship breakdowns, in autopsies, we want someone to take our side, we want to know what really happened, and we want ‘them’ (a parent, a counsellor, the media, a court) to take our side. While I was reading this report, I listened to an interview with William Dalrymple on Global Roaming. He pointed out that two opposing facts can both be true: for example, Israel was formed in 1948 and was a haven for post-Holocaust Jews AND hundreds of thousands Palestinians were rendered stateless in the Nakba that followed the establishment of Israel. The Yoorrook Report is the definitive attempt to put the Aboriginal truth on the record so that it stands alongside and is interwoven with the convicts-squatters-gold-ANZAC arc. As the First Peoples’ Assembly stated in establishing Yoorrook:

The Yoorrook Justice Commission was not established to find the truth: the truth was never lost. It was established so the state might finally learn to hear what had long been spoken among First Peoples. It was established to gather the stories that had been scattered by centuries of violence and denial and to give them shape, force, direction—and, crucially, an equal place in the historical record (p.140)…Our peoples will no longer have to carry the pain of these stories alone—this history and these truths become everyone’s history and truths. (p144)

The report is long: far longer than I expected because I didn’t realize that each PDF page actually contained two pages. It starts with a preamble and introduction by both former premier Steve Bracks, and chairperson of the Yoorrook commission, Professor Eleanor Bourke, and then has a lengthy timeline of colonization in Victoria.

Part I ‘The Jagged Line’ is about 100 pages in length, and is divided into chronological chapters:

  • Sovereigns, squatters and settlers
  • Massacres and the dawn of injustice
  • Gold Diggers and the ‘Aboriginal Problem’
  • Letters, petitions and deputations
  • Protection, assimilation and the Stolen Generations
  • Thinking Black, fighting back
  • The Edge of Something New and Ancient.

There was little here that was new to me, although I hadn’t seen the Gold Rush and the establishment of missions linked like this. It was the Gold Rush that brought in the money that financed the creation of the State Library and Museum and the University of Melbourne, which in turn played their part in scientific racism and the ‘collection’ of artefacts. The missions, which were established in the 1860s, were deliberately placed far from the main gold field sites. The text is supplemented by a map which shows the rapid alienation of traditional lands through surveying and appropriation as Crown land for sale or lease. The section on letters and deputations highlighted the importance of Victoria in particular as the site for protest and organization, and I did raise an eyebrow at the explicit acknowledgement of the Communist Party as allies in this fight.

Part II The Silence and the Telling is a 40 page explanation of the establishment of the Commission in the context of previous commissions, and the explicit actions undertaken to ensure the embedding of Indigenous Data Sovereignty into the testimony. Some of these stories had been told previously, but others not. Truth Receivers were appointed to make contact with 9000 First Peoples, and evidence was received from 1500 people. More than 200 witnesses appeared as part of the four year enquiry. The Enquiry itself faced its own problems: firstly finding somewhere appropriate to hold it (they settled on Charcoal Lane in Collingwood- a site that has resonance amongst Koories in Melbourne), and then gaining the cooperation of government agencies in getting information to the commission in a timely manner. It is striking how much care was taken in ensuring that it was not another white-fella commission of enquiry. There is a series of photographs showing various encounters and bestowal of gifts on various dignitaries, reflecting both the generosity of the First Peoples and also the need to have relationships enshrined in ceremony and ritual.

Section III is the longest part, where selected witnesses tell their stories. Some of the names are familiar: actor Jack Charles, or Paul Briggs, but others will only be familiar to people in contact with the Koorie community in Victoria and who will recognize the leadership role that many of these witnesses play in different organizations, denoted by the title ‘Uncle’ and ‘Aunty’. There are non-Indigenous witnesses too, including the Premier, the Minister for Education, The Chief Commissioner of Police, the Anglican bishop of Gippsland. Suzannah Henty, descendant of the Henty family who appropriated lands at Portland also appeared. Again and again the same themes arise: the heartlessness and pettiness of bureaucracy, the pain of the Stolen Generation and a sense of betrayal.

The report closes with the key findings and a long list of recommendations compiled from the different reports issued throughout the life of the commission. Will they just gather dust, as was feared? Well, the recommendation of Treaty was taken up with alacrity (reflective perhaps of the fear of electoral defeat of the Labor Party next year?) but already is mired in party politics with the Victorian Liberals vowing to scrap it should it win power.

I’m really pleased that I read this report, and I hope that more Victorians do so as well. In places it is beautifully, lyrically written and underpinning it is a quiet, determined insistence and persistence.

Sourced from: The Yoorrook website as a PDF. Free. https://www.yoorrook.org.au/reports-and-recommendations/reports/yoorrook-official-public-record

Read because: my UU Fellowship committed to read it and discuss it.

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More challenges

Posted on February 7, 2026 | Leave a comment

Well, not only have I fallen behind with my Waking Up Challenges, but I’ve fallen behind in writing about them as well.

Day 5’s challenge was to sit it somewhere for five minutes and write down exactly what I saw,—objects, movement, colors, textures, light- then to write about what emotions or expectations might be influencing what I saw, and how. Well, I sat at my desk, the same desk that I’m typing this at. I have slimline venetian blinds, and so the light was being sliced up horizontally. What I could mostly see was mess: printoffs of music, little notes to myself, piles of folders, books I’ve read and haven’t decided what to do with. Around me, more piles of books and an assortment of ukuleles. My feelings about them all? Obligation and “I should”s. The one thing that made me smile was looking at my desk calendar which I had printed off with photographs of my grandchildren. Listening to the reflection that accompanied this challenge, I must be a person who sees through a glass darkly (which is not, I must admit, how I perceive myself). Or perhaps I should just clean up this desk (another should).

I skipped Day 6 but it looks interesting, and I might come back to that one.

Day 7 was called ‘Leveraging Boredom’ and the challenge was not to use my phone FOR A WHOLE DAY. Well, I soon decided that I couldn’t possibly do that, but what I could do was to not go onto social media, no Wordle, no Google, no Solitaire, You Tube or The Guardian website for a day. It was disturbingly difficult but I’ve been hating how much time I waste each day, especially at night when I get tired. So, instead of scrolling, I finished reading a book I’ve been enjoying and felt much better for doing so. Instead of watching TV and playing Solitaire at the same time, I actually watched the Foreign Correspondent episode I was watching.

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Leaning Into Relationships

Posted on February 4, 2026 | 2 comments

The challenge for Day 4 was:

Reach out to someone you haven’t spoken to in a while. Your message needn’t be long or detailed, but make it sincere: “You crossed my mind today, and I’d love to reconnect.”

Or, if you have some extra time and know the person’s address, consider sending a handwritten note.

Well, this all felt a bit cheesy to me, although that might be a bit defensive because I am certainly not good at keeping connections going. I often think of people, but I just don’t take that last step. So I rang my former sister-in-law and had a chat with her. I don’t think I properly entered into the spirit of this one.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 24-31 January 2025

Posted on February 3, 2026 | Leave a comment

The Rest is Classified Episode 100 Putin’s Secret Army: Fighting with Assad in Syria (Episode 3) Prigozhin met with Dmitry Utkin, a Nazi-leaning ex-soldier with the GRU Military Intelligence Unit. His favourite composer was Wagner, which is not unexpected amongst neo-Nazis, and this became his call sign, and later the name of the group he founded with Prigozhin. The hosts of the podcast, former CIA analyst turned spy novelist, David McCloskey, and veteran security correspondent, Gordon Corera, note that in all ages and all countries have their own mercenaries, not just Russia. There was restlessness in the Crimea and Ukraine, and with his contacts and supply lines of food to the military, Prigozhin could make himself “useful”. He arranged for 200 mercenaries (the ‘little green men’) in Crimea and Ukraine before their takeover by Russia, and it was proRussian groups who shot down Malaysian airlines MH17. Using his PR skills, Prigozhin was able to muddy the waters over the whole affair. The Wagner group fought a dirty war and by 2011 they had committed 1000 men, but the 2015 Minsk theoretically brought the fighting to a close (theoretically). By Sept 2015 the Wagner group was involved in Syria, where Russia had many interests and wanted to project its power. Russia was a big arms supply to Assad, and by 2016, 2500 mercenaries had been equipped by Russia. Soon there were very violent videos circulating on the internet showing beheadings etc. which all helped to build the mythology of the Wagner mercenaries. Prigozhin’s men were involved in fighting IS in Palmyra, and he soon started taking his cut from the infrastructure he ‘liberated’. But when the Wagner group attacked a US base, the Russians denied all knowledge of him and the attack, and suggested that he was freelancing (which he may very well have been doing). Prigozhin was furious with the Russian Ministry of Defence for not backing him up. In 2018 he was indicted by the US for interference in the 2016 election, and he shifted his attention to Africa.

The Global Story. The whole world was talking about Mark Carney’s talk at DAVOS, and I just felt relief that someone was FINALLY standing up to the Orange Bully. In Is Canada leading the global resistance against Trump? we hear a familiar voice, Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent who I certainly would never have picked as Canadian.

Journey Through Time Episode 62 Spanish Civil War: A Nation in Flames (Episode 1) Ah good- I’m looking forward to this. As they start off by commenting, the Spanish Civil War is better known for its cultural effects, especially in terms of the writers and artists it attracted. But why did it matter so much to people outside? 1936 the Spanish army staged a coup, but it neither succeeded nor failed- it just stalled, and the country split with the east coast and urban areas in favour of the Republicans, and the rural areas especially in the South for the Nationalist/Falangists and as they were known even then, the Fascists. The Nationalists were supported by Germany and Italy; the Republicans by Russia . The UK and France decided to abstain, and people in other countries, feeling that their countries had dropped the ball, arrived to fight themselves. In fact, they draw parallels between Spain then and Ukraine today. When the Republic was formed in 1931 it was faced immediately with the Depression. The coup actually began overseas, and Europe was already on edge. Hitler sent the Condor legion, and made Spain the testbed for international intervention, to see what he could get away with. Hitler felt that a Nationalist Spain would threaten France, and would block access to the Suez Canal, as well as distract attention from what he was doing in Europe. Meanwhile, Baldwin was occupied with the abdication crisis, and he gave oversight to Anthony Eden, who was on Franco’s side. The non-intervention pact was signed by France, UK, Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union and the latter three promptly ignored it. The League of Nations failed to act, and the US signed the Neutrality Act, which ostensibly meant that there would be no arms sales, no loans etc. However, that didn’t stop US companies from ignoring sanctions and giving support to the Fascists. Meanwhile, Stalin gave support to the Republican goverment in exchange for gold reserves. The International Brigades were organized through Comintern and soon began attracting participants including Orwell, Hemingway, Gellhorn and Kim Philby no less.

The Rest is History Episode 636 Revolution in Iran: Fall of the Shah (Part 1) Very topical, eh. This episode starts with an absolutely dreadful impersonation of Jimmy Carter toasting the Shah, just before the Revolution began. Dom and Tom make the rather big claim that the Islamic Revolution is comparable to the French and Russian Revolutions. I need to think about that. They point out that Iran (formerly Persia, and meaning ‘Land of the Aryans’) is neither Arab nor Sunni, and their monarchy stretches back to Darius and Cyrus, before Islam. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the father of the man who is in the US agitating to lead the current protests) was the rather timid son and heir to an overbearing bully, and he was sent to a Swiss boarding school, where he became quite the connoisseur and Francophile. His father, who was supported during WW2 to prevent the Germans from taking over, was forced by the British to abdicate after the war in favour of his son. As a result, the Shah has long been seen as a foreign puppet. In 1953 the Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh threatened to nationalize BP (formerly the Anglo-Persian Oil Company) so the CIA organized a coup. The Shah did nothing. In the mid 1950s the Shah began modernizing, and began believing his own publicity that he was a celebrity. In 1967 he organized a second coronation and renamed Persia to Iran as part of the 2500 year anniversary (quite amazing really, that any nation could have a 2500 year anniversary!) Corruption was rife, with the CIA training the Savak, the Iranian secret police, and big US arms sales going to Iran, even though the other Middle East countries tried to warn America. Then along comes Jimmy Carter- Christian, Southern Democrat, inexperienced in international affairs, populist outsider and micromanager. He appointed William Sullivan as Ambassador, but the US embassy was largely oblivious to the unrest that rising under Khomeni. Khomeni himself was born in 1900 to a middle class family, he was clever, serious and revered as a Shi’ite ayotollah. It is this Iranian Shi’ite identity that distinguishes Iran from the Arab Sunnis. Local mullahs are very important, and there was always tension between the clerics and the Shah. Khomeni entered politics in 1960, drawing on anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist rhetoric. Revolution was brewing with inflation, unemployment and the bombing of the Cinema Rex, probably by Islamic militants. Strikes shut down the oil fields but the US government, under the unlikely President Jimmy Carter, was slow to realize what was happening until finally William Sullivan, the US ambassador began warning that perhaps the US should distance itself from the Shah, because change was afoot.

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