The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

Journey Through Time Episode 66 The Spanish Civil War: Guernica, Picasso and the Nazis (Episode 5) As well as a laboratory for totalitarianism, the Spanish Civil War also acted as a proving ground for German military equipment. This was particularly true of the three-hour aerial bombing of the market town of Guernica, carpet bombing at first, followed by incendiary bombing, then strafing the citizens as they ran away – a new form of war that was intended to break the morale of the citizens. The Italians, on the other hand, used Spain as a way of showing their massed manpower to project strength. The Republicans sorely needed a victory, which they gained at Brunete and Teruel with huge casualties, but then they gave up the advantage almost immediately. By this time Stalin’s support of the International Brigade was declining, and Republican observers were beginning to warn of the dangers of Germany and tried to raise funds to bolster the Republican side. The Battle of Ebro was the longest one of the war and again, after initial success by the Republicans, it got bogged down and culminated in four months of futility. In 1938 the International Brigades were ordered out, in the hope that Germany and Italy would withdraw- a rather mad, forlorn hope.

The Book Club I’ve heard the Goalhanger The Book Club advertised on other Goalhanger production (e.g. The Rest is History, The Rest in Politics) but I can’t find it on Podbean. It is hosted by historian and author Dominic Sandbrook and his producer on The Rest Is History, Tabitha Syrett. The first episode is Wuthering Heights: Passion, Violence and Revenge in the Moors. They hadn’t seen the movie at that stage, so they stuck to the book. They point out the nested narrators: the new tenant Mr Lockwood interrogates Nelly, who had worked at Wuthering Heights thirty years earlier, and she is not necessarily a reliable narrator. Despite the visual imagery of the moors, much of the action takes place indoors. It was already historical when it was written, and violence permeates the whole book. The book has doubling throughout, and the repetition of names from one generation to another is very confusing. They give a score at the end. Dominic gives it 7/10 and Tabitha gives it 7.5/10.

Short History Of… I’m interested when an American or British podcast deigns to tackle an Australian topic. The Australian Gold Rush starts with Rev Clarke’s discovery of gold in Australia in 1841 and 1844, and Governor Gipps’ suppression of the news because as a convict society, they feared that ‘we shall all have our throats cut’. However in 1849, after the California gold rush and the cessation of transportation in most states, Gipps changed his mind and instituted an incentive scheme where 10,000 pounds would be awarded for the first discovery. Edward Hargreaves, along with his guide, John Lister, and the two Tom brothers found gold at Lewis Ponds Creek, but Edward Hargreaves took all the glory (and the money). Hargreaves was made a Crown Land Commissioner, and the prerogative of renaming the location which he called the Ophir goldfields. The episode has a lot of emphasis on the effect of the gold rush on First Nations people with the ruination of the environment and the introduction of disease (I think that the diseases had been long introduced before that). Emphasis is also placed on the Native Police as the first law enforcers on the gold fields, something I didn’t know. It then deals with the Gold Rushes in what became Victoria, and the later small gold rushes in the other states.

Witness History The Storming of Spain’s Parliament I don’t know whether it was because the attempted coup occurred on 23 February 1981or whether it was prompted by the death Putsch leader Antonio Tejero hours after Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declassified files detailing the seizure of parliament in Madrid. It was the second attempt at a putsch by the civil guard, and 350 members of Parliament were held captive for 18 hours. Eventually King Juan Carlos talked them down, and condemned the coup (although since then there have been questions over when the King was himself involved). It was a vivid demonstration of the fragility of Spain’s democracy which was at that stage only six years old, and it coincided with a change of democratically elected government- obviously a dangerous time!

Short History Of…. The White House. Like many others, I’ve been transfixed with horror at Trump’s circle of adoration in the Oval Office and the increasing tide of gold tat that is encrusting the walls. But Trump is not the only President to make changes to the White House, with Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft constructing the East and West Wings and expanding the Oval Office, and Truman constructing the balcony. Under Jacqueline Kennedy, the White House was actually proclaimed a museum. The original Presidents Palace, based on Leinster House in Dublin, was built between 1792 and 1800, so the paint was barely dry by the time it was burnt and sacked by British troops in the War of 1812. It was a mixed- use building: both the President’s house and workplace. The White House originally had its own staff who worked only at the White House, but today Presidents tend to bring their own supposedly-loyal staff. George H. W. Bush was the most popular president amongst the traditional White House staff, supposedly because he was accustomed to having servants. Interesting… but it still doesn’t make me feel any better about Trump’s decorating taste. At least it can be taken down when he leaves, unlike the East Wing which no longer exists.

The Rest is History Episode 639 Revolution in Iran: Death in the Desert (Part 4) After mocking Jimmy Carter mercilessly over the previous three episodes, Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland finally express some sympathy and grudging admiration for President Carter in this episode. After the release of the black and female hostages, there were 52 male hostages left in Iran, and after showing restraint for months, Carter became more hawkish and finally in April 1980 he imposed sanctions on Iran. Cyrus Vance was still urging diplomacy, but that same month Brzezinski (in Vance’s absence) gained Carter’s approval of a military rescue of the hostages. It all sounds very Christian: the commanders assembled in a hangar before taking off, where they prayed, read about the story of David and Goliath and sang ‘God Bless America’. (Sheesh). It was a disaster: there was a dust storm, they encountered civilian pilgrims, and the helicopters malfunctioned, leading them to pile into a smaller number of helicopters. The attempt was aborted. By now, the 1980 Presidential election was afoot, and Iran held out until Reagan’s inauguration, despite and to spite Carter’s obsession and hard work in trying to get the hostages home. And look where we are now, invading Iran again.

Journey Through Time Episode 65 The Spanish Civil War: Orwell V Stalin (ep. 4) The Republicans were not one united group. There were communists, supported by Russia on one side. On the other side were anarchists, who were not part of the International Brigade, who wanted revolution within Civil War. This is the side that Orwell chose, when he joined POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification). They began fighting against each other. The communists took over the Telephone Exchange, which was controlled by POUM, and after POUM was defeated, it was seen as the ‘enemy’ and ‘facists’ just as much as the Nationalists were. He was in real danger, and after he escaped he wrote ‘Homage to Catalonia’, which he had trouble getting published. Spain was by now a laboratory for Stalinist repression, as well as a laboratory for fascism.

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.