Emperors of Rome Podcast Episode CCXXVII – The Catiline Comparison (The Catiline Conspiracy VIII) Matt and Rhiannon have studiously avoided making comparisons between Catiline and Donald Trump, but in this episode they give in to the obvious temptation. They are joined by Professor Nick Bisley (Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University)- keeping it in the La Trobe family! They agree that there are surface similarities: a rich guy pretending to be a saviour of the poor; a macho male harking back to a golden age, and refusal to accept the results of an election. But there are so many differences too, and there is a limit to how far the parallels reach.
The Rest is History Custer vs Crazy Horse: Rise of Sitting Bull (Part 4) From Tom and Dominic’s summary (better than I could ever do) “Following the bloody Fetterman Fight, which saw the Lakota warlord Crazy Horse and his warriors ambush and massacre American troops, the American public was left stunned, its government and civilian population hungry for revenge. In the wake of this a new treaty was signed, further restricting the Lakota Sioux’s freedoms, but nevertheless signed by their political leader, Red Cloud. Still, many would not be constrained to reservations, and instead sought war. Chief amongst them was Sitting Bull, a legendary, mythologised figure of the Great American Plains and the Wild West – the embodiment of a vanished age. Born into the Lakota Sioux, and a world of shifting allegiances, violent initiation rituals, and intransigent spiritualities, as a young man Sitting Bull’s herculean destiny was sung to him by an eagle. The career that followed in his war against the U.S. government would exceed even the greatest of epics. By 1860 he was paramount leader of the Sioux Nation, when news reached him of the imminent arrival of a survey party, lead by none other than George Armstrong Custer…”
History Extra: Communism: everything you wanted to know. I’ve been getting a really good analysis of communism in its different manifestations in my Shadows of Utopia podcasts, but I thought that I’d listen to this as well. It features Danny Bird, Staff Writer at BBC History Magazine. He points out that Communism is a point in time, reached by different ideologies. It was Lenin who introduced the idea of a ‘vanguard’, and between 1919 and 1943 Comintern with its branches in different countries had a world-wide revolutionary purpose. Just as each communism is different, so too each anti-communism is different too. Stalinism was a product of Stalin’s own paranoia, but as the only successful Communist party at the time, it dominated and dictated Comintern. In a way, the Spanish Civil War operated as a release valve for Communists who were becoming uneasy about Stalin’s communism.
The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey. I heard James M. Dorsey being interviewed somewhere (Global Roaming, perhaps?) and I thought that he sounded interesting. He is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. His podcast is mainly about Middle East affairs. His podcasts are of varying lengths, and they’re interesting. Israel’s Reputational Self-Immolation was just one of the podcasts that I listened to here.
In the Shadows of Utopia Episode 9: Communism in Practice (Intro to Communism II) My, Lachlan is speaking very slowly in this episode. Actually, he’s starting to put a lot of his energy into the YouTube version, which has lots of images, so here’s the link to the video: https://youtu.be/Y3dFDwM1UXs?si=6wJh-hUnMKXILm1H
Well, Marx and Engels died without ever seeing Communism in practice. Everybody thought that, if there was to be a revolution, then it would be in industrialized Germany, which was just hanging on in the war. But canny Germany sent all the Communists off to Russia instead (hence the fantastic book To the Finland Station) hoping that they would destabilize Russia instead. After all, 1905 had been a dress-rehearsal for revolution, and now in 1917 there were two October revolutions (old calendar). The first was the revolt that led to the Tsar’s abdication and the second was the call for Peace, Land and Bread. Lenin took charge on October 5 and stormed the Winter Palace. Lachlan suggests the metaphor of nuclear energy: it was as if Marx and Engels split the atom, but as if Lenin drew up plans for the nuclear power plant.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 