I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 16-23 February 2025

The Daily NYT ‘The Interview: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done. Powerful Conservatives are Listening Well, as far as I am concerned, anyone who is a friend of J.D. Vance is an enemy of mine, and Vance talks very approvingly about Curtis Yarvin. He is a computer engineer who has “done his own research” to come up with an argument that, to quote The New York Times “the mainstream media and academia have been overrun by progressive groupthink and need to be dissolved. He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted and that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy run by what he’s called a CEO, which is basically his friendlier term for a dictator.” His way of arguing is repellent: he machine-guns out a scattershot of historical facts, any one of which could be unpicked if he gave you time. A repellent, slipshod, bombastic man.

In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2, Episode 2 Maoism and the Great Leap Forward 1949-1962 In this very long episode (2 hours 43 minutes) Lachlan takes us over to China where, after the Korean and Indo-China wars finished, the Chinese Communist Party could concentrate on local matters and the need to delineate ‘the people’ from ‘the enemy’. In 1953 a five year plan was initiated on the Stalinist model, where small farmers took over the land that had previously belonged to their landlords. In May 1958 Mao looked at the countryside, and after declaring the four pests (rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows) embarked upon the Great Leap Forward, later described as a ‘bubble of unreality’ which pushed the country towards starvation. The small farms, only recently given, were taken back into huge communal farms, with an emphasis on agricultural targets and communal eating. There was a push towards industrialization, with backyard furnaces slowly pillaging families’ household goods in the production of poor-quality steel. By 1959, famine had taken hold, prompting cannibalism and necrophagy and culminating in the death of perhaps 30-45 million people (no-one really knows). After Mao’s Minister of Defence criticized the Great Leap Forward, Mao rachetted it up even more to prove him wrong. It was not until 1962 that conditions improved. Meanwhile, the Sino/Soviet relationship had always been testy but initially Russia showed a readiness to co-operate militarily with the new Communist regime in China. However, Krushev’s denunciation of the ‘cult of personality’ after Stalin’s death was not taken well by Mao, who was curating a cult of personality of his own. Mao can be seen as either the 3rd or 4th Great Prophet of Communism after Marx (who identified the stages of communism and the importance of class), Lenin ( who introduced the concept of the ‘vanguard’ of the revolution), and maybe or maybe not Stalin (who created the centralized command economy). Mao wanted to use the nationalist cause combined with Confucian concepts of ‘right thinking’ and built on struggle and volunteerism. He had a fraught relationship with Krushev, who he believed had betrayed communism, and as the rift between the two countries increased, Soviet advisors returned to Russia and the promise of an atom bomb was withdrawn.

The Rest is History Episode 228 Portugal: The Golden Age of Discovery Part 2 The first episode finished with the reconquest of the Muslim ‘invaders’ of the Iberian Peninsula. This led a militant edge to Christian exploration outside the known world. The Portguese had ports all around the Cape of Good Hope, so they didn’t need Columbus. During the negotiations for the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Portuguese tricked the Spaniards by getting them to shift the line 1000 km that meant that Portugal got Brazil. Vasco da Gama was chosen to lead his expedition in search of India because he was a hard man. He rounded the Cape of Good Hope, turned right at Kenya and sailed for 23 days to get to Kerula. He reached Indian, Malaysia and Japan, and was very violent towards the Muslims. The Portuguese ’empire’ was more a series of nodes, and they were not very good at administration. By now the Portuguese throne had been inherited by a Spanish king, but Portugal retained its own identity.