In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2, Episode 17 Death from above 1969: Operation Menu and Nixon’s Madman Theory President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not stand for re-election on 31 March 1968. This brought the Rolling Thunder campaign to a close, but the bombing was to continue for five years longer. The $2bn price tag of Operation Menu had sucked out all the money that LBJ hoped to devote to the Great Society, which could only proceed with an increase in taxation. Back in Cambodia, Sihanouk began talks with the United States, sparked by Jackie Kennedy’s visit, because the Communists were not stopping the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk threw himself into his film career, writing and starring in ‘Shadow over Angkor’ in 1968. Perhaps this was just escapism, or maybe he was trying to portray himself as being Khmer above all. The economy was stagnant and corrupt so he opened up casinos, and the Phnom Penh casino was soon contributing 9% of the country’s income. Education was increasing, but the link between urban and rural life was being hollowed out, leading to general dissatisfaction. The Civil War continued into 1968, with the armed struggle in the provinces providing a way of training up soldiers, but the government’s response was brutal. The Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) had more success in the north-east, where Pol Pot was, and in the south west. The CPK now had peasants and students, thus integrating both town and country. Sihanouk launched a raid against the CPK and with the arrest of members, he realized the networked nature of the party, but he explained this as being an example of Vietnamese infiltration. By September 1968 there were at least 9 large Viet Cong bases in Cambodia, with 6000 Viet Cong soldiers on Cambodian soil at any one time.
Meanwhile, Nixon (or at least his representatives) went behind the peace talks, suggesting to the South Vietnamese that the Republicans would offer them a better deal, should the Republicans win. From the US missile crisis, the South Vietnamese took the lesson of standing firm- they didn’t know about the side deal with Turkey that enabled the missile crisis to be defused. Meanwhile, there was a top secret bombing of the COSVN (the North Vietnamese) headquarters in Cambodia by B52s (not even the head of the Air Force knew about it), then there was a shift to carpet bombing. Holding the “madman” theory, Nixon gambled on the fact that he had nuclear weapons and could do anything to intimidate the North Vietnamese. The ‘menu bombing’ (i.e. Operation Breakfast, Operation Lunch, Operation Dinner, Operation Dessert) was not the cause of Pol Pot’s rise, and the numbers killed were not as much as popularly believed. Sihanouk did not approve of the bombing, but he didn’t ask for the carpet bombing to stop either.
Journey Through Time Episode 49 The Paris Commune: France Wages War On Its Own (episode 4) Bismarck released 60,000 Prisoners of War, which the French government at Versailles was able to turn against Paris. Now the Civil War was official, with the French government fighting against its own capital. Starting May 21 1871, 130,000 government troops commenced “the bloody week”. The Commundards had no defence plan, and in Houseman’s newly designed Paris, revolutionaries were not able to barricade themselves in the narrow streets as they had in the past. What they did have was too little, too late. The government troops slowly and methodically took Paris, with mass executions targetting working class areas. Government buildings were fired, and the city was ablaze, with the Louvre saved by rain. Women, dubbed ‘petroleuse’ were blamed. The Commune was crushed, with wide scale arrests, summary trials and the establishment of prison camps. By 1880, the Communards were amnestied and allowed to return. One of the female ringleaders, Louise Michel, was sent to New Caledonia, then ended up lecturing in London. The Commune was soon mythologized, but the sense of bitterness towards Prussia (Germany) underpinned the harsh conditions imposed by the Versailles Treaty, where Clemenceau, who had much anti-Prussian feeling through his earlier involvement with the Commune, was one of the architects.
The Philosopher’s Zone Innocence and ‘child rescue’ in the colonial imagination. This episode was first aired on 16 March 2025. It features historian Joanne Faulkner, the author of Representing Aboriginal Childhood: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia. She talks about the treatment of the ‘street arab’ children of the London streets, who were scooped up by Christian philanthropists, including Thomas John Barnardo, who used photography as a way of staging ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs to garner donations for his children’s homes. She then extends this discussion to the depiction of indigenous children in Australia, who were rendered in a ‘piccaninny’ style in photographs and household objects, to be rescued by the colonizer. Children were depicted outside the context of their own birth family and society, as ‘waifs’ like the London street children.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 