Let’s just jump ahead, shall we? I have been listening to podcasts between September and November, but many of them have been current affairs podcasts, which just come and go.
The Human Subject (BBC) The Gay Man and the Pleasure Shocks From the website:
This is the story of patient B-19, a 24-year old who, in 1970, walks into a hospital in Louisiana troubled by the fact that the drugs he’s been abusing for the past three years are no longer having the desired effect. He claims he is “bored by everything” and is no longer getting a “kick” out of sex. To Dr Robert Heath’s intrigue, B-19 has “never in his life experienced heterosexual relationships of any kind”. Somewhere along the way, during the consultations, the conclusion is drawn that B-19 would be happier if he wasn’t gay. And so they set about a process that involves having lots of wires sticking out of his brain. Julia and Adam hear from science journalist and author, Lone Frank, author of The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor.
Actually, I wasn’t particularly shocked by this episode. It was the 1970s after all, time of ‘Clockwork Orange’, and brain stimulation and operant conditioning was all the go. While most of us wouldn’t see being gay as something that had to be ‘cured’, I do wonder if truly deviant behaviour that would otherwise see a person incarcerated for life (an inveterate child abuser?) might not still turn to methods like this?
The Rest is History Episode 606: Enoch Powell Rivers of Blood With Nigel Farage on the loose, it seems appropriate to go back to revisit Enoch Powell and his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. As Dominic and Tom point out, Enoch Powell is better remembered than a lot of Prime Ministers are, and he influenced Thatcher and inspired the Brexiteers. He was born in Birmingham in 1912 and was a precocious child who seemed destined to be a classics scholar. He had no interest in women, but he was obsessed by Nietzsche. He was a Professor of Greek at Sydney University by the age of 25 (I didn’t know that!), but he really wanted to be the Viceroy of India (as one does). He fought in WW2 but not in a combat role. He was a Tory, but he was often critical of the party, and championed English nationalism in Parliament in his hypnotic droning voice. He decriminalized homosexuality, was anti-Vietnam, anti-US but economically very dry. Despite the influx of Windrush and British/Pakistani immigrants in the late 1940s, immigration was seen more as a regrettable necessity rather than a national issue. At first Powell did nothing about the reported ‘white flight’ from areas like his electorate of Wolverhampton, but by 1964 it was recognized that immigration had to be controlled to avoid the ‘colour question’, a question supercharged by television of unrest in Montgomery and Alabama in the US. Why did Powell change? He argued that he was representing the views of his electorate, and he held up an ideal of the English people and became more radical as a way of distinguishing himself from Heath. In 1967 there was an influx of Indians from Kenya after Kenyatta expelled them and an Act was passed to restrict immigration. The Labour government introduced a Racial Relations Bill in 1968 which prohibited racial discrimination in areas like housing. When the Tories decided to quibble over the details but accepted the principle of the bill, Powell was furious and this was the impetus for the ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’, which was publicized beforehand, so television crews were there to record it. He was sacked as Minister for Defence, but he had strong support on the streets. He never distanced himself from violence, but he was wrong- there were no rivers of blood. And until now Tories wouldn’t touch the issue again.
The Rest is History Episode 577: The Irish War of Independence: The Violence Begins (Part 2) After their largely ceremonial electoral victory in 1917, Sinn Fein established an alternative shadow government which had cabinet positions, courts and issues a Declaration of Independence. It wanted to attend the Paris Peace Conference, but it didn’t get a seat at the table. The IRA was recruiting heavily, but the majority were more involved with logistics and protection rather than firing guns. The conflict hotted up in the early 1920s when the IRA began attacking police barracks and courts. There was a mass resignation of police, and they were replaced by ex-army soldiers, the notorious ‘black and tans’ and auxiliaries. In 1921 the Flying Columns and IRA intelligence ramped up, with localized violence. But this violence was not necessarily a sectarian war, but it certainly had sectarian aspects.
In Our Time (BBC). Apparently Melvyn Bragg is stepping down from In Our Time after 26 years. He is 85, after all, and he was starting to sound a bit quavery. So, they’re dipping back into the archives and they replayed an episode on Hannah Arendt from 2017. She was born to a non-observant Jewish family in Hanover in 1906, a family that was so non-observant that she was surprised when she found herself singled out as being Jewish. She had an affair with Heidegger, but then he became a Nazi. She was a classicist, and she maintained this interest throughout her life. She escaped to America in 1941 as a refugee, where she developed English as her third language. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, she warned of a new sort of atomized evil, like a fungus, and she saw Eichmann as thoughtless, rather than evil. Actually, I hadn’t realized that she was anything other than a political writer: she was just as focussed on the human condition as politics.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 