The Rest is HistoryEpisode 578 The Irish War of Independence – Bloody Sunday (Part 3) As with the previous two episodes, Dominic and Tom are joined by Irish historian Paul Rouse. I knew about the 1972 Bloody Sunday, but not about the Bloody Sunday that took place on 21 November 1920. It started with the IRA targetting about 19 men in Dublin, shooting 15 dead in 8 locations. It was personally ordered by Michael Collins himself. Not all the victims were intelligence officers, and not all were English. That afternoon there was a football match at Croke Park. The football authorities were warned to cancel it, but they decided to go ahead because the park was already half-full. At 3.30 trucks, and 15 minutes after the game began, trucks arrived. Shooting began from the outside (this is important because the British claimed that the shooting began from inside), and there was a stampede and crush. There was blowback in England with acts of violence, followed by reprisals against the IRA, who found it hard to get arms. Finally a ceasefire and truce was announced, and negotiations began.
The Human Subject (BBC) This is the final episode in the series. If the second-last episode about deep-brain stimulation seemed a bit ho-hum, this one certainly made me angry. The Trauma Victims and their Blood tells the story of Martha Milete, who was shot in 2006 when masked men invaded her house. Without ever giving consent, she found herself part of an experiment into Polyhaem, a form artificial blood which would certainly be a boon to emergency medicine, but which initially caused heart attacks in all of the first ten subjects, with two of them dying. These terrible results caused the product to be shelved but in 1996 a change in the FDA regulations meant that there was no need for individual consent from trauma patients- which is how Milete found herself part of the experiment. Instead, Polyhaem had to gain ‘community consent’, which they interpreted as giving a Powerpoint presentation at the hospital, and the initial provision of blue bracelets that had to be worn 24 hrs a day opting out (they soon ran out and it took a year to replenish them). Appalling.
Witness History (BBC) I love this program. Ten minutes- enough time for a walk home from the station- and really interesting. Orson Welles Broadcasts War of the World has interviews from various people who were involved on the radio program broadcast on the night before Halloween in 1938. I’d forgotten that H.G. Well’s short story ‘The War of the Worlds’ was set in England. When Howard Koch wrote the radio play, to be performed as part of a weekly program, it was a very boring show. So it was decided to set it in a real location in New Jersey, and to present it as a live broadcast which had interrupted the programming for the night. Up to six million people tuned in, unaware that they were listening to a radio play, and it prompted mass panic. There’s an interview with Orson Welles himself, as well as with the script writer and the producer John Houseman. Really good.
Rear Vision (ABC) America’s Radical Left Part I and Part 2 looks at the history of the left in America. Part I looks at the religiously-driven radicalism of early America and the failure to create a dedicated ‘labour’ party in United State. This failure was tied up with other competing ideas about colour and ethnic identity, and the Republican and Democratic parties were canny enough to co-opt some of the Left’s ideas- enough to undermine support for a minority party which might not gain power. Part 2 looks at the effect of the Soviet Union on Left politics, McCarthyism and the rapid re-emergence of Left ideas under the Black Power movement. The election of Zohran Mamdani to New York mayor and the persistence of Bernie Sanders shows that the Left isn’t dead yet.
Thanksgiving Day in America has just passed. We do not celebrate it, or anything like it, here in Australia, although as it happens I participated in a Thanksgiving lunch with American and Australian friends last Saturday. Historian Heather Cox Richardson posted a video about Thanksgiving which she was undecided about leaving up, so I’m posting about it now while it’s still there. You can find it here:
In this video, she returns to one of the primary documents, Mourt’s Relation to describe the First Thanksgiving, and it’s quite different to the story as I understood it. There’s no starving Pilgrims here: instead they were surrounded by food:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king, Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain [Myles Standish] and others.
Mourt’s Relation was a document published in 1622 to reassure investors that the colony was a successful (and that they hadn’t ‘done’ their money) and to encourage others to come. There is another similar document called Of Plymouth Plantation written between 1630-1651 CE. Of Plymouth Plantation doesn’t have any starving Pilgrims either:
They began now [fall of 1621 CE) to gather in the small harvest they had, and to prepare their houses for the winter, being well recovered and in health and strength and plentifully provisioned; for while some had been thus employed in affairs away from home, others were occupied in fishing for cod, bass, and other fish, of which they caught a good quantity, every family having their portion. All summer there was no want. And now, as winter approached, wild fowl began to arrive [and] they got abundance of wild turkeys besides venison. (Book II.ch.2)
HCR (ie. Heather Cox Richardson) points out that there is a difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans although they are often conflated in the public imagination. The Pilgrims were separatists, who wanted to leave the Anglican Church, whereas the Puritans were prepared to stay in the church and transform it from within. The Pilgrims went to America from Leiden in the Netherlands, where they had escaped in the hope of establishing their own independent congregation. However, when their children were not doing as well as they hoped, they headed off for America as a form of ‘tough’ love to turn their grumpy adolescents into god-fearing responsible young people.
She also points out that the Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to arrive in New England. English cod fishers had been plying the New England coast to avoid competition in the North Sea, and they had established relations with the local tribes, as well as exposing them to contagious diseases that plunged the indigenous population into crisis.
What really interested me were the parallels and differences between the early contact in New England and in New South Wales. The fishers were followed by explorers, like George Weymouth, who was struck by the straight pines which he immediately saw as potential masts for the British navy – a very early hope with the NSW settlement as well. The Pilgrims were struck by the ‘park-like’ appearance of the land, which as in Australia, had been managed by firestick farming by the local tribes. ‘Park-like’ was a common description of the Australian explorers as well. The difference was that the Pilgrims saw this as proof that God had prepared this new land for them: Australian explorers just saw the commercial potential. And in both cases, the spread of disease decimated indigenous populations and de-stablized their politics.
HCR recorded this for an American audience, but this Australian listener found it fascinating.
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.
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 HistoryEpisode 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.
Despite its modest 300 pages, this book covers a huge scope, covering three hundred years over two continents: Africa and America. It opens in Ghana in the mid 18th century, with two half-sisters who are unknown to each other. One sister Effia, of Fante tribal heritage, is coerced into marrying a white British officer sent to oversee Cape Coast Castle, a staging post for enslaved Africans prior to being shipped across the Middle Passage. Living in luxury at the Castle, she is oblivious to her half-sister Esi, of Asante tribal heritage, imprisoned as “cargo” in the basement holding pens, before being shipped to America. The two family trees bifurcate at this point as Effia’s line stays mainly based in Ghana, with the ongoing effects of colonization affecting the life events of generation after generation. Esi’s line is based in America, spanning slavery, Jim Crow legislation, the Harlem Renaissance and drug-fuelled urban life.
The opening pages of the book have a time line, tracing the generations in two distinct branches. The narrative alternates between the two branches, in a series of fourteen separate but linked short stories. They could be read separately because each one in effect starts again in its opening paragraphs, although there are small familial references that allow the reader to place the character within their familial context. In many ways this disjointed narrative reflects the dislocation of slavery and the rootlessness of not knowing where you come from. It was a rather jarring reading experience: you would come to be invested in a character, only to have the narrative whisk you across the ocean and time into a new story.
Running through the book is the theme of betrayal and complicity. The coastal Fante tribe capture and sell the Asante people to white slavers. In Harlem Renaissance New York, a black man who ‘passes’ as white leaves his wife to marry a white woman. Step-mothers are cruel to their step-children; families shun their gay children. There is also the theme of severance: two half-sisters growing up on different sides of the globe; and particularly in the American part of the narrative, severance between parents and children, one of the tools of enslavement, but which recurs from generation to generation. This severance lies at the heart of identity and reflects the title of the book: one of the characters, speaking of the Back to Africa movement says “We can’t go back to something we ain’t never been to in the first place. It ain’t ours anymore.”
A rather heavy-handed motif of the book was a pair of gold-flecked stones, one each given to the two half-sisters by their mother Maame. Esi’s stone was soon lost, buried in the mud of the holding cell at Cape Coast Castle, while the other stone was handed from generation to generation. I was dreading a rather mawkish resolution of the two stones at the end of the book but fortunately Gyasi was an astute enough writer not to fall to such an easy trope.
I enjoyed the book, with the equal weight given to the Ghanan and American experience, a weight judiciously and scrupulously meted out. I did find myself thinking of Alex Haley’s Roots which took a similar generational approach but from memory, there was not the bifocal approach of both African and American stories in that book.
It is particularly impressive that this is a debut novel, as the author has such control of a tightly structured dual narrative. The structure did feel a bit like a straitjacket at times, and not all characters were as fully developed as others. But it is a good exploration of slavery, colonialism, inter-generational trauma and the intersection of colour, class and gender- in many ways a book of its time, despite its historical focus.
My rating: 8/10
Read because:Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection. I wish that I had written this review soon after reading the book, instead of waiting weeks. You’d think that I’d know by now.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 576 The Irish War of Independence Part I. The Rise of the IRA Between 1909-11 Britain wanted to give Home Rule, but the Northern Irish unionists didn’t want it. World War I froze any progress on the question. Then, during the war, in 1916 the Easter Uprising took advantage of the opportunity of Britain being otherwise distracted, but it was quickly crushed, leading to the arrests of between 1000-1500 people. 187 were imprisoned, and 14 were executed, including Roger Casement. The Nationalists used the deaths for propaganda purposes in the midst of UK apathy. The Unionists, who constituted about 30% had influence in the British cabinet butBritain was taking an each-way bet as Sinn Fein became more prominent. Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, worked as a printer, and organized boycotts and agitation and stood for by-election. Michael Collins was a military organizer within Sinn Fein, not just a gun runner. He emerged when the other leaders were jailed in 1917. De Vallera was the President, and Griffith was the Vice-President of Sinn Fein and they accepted the aim of an independent Irish Republic. In December 1918 there were elections held in the UK and Ireland with an enlarged electorate, with 70% of electors voting for the first time. It yielded a Sinn Fein victory.
The Human Subject The Man With the Artificial Windpipe was Andemariam Beyene, an engineering student from Eritrea studying in Iceland. In 2011 he was desperate for a cure for the large tumour that had been discovered in his trachea. He had tried surgery and radiotherapy and nothing had worked.Dr Paolo Macchiarini, Karolinska Institute’s star surgeon presented himself as Andemarian’s best and last option. He proposed an experimental treatment – but one that had never been done before on a human being. Andemariam would be the first. Unfortunately, he agreed to it. Macchiarini was a good publicist, and published the results of the surgery soon afterwards- too soon, because Andemarian died, as did all three patients who had this surgery. Macchiarini ended up being jailed for 2 1/2 years, and his papers were retracted.
History HitThe Surrender of Japan In the broadcast to mark the surrender of Japan on August 15th, 1945 Emperor Hirohito’s voice crackled over Japanese airwaves to announce the unthinkable – the surrender of Japan. It was the first voice recording of him, and there would be many Japanese who had never heard him before. This episode, featuring Dr. Evan Mawdsley, points out the Allies wanted regime change because they distrusted the deepseated militarism of Japanese society. Technically, there was a neutrality pact between Japan and USSR signed in 1941, but on 9 August 1945 Russia entered into the Japanese arena, which meant that Japan could no longer defend Manchuria. Days later, the nuclear bombs were dropped. In a bit of what-if history, the podcast goes on to explore what would have happened had Japan not surrendered.
In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2 Episode 12 The Cambodian Civil War Begins Part 2: A Revolution Waged with Empty Hands Time Period Covered 1967-1968. In November 1967 Jackie Kennedy visited Sihanouk (in fact, I saw photos of her at the Raffles Hotel in Phnom Penh when I dropped by there one day). Sihankouk was convinced that there was a communist insurgency in his own country, surrounded by Communist countries, so he began looking increasingly to the United States.
Meanwhile, in November 1967 Pol Pot went to the north eastern base of the CPK (Communist Party of Kampuchea), which was supported by local tribespeople, but poorly armed. Both Vietnam and the CPK planned to have uprisings at New Year in 1968, but there was little support from the Communist parties in other countries: China discouraged the uprising because it was preoccupied with its own cultural revolution, and Vietnam ignored the Khmer pleas for help when skirmishes were being quashed. On January 17th and 18th the CPK attacked army and police depots in order to seize their arms, and the uprising began. It started in Battambang (over near the Thai border), where 10,000 villagers joined in, and moved into the jungles. With no support from China or Vietnam, the CPK went it alone, identifying itself as the vanguard of the revolution, and Pol Pot set himself up as leader. He lavished high praise on China, especially the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward (despite the reality) and the Chinese Student Association emulated the Big Character posters of the Cultural Revolution. All this pro-China action was too much for Sihanouk, who withdrew his ambassador from China. In January 1968 Sihanouk cracked down on the Battambang uprising, blaming everyone. He brought back Lon Nol, who undertook a scorched-earth approach against the uprising. Yet Sihanouk continued to support the Viet Cong and the Vietnamese communists who were in Cambodia, just not the home-grown ones. The United States was aware of the border camps and the Pentagon was even considering invading Cambodia, which was officially neutral, but the State Department put the kibosh on the plan. Sihanouk said that he couldn’t prevent crossings from Vietnam over the border, so he couldn’t object to the US engaging with them. He said he would shut his eyes to any American bombing. Did he know? Did the bombing start under LBJ? Meanwhile, the Tet offensive was under way in Vietnam.
Rear Vision (ABC)2014 and Ukraine’s relationship with Russia. This is a replay of an episode from 2014, just as Russia had invaded Crimea. It all seems rather prophetic now. Ukraine was the largest republic of the former USSR, and it withdrew from USSR in 1991. With hindsight, they were dudded by the Bucharest Memorandum of 1994 whereby they gave up their nuclear arms for a security ‘assurance’ – not a guarantee- of territorial integrity from their guarantors including Russia (something that Bill Clinton now regrets). In the wake of huge inflation and very low wages, the Orange Revolution took place in 2004 ending with the election of Viktor Yushchenko. At the time of recording (2014) Crimea had just been invaded by Russia. Crimea had been settled with many Russians who had been encouraged to move there by Stalin, but many of the original Tartars had since returned, and in 2014 comprised about 35% of the Crimean population. Interesting, in he light of current events.
In the Shadows of UtopiaEpisode 11 Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution I listened to this just after reading Linda Jaivn’s book Bombard the Headquarters (my review here), and this makes a really good companion listen. In fact, well done young Lachlan, because this episode hangs together really well. He points out that the Cultural Revolution, as well as changing China, also acted as a test of loyalty of Mao’s officials. He draws some parallels with different phases of the French Revolution, and sees the dispersal of young people into the provinces as a way of reining the revolution back in. He reminds us of the Sino/Soviet conflicts, and suggests that China’s rapprochement with the US was an example of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ in action.
99% InvisibleAll About That Bass I’ve started playing bass ukulele- yes, there is such a thing- so this episode really interested me. It’s about the Roland 808 drum machine, which apparently is ubiquitous- even (drummer) Phil Collins used one on ‘One More Night’. When the Roland 808 was released in 1980 it cost $1200 (about $4600 in today’s currency), and was intended to replace drummers. It was when they realized that they could use the ‘decay’ function to replicate the bass and kick drum sound that the Roland 808 gave the bass the prominence that it now has in hip-hop and R&B.
The Human Subject(BBC)The Boy with an Ice Pick in His Brain. Actually, despite all the warnings about gruesome details that preface this episode, I didn’t find it particularly disturbing. It’s about Dr Walter Freeman, who championed the lobotomy process throughout the US, even by psychiatrists whose surgical skills must be questionable. The Boy with the Ice Pick in his brain was 12 year old Howard Dully whose step-mother arranged to have a lobotomy for ‘childhood schizophrenia’ (which sounded just like 12 year old cussedness to me). It was Freeman who operated on Rosemary Kennedy as a 23 year old, who never recovered from the surgery.
Since the Orange One has launched his mayhem on the world – did this second presidency really only start in January?- China and Xi Jinping are presenting themselves as a calm, considered and stable presence on the world stage in comparison. It’s a seductive thought, but after reading this small book, I came away convinced that there is a fundamental difference between China and Western democracies in terms of both means and ends that we ignore at our peril.
Many historians mark 16 May 1966 as the start of the Cultural Revolution, when Jiang Quing (Mao’s fourth wife) and Mao circulated a document amongst the Party members which warned of ‘counter-revolutionary revisionists’ who had infiltrated the Party, the government, the army and cultural circles. This document was only made public a year later, but it was popularized in August 1966 by “Bombard the Headquarters”, a short text in written by Mao Zedong himself and published widely. It was a call to the students, who were already confronting their teachers and university lecturers, exhorting them that ‘to rebel is justified’. Yet the headquarters he was urging them to target were the headquarters of his government; of his party. Within three months there would be 15 to 20 million Red Guards, some already in university, others as young as ten. They were urged to ‘smash the Four Olds (old ideas, culture customs and habits) to make was for the creation of a new revolutionary culture. Mao did not explicitly call for the formation of the Red Guards, but he harnessed them as an alternative source of power to the government and, at first, beyond the control of the army until it also joined in the Cultural Revolution in January of 1967.
With Khruschev’s denunciation of the cult of Stalin, Mao felt that Russia had betrayed the revolution and that China needed to return to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even though 1966 is seen by many as the starting point, Mao had been moving towards this point for several years, moving against the deputy mayor of Beijing and historian Wu Han, removing the People’s Liberation Army chief of staff and premier Luo Ruiquing, and splitting with the Japanese Communist Party because it failed to call out Soviet revisionism.
Some of his party colleagues, most especially Liu Shaoqui, Deng Xioping and Zhou Enlai, held qualms about Mao’s call for continuous revolution led by the Red Army. And well they might have, because quite a few of Mao’s judgment calls – The Great Leap Forward and the Hundred Flowers Campaign- brought unseen (to him) consequences, and the schemes ended up being abandoned. But despite any reservations his colleagues may have held, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution went forward, with the Red Guards murdering 1800 people in Beijing alone in Red August 1966. The Red Guards were joined by the workers in late 1966, and the Army in January 1967.
At a dinner to celebrate Mao’s 73rd birthday on 26 December 1966, he proposed a toast to “all-out civil war and next year’s victory”. He got his civil war. Children denounced parents; both the Red and the conventional army split into factions. The targets of the Cultural Revolution were the Five Bad Categories- landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and ‘rightists’. Temples, churches and mosques were trashed; libraries set alight, hair salons and dressmakers’ shops attacked, and even the skeletons of a Wanli emperor and his two empresses were attacked and burned. The verb ‘to struggle’ came to have a new meaning as ‘enemies’ were “struggled” into the airplane position, forced to bend at the waist at 90 degrees with their arms straight behind, with heavy placards hung around their necks and hefty dunce caps on their heads. Teachers, academics, musicians, writers, local officials were all ‘struggled’, with day-long interrogations that ended with instructions to return the next day for more after being allowed to go home overnight. No wonder so many people committed suicide.
By September 1968, the civil war was declared over, with ‘the whole nation turning Red’. However, with the deteriorating economic situation, and with a perception that people living in the cities were not pulling their weight, Mao decided that ‘educated youth’ needed to receive re-education by the poor and middle-class peasantry (p. 68). In 1969 as many as 2.6 million ‘educated youth’ -including present-day president Xi Jinping- left the cities for the country side. Some did not have to go too far from home, but others were exiled to the brutal winters of the Great Northeast Wilderness, or the tropical jungles of Yunnan in the south-west. Some villagers were ambivalent about these ‘soft’ teenagers, although they welcomed the goods and knowledge that they brought with them. The young people were often shocked by the poverty and deprivation in the villages, which contrasted starkly with the propaganda of the happy prosperous countryside they had accepted.
The Cultural Revolution had morphed in its shape, with the 9th Party congress declaring that the Cultural Revolution was over in April1969, and Mao criticizing his wife Jiang Quing and her radical associates in the ‘Gang of Four’ in May 1975. The outside world was changing too. A border war with USSR in March 1969 provoked fears of nuclear war, and the United Nations recognized the People’s Republic of China over Taiwan. President Nixon visited China in February 1972 (Australia’s Gough Whitlam, then opposition leader, had visited in July 1971) and Mao died in September 1976, eight months after the death of Zhou Enlai. In 1981 the Party declared that the Cultural Revolution had been a mistake, and that Mao had been misled by ‘counter-revolutionary cliques’. All at the cost of at least 4.2 million people being detained and investigated, and 1.7 million killed. Some 71,200 families were destroyed entirely. It has been estimated that more people were killed in the Cultural Revolution than the total number of British, American and French soldiers and citizens killed in World War II (p. 106)
The Cultural Revolution may seem an event of the 20th century it’s not that far away. Xi Jinping and his family were caught up in the Cultural Revolution, and tales of him toiling alongside the peasants in the countryside is part of his own political mythology. We here in the West are well aware of the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989, but there is no discussion of them in China. When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, discussion of the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and the resulting famine, were all increasingly censored. Xi Jinping abolished the two-term limit to presidential office in 2018, making it possible for him to be President for life. New generations of nationalist fanatics have arisen, likened (for good or bad) to the Red Guards.
This is only a short book, running to just 107 pages of text. In its formatting and intent, it is of a pair with Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Death of Stalin (reviewed here), and both books deal with hinge-points that, although taking place some 50 years ago, resonate today with even more depth. As with Fitzpatrick’s book, Bombard the Headquarters opens with a timeline and a cast of characters, but I found the brevity of Jaivin’s character list made it harder to establish the various protagonists in my mind, exacerbated further by unfamiliar names. What I really did like was the way that she interwove the stories and experiences of individuals alongside the ‘massed’ nature of this revolution. When we see the huge crowds of people in Tiananmen Square, and the chilling precision of the Chinese army at the parades that dictators are so fond of, it is hard to find the individual, but she has worked hard to keep our attention on the people who lived through, suffered, and did not always survive such a huge experiment in social engineering.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: Review copy from Black Inc. books, with thanks.
7.a.m. (Guardian) The Road to Yoorook is the first of a two-part series that was released at the same time as the Yoorook final report was handed to the Victorian government. The Yoorook truth-telling commission is the first one held in Australia. Although the indigenous population in Victoria is not large now compared with other states, prior to colonization Victoria was one of the most heavily populated areas of Australia , largely because of climate, geography and the abundance of food. It was also the home of many of the Aboriginal organizations of the 1970s, including the Aboriginal Legal Service, the Aboriginal Health Service. The First Peoples Assembly called for a truth-telling commission that had all the power of a royal commission, but at first – pathetically- they had trouble finding premises in which to hold the commission, and it took a directions hearing to get government compliance in making a building available. Part 2: The Truth Has Been Told has the stories of First Nations elders whose loved ones were stolen, and the changing policy settings that had such effects on their lives. It goes through the commission process, with the Premier and the Police Commissioner being called before it. Given the political climate of the present day, it is unlikely that we will see anything like it again.
In The Shadows of Utopia Season 2 Episode 10 The Cambodian Civil War Begins Part 1 deals with 1967. The foreword to the episode starts with the man we now know as Duch, who was at the time was a quietly-spoken communist teacher- we will meet him later, I’m sure. By this time, there was a contradiction between Sihanouk’s external and internal politics. Internally, he was veering between the left and right. At the end of 1966 he went to Paris for ‘health reasons’, leaving his Prime Minister Lon Nol in charge. In January and February 1967 riots broke out in Battambang, where the government cracked down on the black market sale of rice to Vietnam. Battambang had been the site of anti-French protest in the past, and it was close to the Thai border. Two-thirds of the rice harvest was being passed to the black market, and Lon Nol forced the sale of the rice to the government, at a low price. By April 2 1967 the resulting Samlaut uprising had morphed into a peasant revolt, which was quickly and violently suppressed. There were only a few hundred fighters, and they had some village support but they faced the superior technology of the army and betrayal by village vigilantes. This was the start of a new era of violence in an independent Cambodia. Historians are divided over the actual influence of the Communist Party of Kampuchea on the Samlaut uprising, but certainly the CPK decided on a nation-wide uprising at the start of 1968, against the disapproval of the Vietnamese communist party.
But Sihanouk couldn’t pretend now that unrest was all external. Sihanouk had dealt with the North Vietnamese, with the support of Russia and China. Internally, he wanted to eradicate the CPK, but he went for the wrong Marxists, and ended up pursuing all of the old Paris-based leadership. This led to false rumours that three of these leaders -Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim – had been murdered, and when the three re-appeared later, they were called the Three Ghosts.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 556: 1066 The Battle of Hastings One of the first books that my parents bought for me specifically, on request, was the poetry book 1066 and all that. I was in grade 5 in primary school, but thinking back, it seems odd that we would have learned about the Battle of Hastings. Who knows. The Battle of Hastings took place on 14th October 1066, just three weeks after Harold Godwinson had seen off Harald Hadrada. William of Normanby had horses, where the English had shields, although given that it was an all-day battle, probably the horses weren’t that important anyway. Many of the myths about the Battle of Hastings are questionable. Was Harold really shot through the eye? The Bayeux Tapestry shows two figures identified as Harold, and it was reworked in the 19th century anyway? There’s an alternative scenario, identified in the account written closest to events, that says that he was butchered by four men including William the Conquerer.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 555: 1066 Slaughter at Stamford Bridge This was in effect the last battle between the Vikings and the Saxons, with two doomed characters each representative of their cultures. Harald Hardrada was 56 years old, and although he hadn’t previously been interested in invading England, he was now because of the need for money, the desire to be the next Cnut and because he was psychologically restless and warlike. He landed with 300 longships and possibly 10,000 men north of Yorkshire, where there were many Danish connections. There he joined forces with Harold Godwinson’s own brother Tostig (boo, hiss) at the Humber. It was a hot day, and it is possible that the Norse left their armour off, because they were unaware that Godwinson had rushed from London with his army, picking up men as he went. Harald was killed at Stamford Bridge, but glowing with success, Harold Godwinson did allow his treacherous brother Tostig to return to Norway. Then blow me down, who should arrive by William of Normanby, ready for a fight!
History Extra PodcastOwain Glyndŵr:Life of the Week The blurb on the website says “Famed for his dramatic and determined revolt against English rule in the early 15th century, as well as his bold vision for an independent Wales, Owain Glyndŵr has gone down in history as a symbol of Welsh resistance and a national hero.” Well, I’d never heard of him. To be honest, I didn’t like this episode much- it assumed too much knowledge of Welsh/English history. I’m not sure if I have this right, and I don’t have enough interest to check. As Wales was a colonized region, the rich and well-connected Owain served in the English armies, then went home for about 10 years. During 1400 rebellion broke out in Wales, taking advantage of the intra-English rebellion. His lands were confiscated, then an outbreak of violence saw a Welsh victory in 1402. The first native Welsh Parliament in 100 years was held in 1404 and in 1406 Owain wrote a long treatise on the Welsh State. The Welsh had French support at first, but when the French support split, the war reverted to a Peasants Rebellion. Owain never accepted a pardon from the English for his role in the resistance, and we don’t know what happened to him.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 