The Rest is HistoryEpisode 261: The Tupumaros I’m doing a presentation on Jose Mujica, the recently deceased ex-president of Uruguay, who was a guerilla fighter with the Tupamaros in his youth. This episode made me realize how anglo-centric ‘The Rest is History’ is because obviously Tom and Dominic (I’m on first name basis with them now) knew little about Uruguay or the Tupamaros until they did the research for this episode. They point out that Uruguay was a small, progressive country known as the Switzerland of South America, but after WW2 the prices of wool and meat declined and inflation and unemployment rose. Raul Sendic, the founder of the Tupamaros, was the bright boy of a peasant family. In 1963 the Tupamaros began a series of bank robberies and kidnappings, most of which ended with the hostage being released after about 10 weeks, before moving on to international figures like the British ambassador and then US advisor Dan Mitrioni. This sparked off mass arrests, and they give a figure of 1 in 5 Uruguayans being arrested (a figure I haven’t found elsewhere). Democracy was suspended between 1973 and 1985 and all the Tupamaros were arrested or exiled. Jose (Pepe) Mujica was one of these prisoners, kept in a horse trough for 2 years, with no toilet, and he was driven half-mad before his release in 1985. On the day that Mujica was elected president, Uruguayans confirmed by referendum that the amnesty for both prisoners and human-rights abusers should remain. After his presidency Mujica retired in 2015 to his farm, where he grows chrysanthemums. (He died recently, hence my interest in him).
Guardian Long ReadsOperation Condor: the Cold War conspiracy that terrorized South America. This podcast by Giles Tremlett was originally broadcast in 2020. During the 1970s and 80s, eight US-backed military dictatorships jointly plotted the cross-border kidnap, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of their political opponents. Now some of the perpetrators are finally facing justice. I like Giles Tremlett, whose book Ghosts of Spain I very much enjoyed. I had heard of Operation Condor, but thought that it was a spy novel about CIA agents! Instead, it was an agreement between right-wing governments in South America to allow friendly dictatorships to cross national borders to arrest their citizens who had fled into exile. Most South American countries passed Amnesty Laws as a compromise for the return of democracy, so few court cases against human rights abuse have been mounted in South American countries (although I note that recently Sydney nanny Adriana Rivas has lost her appeal as part of avoiding extradition to Chile for her role in Pinochet’s regime). Instead, it is European courts who are opening up cases against officials in dictatorships because they are not bound by the amnesty laws. It’s an interesting and rather chilling thought that Western countries were considering getting advice from South American Operation Condor officials, in order to introduce a similar system in Europe during the IRA and the Baader-Meinhof group terrorist campaigns.
In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2 Episode 8 Rolling Thunder in Vietnam, Clouds over Cambodia Time Period Covered 1964 – 1967. Despite LBJ’s doubts about the wisdom of escalating the war in Vietnam, it seemed to be set in stone by 1964. The Vietnam War was really the resumption of an earlier war. The Vietnam Workers Party resolved to mobilize large numbers of North Vietnamese and NLF fighters quickly in order to win a victory before the US got involved. In August 1964 the Tonkin Gulf episode was an over-reaction, but LBJ used it to justify his stance on the war and he was rewarded with an increase in popularity. Meanwhile, the Cambodian communists in Vietnam were becoming increasingly resentful, wanting to start an armed struggle back home, but discouraged by the Vietnamese because they were friendly with Sihanouk. Pol Pot found himself feeling sidelined. He visited China on the eve of the Cultural Revolution as a friend of revolution, and he liked the idea of continuous revolution, especially drawing on the rural peasantry, as put forward in the Little Red Book. But although he received the support of Chinese officials, China also did not want to encourage armed struggle as they too were friendly with Sihanouk. In 1966 Pol Pot returned to Vietnam, then on to Cambodia, but his progress home was hampered by heavy bombing. The Cambodian Communists conducted a study session in 1966 where they decided to change their name from the Cambodian Workers Party (which matched the Vietnamese Workers Party) to the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and moved their office to avoid the surveillance of the Vietnamese. Pol Pot was determined to prepare for armed struggle in the rural areas. But things were changing in South East Asia as the 1965-6 aborted Communist coup in Indonesia led to heavy repression. In Cambodia, Sihanouk was losing his magic, with the stagnant economy, disaffected youth, internal repression and border skirmishes as Thailand and the US pursued the Viet Cong into Cambodia. Conservatives were becoming disillusioned with Sikanouk’s ‘both ways’ approach that saw him rejecting the west and maintaining a relationship with North Vietnam and China. The left never like Sihanouk anyway. There was increasing resentment at Sihanouk’s involvement in film-making and acting- apparently they were bad films, focussing on the elite. In 1966 there was another election but this time Sihanouk didn’t select the candidates, leading to a new assembly that was not completely in his control. Lon Nol was chosen as Prime Minister as he was still loyal to Sihanouk and popular with the army and Buddhists. Sihanouk went off to France, but things changed in his absence.
The Human Subject (BBC)The Farmers and the Goat Testicle Transplants. In 1916 a farmer walked into a Dr John R. Brinkley’s surgery in the small town of Milford, Kansas, complaining of a ‘flat tyre’ (i.e. erectile dysfunction). The doctor suggested a transplant of goat’s testicles as the solution to his problem and Brinkley’s career as a xenotransplant surgeon took off. He had his own radio show, where he spruiked patent medicine, and unsuccessfully ran for government, claiming that the election was ‘stolen’ (sound familiar?) He was engaged in multiple court cases, and ended up losing his licence to practice and was called a quack. Interesting.
I’ve been thinking recently of public displays of grief after a leader has died. Some weeks ago, the ex-President of Uruguay Jose Mujica died, and I was struck by the spontaneous and heartfelt applause that accompanied the journey of his casket from the presidential palace to the National Assembly.
In contrast, I remembered the extravagant hysteria after the death of Kim Jong-il some thirteen years ago.
I’ve been thinking about the deaths of leaders while reading Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Death of Stalin. Fitzpatrick is an eminent Australian historian of Soviet history, but this small book is written for a general audience.
The title echoes the Armando Iannucci movie of the same name, which Fitzpatrick admires:
In his The Death of Stalin, the British film director Armando Iannucci memorably depicted the death scene as black comedy, with Stalin’s potential successors united only by ambition and relief, milling around distractedly at his deathbed. That is indeed how the main eye-witness accounts describe it, although to be sure these were eye-witnesses with their own agendas. There is black comedy in this [i.e. Fitzpatrick’s] book too, not just in connection with Stalin’s death but also with the fate of his corporeal remains (buried, dug up, reburied) and the subsequent persistent apparitions of his ghost. But not everything about Stalin’s death is comic. It had serious implications for his country and the world in the twentieth century and beyond; this book sets out to unravel them. (p.2)
Chapter 1 starts with a biographical sketch of Stalin. Under the chapter title is a police photograph of Stalin taken in the early 1900s, showing a quite handsome, chiselled young man – quite unlike the pudgy, square man he became in later life. He was involved in the Russian revolution from the start, in fact he made it back to Petrograd before Lenin did after the February Revolution of 1917. Although a member of the Politburo since its inception in August 1917, he became the quintessential backroom man, a role formalized with his appointment as general secretary of the party in April 1922. Despite Lenin adding a postscript to a document that came to be known as ‘Lenin’s Testament’, warning that Stalin’s rudeness rendered him unsuitable as party secretary, Stalin and the Central Committee saw off an opposing faction and he became leader after Lenin’s death. His ascendancy was welcomed by Western observers, who saw him as a centrist. He mounted a program of mass collectivization and industrialization guided by a Five Year Plan. By 1934 he announced a new phase of relaxation, and he introduced the new Soviet Constitution. But he changed direction again at the end of 1934 when his friend Sergei Kirov was assassinated by what turned out to be a lone-wolf actor. Mass terror was released, directed initially against members of the party itself, then to the broader population. He startled the Soviet public and the West by signing a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in 1939, which was broken in June 1941 when Germany launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. Despite the huge cost in infrastructure, military and population loss, Stalin emerged from WW2 with enormously enhanced prestige at home and internationally. Within a few years, unfounded fears of Soviet communism (unfounded because Stalin knew that Russia was in no state to launch WW3) settled into the Cold War, fueled by mutual hostility and suspicion, but tempered by the nuclear threat and the use of proxies. By 1949 the cult of Stalin reached a peak as Stalin’s 70th birthday was celebrated.
By early 1953, Stalin would be dead. In Chapter 2 ‘Stalin’s Death’ we see Stalin as a lonely, isolated, paranoiac man who insisted on the attendance of his Politburo colleagues at film nights at the Kremlin, and crude, men-only dinners at his dacha. The day to day running of the business of government was carried out by the Politburo, with sudden interventions by Stalin, and shifts against his erstwhile colleagues. One of these initiatives was the arrest of a number of physicians from the Kremlin hospital, known as the ‘Doctors Plot’. As we know from the film ‘The Death of Stalin’, this backfired somewhat when there was no one to treat him in the dacha when he had what appeared to be a stroke. Actually, Iannucci didn’t have to embellish much in his depiction of Stalin’s death: the fear of finding him dead; him not actually being dead; sending in the housekeeper; having to find a doctor because they had all been arrested; the arrival of his daughter and drunk son. However, unlike in the film, they quickly set up an efficient government, calling themselves ‘the collective leadership’ (p. 37)- a fact that might have undermined Iannucci’s black comedy somewhat. His body lay in state in the Hall of Columns in Moscow for three days and was buried in the Mausoleum, with his name emblazoned under that of Lenin.
Chapter Three examines reactions at home, noting the recorded responses of writers and members of the public, before then moving on to the immediate, radical policy changes that were set in train. First was the announcement of a mass amnesty for non-political prisoners in the Gulag, then the withdrawal of charges against the doctors. There was a change in direction on the nationalities policy and an abrupt halt to the Stalin cult. The first six months of 1953 was described as a ‘cultural thaw’, but this was not necessarily welcomed by the Soviet public. Beria was ousted and put on trial and swiftly executed. This made it possible to put all the blame for the Stalinist terror onto Beria’s shoulders.
Reactions Abroad are dealt with in Chapter 4. The rest of the world wasn’t really sure what would happen when Stalin died. Western intelligence was at a low ebb between the end of the war and Stalin’s death, and so the West missed the signals that the ‘collective leadership’ might be willing to deal. Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles, one of the most virulent anti-Communists on the US political scene (p. 65). He and his brother Allen, who headed the CIA, favoured undermining the Soviet Union by making trouble in the satellite-states, rather than provoking a head-on confrontation. It was, as A.J.P. Taylor said, a turning point that failed to turn (p. 71). It was only in 1956, with Krushchev’s partial denunciation of Stalin that there was Western recognition of the thaw.
The closing Chapter 5 ‘Stalin’s Ghost’ looks at his legacy. For the first years after Stalin’s death the terror of the 1930s was the great unmentionable. This was broken in 1956 with Krushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ to the Congress in Moscow which denounced Stalin, the cult of personality and the Purges and terror under his government. Although writers embraced openness about Stalin’s reign, the reactions of ordinary people varied. Some simply did not believe it, and there was public protest in Georgia, where the speech was seen as an insult. In some of the Soviet satellites, the Soviet Thaw encouraged local Communist parties, including in Hungary, to remove unpopular Stalinist leaders and put in Communists with a reform agenda. The Soviet Thaw didn’t extend that far: Soviet tanks were sent in to Hungary, and reformer leaders were arrested. Krushchev was ousted in 1964, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and replaced by Brezhnev who oversaw a replay of Hungary 1956 in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Even though a breach opened up between Brezhnev and the intelligentsia, Stalin was not rehabilitated. That had to wait for Vladimir Putin. The book ends on a rather chilling note.
There is a lot in this small book, which is presented so clearly that it can engage readers who are not particularly familiar with Russian history. The book provides a timeline spanning 1879 to 2000, and a full ten-page ‘cast of characters’ including not only Russian political and cultural personalities, but also Mao Tse Tung (Zedong), Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. The book has endnotes, but they are not footnoted throughout the text.It is liberally illustrated, albeit in black and white (although that echoes the theme of the book quite well), and by bringing it right up to the present day and referencing the Iannucci film it has a contemporary edge. It’s a good read.
Background Briefing (ABC)Agents of Influence Ep. 2 The Billionaire’s New Sport I’d never heard of Len Blavatnik, but apparently he’s the new head of Foxtel and the owner of Warner Music. Is he the person I have to blame for taking AFL off free-to-air on Saturday night? He is one of the oligarchs (although he does not like that term) who made his money through the carve up of Russian state enterprises after the fall of Communism, and somehow he seems to have escaped Western sanctions. He has since distanced himself from Russia, and is strongly pro-Israel and pro-Netanyahu. Yuck.
The Rest is History Episode 554: 1066 The Shadows of War After our little excursion with Harald Hardrader, we head back to 1066 again with three warlords: the Viking Harald, the French Duke of Normanby and the Anglo-Saxon Harold Godwinson. Edward the Confessor died on 5 January 1066 and the Bishops met to choose the next king (which surprised me because I thought that the English crown was hereditary, but it wasn’t. Although family had a good head start). There were quite a few contenders to choose from: 1 Harald Hardrada who had a slight claim, and no one wanted the Vikings 2. Sven, who was King Knut (Canute)’s nephew. Another Viking. 3. William the Duke of Normanby who had been promised the throne of England 4. another descendant of Alfred the Great 5. Edward the Exile in Hungary who arrived back in England in 1057. 5. Thirteen-year old Edgar. 6. Harold Godwinson. The Bishops went for Harold Godwinson, well aware that this would prompt an invasion, and so they crowned him the very next day. Meanwhile Tostig, Harold’s brother was stewing away in exile and he invaded but was not successful. Thanks to feudalism, Harold could command 90% of English men, but he was facing Norman technology and confidence, sharpened by religious reform under hardline Catholic reformer Hildebrand (who was later to become Pope Gregory VII). When bad winds arrived, threatening to delay William of Normanby’s troops, Harold decided to stand down his army which was a big mistake because who should arrive but brother Tostig and Harald Hardrada!
Half Life BBCEpisode 7 The City Forgets Happy to distance himself from his great-grandfather’s half-truths, Joe turns to his great-grandfather Siegfried’s sister Elizabeth who redeemed the family somewhat by establishing a nursery and orphanage for Jewish children in Munich. Once the Nazis came to power, Elizabeth herself escaped to Tel Aviv, and there she read about the gradual deportation, in several tranches, of all the children in her orphanage. In the concentration camps they were gassed by the same chemicals that Joe’s great-grandfather had produced. Episode 8 A Fracture Joe returns to Germany, where eventually a memorial to the Dersim massacre is unveiled, something that would not be possible in Turkey, where all mention of the massacre is suppressed. Kurdish activists are trying to get the German government to take responsibility because the chemicals were manufactured there (which is a bit of a long stretch, I reckon, and they’re probably only pursuing it because the Turkish government won’t admit it). I’m getting a bit sick of Joe making it all about him. It’s about time this series finished.
The Human Subject (BBC) The Woman Who Resisted Mind Control Hiding in plain sight was a renowned psychiatrist, working at the Allan Institute under the aegis of McGill University. As a 16 year old in 1958 Lana Ponting was taken to the Allan Institute where Dr Ewan Cameron subjected her, and other patients, to a regime of LSD, shock therapy at 20-40 times the usual voltage and ‘depatterning’ and ‘positive affirmation’ to wipe clean their memories. It left her unable to form coherent memories, and she even forgot that she had had a child in the hospital who was adopted out. Dr Cameron’s methods soon attracted the attention of the CIA and their mind control efforts. And it all looked so respectable and upfront.
The Rest is HistoryEp 522 The Last Viking: Harald Hardrada Tom Holland was driving the previous four episodes about the lead-up to 1066 (having written Millenium ), but in this episode Dominic takes the reins, having himself written The Fury of the Vikings as part of his Adventures In Time series for children. To be honest, I had never heard of Harald Hardrada and I still don’t know what the connection with 1066 is. I guess I’ll have to wait for the next episode. From the shownotes:
In the 1066 game of thrones for the crown of England, the most extraordinary of the three contenders is arguably Harald Hardrada: viking warrior, daring explorer, emperor’s bodyguard, serpent slayer, alleged lover to an empress, King of Norway, and legend of Norse mythology. How did this titan of a man come to cross the North Sea with his army, and take on Harold Godwinson, in the titanic showdown of Stamford Bridge? His story before this point is so colourful that it may be one the most exciting lives in all history. Fighting from the age of twelve, Harald was born to a petty regional king of Norway, in a Scandinavia of competing religions and kingships. As a teenager, he would then join his fearsome brother Olaf, the man who united Norway but later fell foul of King Cnut, and subsequently sailed the seas and mysterious waterways of Russia, in a mighty battle to take back Norway. Their defeat was terrible and absolute, leaving the young Harald wounded and on the run. A journey of horrors and hardship would then lead him at last to the awe inspiring city of Kyiv, where he would serve as mercenary for the Grand Prince. But still hungry for wealth and glory he then travelled on to the most remarkable city in the world: Constantinople, where his life would take an even more dramatic turn
Half Life (BBC)Episode 3 Lost From 1935 onwards, Ammendorf, south of Berlin was the main manufacturing industry town for mustard gas. It was not used during WE2, but was instead stockpiled and burned after the war, leading to environmental contamination. Our narrator Joe intended to apologize for his great-grandfather’s role in manufacturing chemicals, but it took him some time to find the opportunity to do so. In 1935 the family left for Ankara, so his grandfather no longer oversaw the factory, even though he continued to receive half-pay from the company. In Episode 4 Young Republic Joe travels to Ankara Turkey, where he believed that his grandfather had worked distributing gas masks for a company now known as MKE that still makes gas marks. . Ataturk’s modernization movement welcomed Jewish intellectuals, and Hitler was friendly towards Ataturk. Joe’s grandfather was in fact working at the chemical factory beside the gasmask factory, and he smoothed the way for the Turkish purchase of German chemicals which were used in the 1938 Dersim massacre of 13,000 Kurds (maybe 3 or 4 times more).
In the Shadows of UtopiaSeason 2 Episode 7 A Khmer Rouge Ideology and Sihanouk’s Dark Side returns us to Cambodia after our little foray into Vietnam for three episodes. Covering the period 1963 to 1965, we start with the Cambodia communists in very different roles. Some, like Khieu Samphan who had been educated in Paris, were incorporated into Sihanouk’s government, which although including some anti-Sihanouk figures like Samphan, in reality acted as the pro-Sihanouk party. Others, like the Cambodian-born and bred Nuon Chea continued to act in the shadows, creating a spider’s web of decentralized communist links. Then there was Pol Pot, who left Cambodia for the border regions of Vietnam, where they found themselves being treated as junior partners by the Vietnamese communists.
Although Khmer Rouge ideology wanted to get rid of Buddhism, it also incorporated Buddhist grammar and principles like renunciation and detachment to give Cambodian (Kampuchean) communism a different nature to Confucian-influenced communism.
Meanwhile, Sihanouk was gradually moving away from the United States, culminating in nationalisation of the banks and import/export channels, and refusing US aid. He signed an agreement with North Vietnam to allow arms through the port at Sihanoukville, and eventually in 1965 he severed ties with the United States completely.
Half Life (BBC) Episode 1: Daughter of Radium Writer Joe Dunthorne had grown up on stories of his family’s dramatic escape from Germany in 1936 to England. He had listened to his grandmother’s stories about her father, scientist Siegfried, whose early experiments in using radium in commercial domestic products as a whitening agent led to his grandmother brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste. However, when Joe decided to actually sit down and read his great-grandfather’s memoirs, which at 2000 pages had daunted most of the family, he found near the end of the document a confession from his great-grandfather had he had been involved in research that led to the chemical weapons and agents used by the Nazis.
In Episode 2 The Quiet Town by the River Joe travels to Oranienburg, a city that was heavily bombed by the Allies in WW2 because it was the centre of chemical weapons, poisonous gas and uranium research. His great-grandfather worked in the Auergesellschaft factory. The bombing turned Oranienburg into a moonscape, but the soil still contains chemicals and unexploded ordnance.
In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2, Episode 6 is the third part of this detour into Vietnamese history which I have found really interesting. The Path to the Second Indochina War – Part Three: Agent Orange, Kennedy… covers the years 1961 – 1963. The first tests for Agent Orange were carried out in 1961, and the program began in 1962. The nerve agent dioxin was included as part of the manufacturing process. JFK was a very close election, so now South East Asia was HIS problem. At this stage, Laos was seen as more of a problem. Kruschev announced his support for wars of national liberation, and Kennedy began escalating the war, although covertly and only as a half measure. The number of ‘military advisors’ was increased from 600 to 1600. Diem supported the defoliation program using Agent Orange, and a South Vietnamese navigator was placed in each plane as cover for the American involvement, despite US military unease about its use. After bombing with defoliants, villagers were moved to ‘strategic hamlets’, which was supposed to isolate villages from contact with the communist insurgency. Meanwhile, the Buddhist crisis that led to the self-immolation with which this little excursion into Vietnamese history began, came to a head in 1963. It had started earlier with the Buddhist Revival Movement in the 1920s. It clashed with Diem’s vision of putting Catholics into positions of power. After the protests and act of self-immolation, Diem was convinced that the Communists must be behind it, and cracked down even harder on the pagodas, leading to even further loss of support. On November 1 1963 there was a coup against Diem which the US ambassador claimed ignorance of, and although officially neutral, the US govt did not assist Diem. Diem escaped but he was later shop by the coup leaders. Meanwhile, back in Cambodia there was increased student and leftist protest. Sihanouk threatened the leaders, and fearing scrutiny of his secret identity Pol (we’ll call him ‘Pol’) returned to the jungles and the revolutionary movement.
The Rest is History Ep. 551 The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4) I really have learned so much from this four part series. Rather than a great, sudden invasion, the integration of the Normans and the Britons started long before, as did the integration with Denmark. Quoting from the show notes, which explain this much better than I could:
Often symbolised as the last of the Anglo-Saxons, [The Godwinson family]’s stratospheric rise to power was engineered by Godwin, an obscure Thaine from Sussex, in a striking case of social mobility. Making himself integral to Cnut, he was made Earl of Wessex to help him run his new kingdom. But Godwin was also cunning and conniving, constantly shifting sides to ensure the maximum advantage to his family. Even Edward the Confessor, who hated the Godwinsons, had no choice but to promote Harold and Godwin’s other sons, and marry his daughter, Edith. But, with his hatred mounting and the couple childless, the fortunes of the Godwins would soon change…in September 1051, with tensions reaching boiling point, they went into exile. It would not last, and their return would see them catapulted to even greater heights of influence. Meanwhile, just as Edward’s life was dwindling, Harold’s star was rising, and across the channel William of Normandy’s prowess was also mounting.
On returning from exile, Edwin and the Godwins reconciled. Harold Godwin was shipwrecked, and taken under the protection of William of Normanby, and he swore to uphold William’s claim to the throne should Edward remain childless (which it was pretty obvious he would). Was Harold coerced into this? Certainly, if Harold or one of the Godwins became King, William certainly would invade. Meanwhile, there was ‘trouble up North’ with rebellion in Northumbria, where Harold’s brother Tosvig was in charge. In the end Tosvig went into exile, just as Edward was getting increasingly frail. And meanwhile, there was action afoot in Denmark.
Ezra KleinBest Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism Can I admit that I was a bit disappointed in this? It was actually recorded in 2022 before the Second Coming, and there’s lots of talk about story and narrative and it wanders all over the place.
Background Briefing (ABC)Long Reads: The church’s disappearing women This episode, written and read by Julia Baird looks at the lack of progress in increasing the number of women in leadership in the Anglican Church, after 30 years. It’s all rather depressing, and it doesn’t really ring true with what I’ve observed, where nearly all the ministers (both Anglican and Uniting) in the churches in my suburbs are women. Nonetheless, there is a real ‘blokeification’ (my word, not hers) of churches going on where now 39% of men vs. 28% of women in Australia identify as Christian. Among Gen Z, 37% of men vs 17% of women agree with the statement that ‘Christianity is good for society’. This is the first time this has happened: in the past, more women than men identified as Christian. I don’t think that these numbers are a good thing: I wonder if it’s part of the Andrew Tate phenomenon and whether it reflects increased patriarchy in society expressed through the church.
The Agency Accused of Paying Bribes for Babies looks at the history of adoption of South Korean children by Australian families. 3500 children were adopted in Australia, most of them sourced from the Eastern Society Welfare Society Adoption Agency. Adoptions reached a peak in 1985, when 24 children would be approved in a single day. There was competition between South Korean adoption agency intake teams, and financial arrangements were instituted between agencies and hospitals. In More to the Story: Meeting your Mum as an Adult, Anna, who was adopted as a child, travels to South Korea to meet her birth mother.
Rear Vision (ABC)Donald Trump and the wrecking ball: The End of the World as We Know It. This episode asks whether the liberal international rules-based order that has underpinned international relations for the past 80 years, is about to collapse. Personally I’m a bit wary of this term ‘rules-based order’, as America, Israel and Russia have never signed up to it, so it seems that only some follow the rules. Borders and agreements existed before 1945, but the Hague Conventions at the end of the 19th and early 20th century codified them into law. After WWI, Woodrow Wilson could not get the League of Nations through Congress, and there was not enough willpower between WWI and WW2 to get anything done. Post WW2 the United Nations was formed, but the Cold War spawned a group of other ‘rules-based’ organizations like NATO, Bretton Woods, IMF- all Western based. Meanwhile the Soviet Union created its own bloc, and there was a group of non-aligned states. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were new attempts at universal rules, but this was all brought undone by 9/11. The expansion of globalism during the end part of last century and the first decades of 21st century weakened the global order, and many were left feeling sidelined and ignored, leading eventually to Trump.
History ExtraHow the English Took Manhattan. One of the history books that very much influenced me when I returned to university as a (very) mature aged student was Donna Merwick’s Death of a Notary (see my review here). Until I read that book, I had never really thought about the change of ownership of New York from Dutch to English hands, and the effect on people living through such changes. The Dutch possessed New Netherland for 40 years, until the British took over in 1664. The re-establishment of the Stuarts meant that Puritans were still seen as the enemy, so Britain began looking at New Amsterdam again. Neither the British nor the Dutch wanted to actually fight, so they settled on a deal, or a merger, whereby the British took effective control, although many Dutch people and businesses continued. A 17th century Trump would pride himself on such a deal.
The Ezra Klein Show. I’m over in Phnom Penh surrounded with little ones at the moment, and it seemed a particularly apposite time to listen to Ezra Klein’s interview with Jonathan Haidt Our Kids Are the Least Flouishing Generation We Know Of. Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was on the best seller list for a year. Haidt’s work has been picked up by many on the right, although it really transcends a left/right binary, and it’s interesting that he often references the certainties (for good or bad) promulgated by traditional religions. I don’t know if it’s my age, or my affiliation with Unitarian Universalism, but I find much to agree with here.
The Rest is History Episode 538 Horror in the Congo– 3 parts. I had already read Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost which Tom and Dominic defer to in these episodes, and so I was already familiar with quite a bit of material. However, listening to it at more than 20 years remove, it seems even more relevant today with Trump’s naked shake-down of compromised countries for their rare earths (somehow, everything I read seems to come back to Trump). I had forgotten the degree of privatization and the sheer exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold, and the role of Roger Casement in publicizing the atrocities. The first three episodes deal with the story of the Congo, while Episode 541 Part 4 Fear and Loathing in the Congo looks in detail at Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness which I read over fifty years ago. I remember the feeling of impending doom in it, but I didn’t particularly see it as the masterpiece that Tom and Dominic do. Of course, it was written in 1898, and new literary and historical lenses are trained on it now, with some commentators seeing as racist and imperialistic.
In the Shadows of Utopia. I’m in Cambodia, but Episode 4 of Season Two deals completely with Vietnam. In The Path to the Second Indo-China War Part I The Two Vietnams, Lachlan promises a shorter episode dealing with the years immediately following the Geneva Accords. He starts with the heavily-choreographed photograph of the monk self-immolating in 1963, which most people associate with the Vietnam War, but it was in fact a protest against the actions of the South Vietnamese government before the Vietnam War had even started.
He then moves to examining first North Vietnam, then South Vietnam. Between 1953-1957 the North Vietnamese Government under Ho Chi Minh, following the example of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, embarked upon a land reform program. This involved cleaning out ‘the reactionary and evil landlords’, but perhaps with not quite the same ruthlessness of Russia and China, with the suggestion that perhaps 1 in 1000 people would need to be executed. Although the numbers of victims may have been lower, it followed the same process: denunciation, land confiscation and redistribution, and later collectivization (which, as in Russia and China the newly landed peasants deeply resented). However, there was so much internal protest that the government admitted its error and abandoned the program and turned its attention instead to the writing of a new constitution which would cement the role of the Communist Government.
In South Vietnam, although under the sponsorship and patronage of the United States, the Diem government undertook a very similar program (albeit less violent). The Geneva Accords were undermined from the start, and the planned elections never took place. The nascent-fascist Diem government was elitist and rife with nepotism. There was a similar land reform program, complete with denunciations and arrests for possible disloyalty, and it too was abandoned when it failed. The formation of the National Liberation Front gave a focus to the armed struggle, and many former South Vietnamese with communist sympathies who had fled north returned to South Vietnam and the civil war resumed.
Just recently I listened to an interview by the New York Times with Curtis Yarvin, who has been name-checked by a lot of Trump’s acolytes. He talks quickly and rather disjointedly, and is fond of throwing out historical references to defend his views and give them the sheen of academe. People are quick to bring out the old saw “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and there’s a danger of cherry-picking when computer engineers (in Yarvin’s case) and social philosophers (in Krznaric’s case) look back to history to bolster a present day argument. But that is unfair to Krznaric: unlike Yarvin, he admits that he is not a historian, and he acknowledges that he is very much standing on their shoulders while surveying present-day society. His book has footnotes, references and an index, and he includes in his footnotes references that make a different argument to the one that he is making. And unlike Yarvin, this is a quiet, considered, optimistic (too optimistic, I fear) book that piques your interest rather than bludgeoning you into silence with names and dates that you have no way of challenging.
Krznaric acknowledges the dangers of cherry-picking but argues that:
All writing of history is selective- requiring choices about topics, time periods, relevant actors, the importance of race and gender, the role of culture and technology, the use of quantitative data and other methodological issues. What matters is being clear about the approach. From the myriad of historical contexts, I have consciously selected events and stories that offer inspiration for tackling the ten major crises facing humanity in the twenty-first century, and actively focus on the collective struggles and initiatives of everyday people, since this is the realm in which we have the greatest potential agency. (p.7)
So what are these ten major crises, and what historical events does he use to discuss them? His opening chapter ‘Breaking the Fossil Fuel Addiction’ draws parallels between the vested interests supporting the continuation of slavery in Britain in the early 19th century, and the fossil fuel interests that are undercutting action on climate change. I’ve though about this connection previously, and the distasteful thought that, as with slavery, it may be necessary to ‘buy out’ fossil fuel interests, in the same way that the compensation for slavery went not to the enslaved, but to their enslavers. As well as emphasizing the importance of creating coalitions across party lines and the potency of the ‘radical flank’ to make the comparatively moderate thinkable, he also notes the place of violence. The Captain Swing civil disobedience led to the 1832 Reform Act, which diluted the power of the slavers and their lobbyists in British Parliament; while the Caribbean slave revolts made continued enslavement unattainable. I think that this chapter was the strongest in the book, and it stands alone well.
Question Two involves the nurturing of tolerance. He starts off with his own family story, with his father arriving in Melbourne from Poland in 1951 as part of Australia’s post-war migration, a story which seems from the distance of 70 years to have been successful but which may not have felt so rose-tinted at the time. He looks back to the Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus, where Muslims, Jews and Christians co-existed, although the backlash of the Reconquista is a salutary warning, I think. He looks to the early years of Chinese immigration when, as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds note, Australia led the world in ‘drawing the global colour line’ at the turn of the 20th century (a reference that he should have referenced, but did not). He also looks at Ghana and the post-independence leader Kwame Nkrumah, who came to power in 1957 and embarked on a series of policies and programs to create a unifying Ghanaian national identity. He talks about the importance of city design in nurturing tolerance, looking at Singapore’s public housing which even today has a quota system where each estate must reflect the national percentage of Singapore’s main racial groups.
The third question is that of over-consumption in ‘Kicking the Consumer Habit’ where he turns to the Edo period of Japan between 1603 and 1868, which ran on a circular economy where almost everything was reused, repaired, repurposes or eventually recycled. Rationing during WWII prompted similar behaviour.
Chapter 4 ‘Taming Social Media’ looks back to the printing revolution and the rise of the coffee house culture in Georgian times as examples of disruptive technologies that drove political change. He notes that the development of print formed the ‘typographic brain’ that is linear, sequential and rationalist; and suggests that the digital age could prompt changes in the way we connect ideas and organize information.
Chapter 5 ‘Securing Water for All’ is subtitled ‘Water Wars and the Genius of the Commons’, and it’s an important chapter, warning in its opening sentence that “we are a civilisation heading towards aquacide”. He looks back to China’s Qing dynasty in the mid-18th century where Chen Hongmou, a government official, managed the building of irrigation and drainage systems. He championed the construction of water wheels and ensured regular repair work on ditches, dams and wells (p. 109). But his work could not survive the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and the El Nino of 1876-8. He looks to Valencia’s Tribunal of Waters, which meets every Wednesday outside the Cathedral to resolve water conflicts as it has since the fifteenth century. However, water can be used as a tool of war, like the Cochabamba Water War in Bolivia in 2000 which led to civil unrest when the water services were privatized in 1999 under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF. Israel has long used water as a tool against Palestinians in the territories that they occupy, but he looks to initiatives like the Good Water Neighbours Program in the Lower Jordan Valley as cause for hope (although I wonder how it’s holding up now) and the International Commission for the Protections of the Danube River. However, seeing the debacle that our own Murray River scheme in Australia has become, I am not hopeful.
Chapter 6 ‘Reviving Faith in Democracy’ involves rediscovering the communal democracy of the past, and he goes way back to Djenné in West Africa between 250 BCE and 1400 CE, a complex trading centre which at its height was home to 40,000 people. He points out that the modern ideal of representative government was designed to prevent democratic politics, not enable it. He goes back to Athenian democracy and the Rhaetian Free State which emerged between 1524 and 1799 in what is now Switzerland, and even Kurdish confederations and the Rojava Revolution in Syria- although I’m not sure what the status is since the fall of Al-Assad. I see that their jailed revolutionary leader Abdullah Ocalan has declared a ceasefire of the PKK against Turkey- one of the problems with writing a topical book!
‘Managing the Genetic Revolution’ looks back to medieval alchemy, in essence returned as genetic engineering. He sees the genetic revolution as one of the rare turning points in history that fundamentally changes the trajectory of the human journey (p. 153). He turns to the past for warnings, looking first at the Eugenics movement and the Better Babies Contest, and Nazi Germany’s adoption of eugenics as the basis for its race-based state in Germany. Rather more hopefully, he looks at the March of Dimes and the crusade against polio where medical innovation was directed towards the common good. He warns of the ‘enclosure movement’ related to biodata, and the Wild West commercialization of the US biotech sector.
‘Bridging the Inequality Gap’ starts with the Black Death, which brought about such huge economic changes. But as he notes, the idea that substantive reductions in wealth inequality can only be brought about by warfare, state failure and pandemics is depressing and disempowering, because it suggests that all well-intentioned peaceful attempts to tackle inequality are unlikely to change the status quo. He looks to the Indian state of Kerala which was a global pioneer of mass education in the 19th century, with women at the forefront. Its government has alternated between a Communist Party and a Congress Party generally supportive of social democracy. In the Global North, the spotlight usually falls on Scandinavia, and especially Finland, which has also been at the forefront of women’s education and egalitarianism.
Chapter 9 ‘Keeping the Machines Under Control’ looks at the rise of capitalism and the extraordinary capabilities of AI- two phenomena that have deep connections. He looks to financial capitalism with the Dutch East India Company, Scottish financier John Law and his schemes under King Louis XIV of France. He argues that both financial capitalism and AI develop into a vast, complex supersystem, with the risk of contagion where any problem in one area spills over into other areas, especially with fake information, mass technological unemployment, and the potential for military use. The final similarity is that both are non-sentient human creations. He looks to the early distributed ownership models like the co-operative movement and mutual aid societies, although he admits the difficulty of breaking the ownership model of the AI industry- even worse since Trump came to power.
His final chapter ‘Averting Civilizational Breakdown’ ( a rather gloomy title) tells us that we face the Great Simplification, where too many ecological limits have been breached. Will society bend or break? He admits that we are currently facing the break scenario. He reminds us that
No civilization lasts forever: empires and dynasties are born, they flower and then die, sometimes abruptly but usually over decades or centuries. (p. 223)
He suggests that there are three broad features that are likely to give a civilization the ability to adopt and transform over time. The first is asabiya, or the power of collective solidarity, which was described in 1375 by an Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun. We see this in the wake of natural disasters (when every country proclaims that the united action of its citizens reflects that specific nationality and its ‘spirit’). It thrives on competition between states, but the problem is that the ecological emergency does not have an external enemy that we can act in solidarity against. The second is biophilia where we develop a sense of ecological stewardship for the whole web of life (or as the 7th principle of Unitarian Universalism puts it “respect for the interdependent web of all existence”). He looks back to the mass planting that took place after the publication of John Evelyn’s book Sylva in 1664 and the vestiges of pagan traditions of nature worship, as well as indigenous worldviews of intimacy and independence between humankind, the land and the living world (p. 230). The third feature is crisis response, when we think historically about the meaning of ‘crisis’ itself, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s popularization of the idea of a ‘tipping point’. He looks to radical change undertaken during war (e.g. WW2 industralization), in the wake of disasters (the Dutch government response to the floods in 1953), and in the context of revolution (Chinese land reform- not a good example; the Cuban National Literacy Campaign).
Krznaric makes no secret of his politics or his priorities. He has been personally involved in Extinction Rebellion, which he characterizes as the ‘radical flank’ of the environmental movement, and he himself was involved in citizens’ assemblies on Biodiversity Loss, even though he ended up being rather disenchanted with them. He calls for ‘radical hope’ because
Disruptive movements can change the system (e.g. slavery, the women’s movement)
‘We’ can prevail over ‘me’ (e.g. Valencia’s Tribunal of Waters, al-Andalus, soup kitchens in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake)
There are alternatives to capitalism (e.g. Edo Japan, the ‘entrepreneurial state’)
Humans are social innovators
Other futures are possible (classical Athens, the West African city of Djenné-Djeno, and the Raetian Free State in Switzerland.
At a personal level, history can do much more than help us realise that there is hope for transformative change: it can also spur us to become one of the changemakers ourselves. Whether in our communities, or workplaces, or anywhere else where we may want to make a difference, we can look to the past as an array of possibilities. From joining a protest movement or setting up a cooperative enterprise to taking part in a citizens’ assembly, history reminds us that we are part of the great traditions of active citizenship that stretch back into the past. (p. 253)
I wish that I shared his ‘radical hope’. While I acknowledge that the past does give examples of alternatives, using them as templates is fraught with contradictions and impossibilities. They can only be shards of hope, and the fact that so many of his examples are drawn from societies than no longer exist is not encouraging. As he admits, no civilization lasts forever, and I’m very much aware that our epoch of industrialization, democracy, and post WW2 peace is just a fleeting smudge on the timeline of human existence. I’m reading this in early March 2025, when the world is becoming a darker place, and at the moment those forces of untrammeled power wielded by strongmen, tech bros and lobbyists seem too strong for ‘radical hope’.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
A personal aside: Krznaric grew up in Sydney and Hong Kong, and he’s a player of real tennis. My brother’s family is very involved in real tennis too. I wonder how the real tennis fraternity deal with this colonial’s radical views?
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 