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?
History HitWhy Isn’t Canada the 51st State? Trump thinks it should be, and in this episode Dan Snow goes through the various attempts that have been made in the past to achieve this end. When the 13 colonies rebelled, they hoped that the French colonists in North America would join them and rise up against the British. But the Catholic French were not keen to align themselves with these land-hungry Puritans and so they stuck with the devil they knew. In 1775 the first US military action was an attempt to annex Canada, and in 1812 with Britain at a low ebb after the Napoleonic Wars, they tried again. The 1812 War ended with the boundaries remaining much as they were when the war started. In 1844 President Polk, the successor and protege to Trump’s hero Andrew Jackson, wanted to take all the west coast up to Alaska as part of America’s ‘manifest destiny’. During the Civil War, the British in Canada were friendly towards the Confederates and after the Civil War Charles Sumner demanded the whole of Canada in reparations payments. Instead, the US settled for 15 million pounds and an apology. In 1911 Canadians wanted lower tariffs but big business wanted Protection, and when the Conservatives won, they wanted higher tariffs against US goods. In 1948 Newfoundland had a referendum about self government or integration with Canada, but joining the USA was not one of the options. So, although Trump’s rhetoric about making Canada the 51st state is not new, he is drawing on older sentiments like small government, tariffs and manifest destiny. I hope that Canada stands strong.
The Rest Is HistoryEpisode 230 Portugal: Football, Fado and Fascism? (Part 4) By the 1820s, Portugal had lost Brazil, and although it still had a few enclaves throughout the world, it called itself a ‘pluri-continental nation’ rather than an empire. There was a sense of stagnation and nostalgia, exemplified by saudade , a sense of longing for something that will never come again, and expressed through Fado music. There was a Republic in Portugal during WWI, but it was a disaster. Portugal supported Britain and France during WWI but it was a time of tension between the Liberals and devout Catholics. It was the time of Our Lady of Fatima, who prophesied the Russian Revolution (and gave 2 other prophesies as well, which are in the keeping of the Vatican). In 1926 after years of chaos under the Republic, there was an army coup and they called on Salazar, a professor of economics to fix their problems. A deeply conservative man who disliked modernity, he only lasted 5 days, so to keep him, the army generals kept giving him more power. By 1932 he was Prime Minister, but interestingly, never President. He did sort out the economy, and was seen as an important and useful tool by the army, landowners, the church and the conservative forces in Portuguese society. Although he copied much of the iconography of Fascism, he doesn’t fit neatly into the category of Fascist. He always served at the pleasure of the President, and although he had secret police and political prisoners, only about 50-100 prisoners died as the result of torture or assassination- bad enough, but nothing compared with the other Fascist leaders of the time. He hated both Franco and the Communists, and was benign towards the Nazis and flew the flag at half-mast when Hitler died. However, Britain was more important as a long-time ally, and so Portugal remained neutral during WWII, although its diplomats did provide visas for Jews to escape Hitler. He was a founding member of NATO as part of his anti-Communist stance, and he knew the importance of popular events and so championed football (soccer) with Portugal winning several World Cups. But he was becoming increasingly politically isolated, eventually having links only with South Africa and Rhodesia at a time when no-one else was talking to them. In 1968 he suffered a stroke from which he was not expected to recover, and so the President dismissed him and appointed another academic technocrats. But no-one told Salazar, who believed that he was still Prime Minister. He is an unsettling, ambiguous figure: not a clear ‘baddie’ but backward looking and deeply conservative in a world that had changed.
I’ve had this book reserved at the library for some time, and when I finally received it I was disappointed that it seemed to be a rehash of the excellent podcast series that I mentioned back in November 2024, before this whole Trump 2.0 nightmare began. But it isn’t. Her podcast was called ‘Autocracy in America’, and in the podcast she applies the principles that she spells out in this book Autocracy Inc to the American context, with much prescience, I’m afraid.
She notes that the old cartoon image of the ‘bad man’ autocrat is outdated.
Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services- military, paramilitary, police- and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy, but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources- the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s- as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America. (p.2)
In this book, she sweeps her searchlight onto the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria (possibly outdated), Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan in particular- although she mentions some three dozen others. What a depressingly large list! Autocracy Inc, as she calls them, collaborate to keep their members in power by ignoring multiple international agencies, buoyed by a conviction that the outside world cannot touch them.
Her opening chapter ‘The Greed That Binds’ looks particularly at Putin, and the schemes he established to enrich oligarchs in the breakup of the Soviet Union. These oligarchs have invested in America and Britain.
Her second chapter ‘Kleptocracy Metastasizes’ turns to Chavez’s Venezuela, where Autocracy Inc. stepped in after Chavez’s death in 2013, where Russian and Chinese money poured into the country to enable Chavez and then Maduro to postpone any kind of financial reckoning as they destroyed the economy. Cuba joined with Venezuela in an anti-American agenda, and Maduro and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan share a dislike of democracy and anti corruption movements in their own countries. Improbably, Venezuela and Iran, despite their many differences, relate on the basis of shared grievance, with Iranians buying Venezuelan gold, and sending food and gasoline in return and assisting with the repair of Venezuelan oil refineries. She looks at Uebert Angel, an evangelical pastor and British-Zimbabwean businessman who is involved in gold-smuggling schemes, some associated with Zimbabwe’s ruling party and its president Emmerson Mnangagwa. The ruling party has a long standing relationship with the Chinese Community Party and Putin’s Russia.
Chapter 3, ‘Controlling the Narrative’ looks at cybersecurity and firewalls as a way of rewriting history, as for example, in China with Tiananmen Square. Spyware and surveillance is a way of autocracies justifying their abuse of electronic technologies. Domestic propaganda in Russian state television devotes huge slabs of time to America’s culture wars. China has made an enormous investment in international media, which makes possible the spread of misinformation internationally, and RT (Russia Today) has sites which writes material, is translated into other languages, and published on ‘native’ sites to make them seem local. Yala News, run by a Syrian businessman for example, has taken material from Russian state media and spread it through Arabic news sites. As we know, websites and videos can be fake.
Chapter 4 ‘Changing the Operating System’ looks at the ‘rules-based order’ (something that powerful countries feel themselves exempt from) and the removal of language that constrains Autocracy Inc from the international arena altogether. Instead of ‘human rights’, China wants to prioritize the ‘right to development’. The term ‘sovereignty’ is used in different ways. ‘Multipolarity’, a word preferred by the Russian information networks, is meant to be fair and equitable, but is now the basis of a whole campaign systematically spread on Russia Today in English, French, Spanish and Arabic, and repeated by information-laundering sites such as Yala News. Alternative institutions in a ‘multipolar’ world agree to recognize each other’s ‘sovereignty’, not to criticize each others’ autocratic behaviour and not to intervene in each other’s internal politics. Not every member of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is an autocrat, but she asserts that
…if the old system was designed to inculcate the “rule of law”, these new institutions are meant to promote “rule by law”- the belief that “law” is whatever the current autocrat or ruling party leader says it is, whether inside Iran, Cuba, or anywhere else in the world. (p. 107)
She looks particularly at the Syrian Civil War and the Russian-led campaign against the White Helmets, and the involvement of the Wagner Group.
Chapter 5 ‘Smearing the Democrats’ looks at ways that the people have fought back in Poland, Venezuela, Burma and Hong Kong- although this is a very discouraging list (except for Poland). The response of autocratic government to challenge is to mount smear campaigns and make accusations of foreign interference. More sophisticated autocracies have moved beyond just killing their opponents, and now prepare legal and propaganda campaigns in advance, designed to catch democracy activists before they gain credibility or popularity.
Applebaum’s book is dedicated “for the optimists” but it’s hard to find much cause for optimism here. Her epilogue ‘Democrats United’ brings the book even more up to date by looking at Ukraine and Israel. She emphasizes that in no sense is the modern competition between autocratic and democratic ideas and practices a direct replica of the 20th century cold war. Many countries do not fit neatly into the category of either democracy or autocracy and divisions run inside countries as well. She urges a reconceptualization of the struggle for freedom as not against specific states or countries, but against autocratic behaviours, where-ever they are found- in Russia, China, Europe and the United States. She spells out a number of steps
Put an end to transnational kleptocracy through ending the whole financial system that makes it possible e.g. in real estate transactions and money-laundering and through an international anti-kleptocracy network.
Don’t Fight the Information War- Undermine it by challenging the information systems at a government level (fat chance, with Musk in power) and joining forces to make Reuters, the Associated Press and other reliable outlets the standard source of global news instead of Zinhua (China) and R.T. (Russia)
Decouple, De-risk and Rebuild – ensure that countries do not remain dependent on other autocracies
She finishes by noting that:
There is no liberal world order any more, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real. But there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do. They are hardly perfect. Those that exist have deep flaws, profound divisions, and terrible historical scars. But that’s all the more reason to defend and protect them….They can be destroyed from the outside and from the inside,too, by division and demagogues. Or they can be saved. But only if those of us who live in them are willing to make the effort to save them (p. 176)
I feel as if much of this book has been superseded by recent events in America, which is really demonstrating where these links between autocracies are operating. There is one serious omission. Until the afterword, she is largely silent on Israel (I think that she herself is of reform Jewish heritage) and its provision of surveillance and military technologies to autocracies, that was described in Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory (which I see is now a documentary). There are other chapters earlier in the book when she could have looked at Israel earlier.
However, particularly since Trump’s inauguration, her articles in The Atlantic, bring her analysis to current events at both the American and international level, and she is an active and articulate participant in current political commentary. This book ranges over a huge number of countries and their leaders, and she told us quite clearly how Trump fits into the Autocracy Inc. model in her recent podcast. Americans can’t say that they weren’t warned, and the whole word is bearing the consequences.
Rear Vision (ABC) For about a fortnight after Trump’s victory, I couldn’t bear to listen to any news about America at all. I’m glad that I didn’t realize the inauguration was even happening so I missed that completely. But now, even though I’m horrified, I can bear to listen, watch and read again. Rear Vision replayed an episode from 2015, before Trump won his first term. It’s called A Tsunami of Trumpness, and the little wave then is nothing to what we have seen now. Trump’s grandfather arrived in 1885 – an immigrant, eh? – and made his money from North West mining. His father Fred built the family wealth further by taking advantage of the New Deal to become a builder and mortgage guarantor. Donald made his money from real estate and casinos, starting by refurbishing a hotel with his trademark glitz, using the political connections and credit from his father. He wasn’t particularly successful, but he knows the power of his own celebrity to gain free publicity because he is too big to fail.
The Rest is HistoryThe Nazis: Hitler’s Triumph (Part 3) This episode starts off with Horst Wessel. I’d heard of the song, but nothing about who Horst Wessel was. He was a streetfighter and member of the the SA, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. He was shot by 2 communists in 1930 and virtually deified by Goebels. The German economy was crippled by the withdrawal of US banking from Europe, something that happened gradually but inexorably. It was estimated that 1/4 of the population was living in a house with unemployment (actually, I think that the figure in Australia was even worse at 1/3 unemployment). Both the Communist and Nazi parties were increasing their members. The Weimar Republic virtually committed suicide as the governing coalition collapsed and, spurred by their fear of communism, Hindenburg and the army decided to rule by decree. Chancellor Heinrich Bruning cut spending and worked on evoking deflation and the first of a string of elections was held. This was the Nazi’s big moment, going from 12 seats to 107. They weren’t fringe any more. The violence of the streets and language was brought into mainstream politics. Electors had to hold their nose to vote for Hindenburg, who was the mainstream candidate. He won 53% of the vote, while Hitler won 37%. The very conservative Von Papen became Chancellor, and he called another election. This time the Storm Troopers were not banned, and the Nazis won 230 seats, against the 89 held by the Communists. Hindenburg refused to make Hitler Chancellor because of his violence. Von Papen wanted to dissolve Parliament and rule by decree but Von Papen lost a vote of no-confidence and so they had yet another election. This time both the Communist and Social Democrat parties improved their share of the vote, but they refused to work together. On 30 January 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor to head a coalition government with Von Papen as Vice-Chancellor.
The Rest is Politics (US edition).Trump’s Insurrection: The Fall of the Capitol I listened transfixed on the radio while driving down to the beach, unable to believe what I was hearing. I saw the photographs in this most widely-photographed event. Anthony Scaramucci and Katty Kay go through the day, hour by hour, discussing what Trump was doing, what the politicians in Congress were doing, what the crowds outside were doing. For me, the most telling phrase was Trump saying “Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.” (see transcript of Jan 6 speech) For me, the WE is fundamental. Anthony and Katty speculate about what the rioters thought they were doing, and what I think they were doing is they were supporting Trump, who was going to march down there with them. It’s really important that we don’t forget the shock of this day, no matter how much Trump wants to rebrand it a “day of love”. We saw it, we heard it.
The Daily (NYT) The episode today is a long read from the NYT magazine: Opioids Ravaged a Kentucky Town. Then Rehab Became Its Business. The former coal-mining town of Louisa, Kentucky was at the heart of the opioid crisis, but then a Christian-based rehabilitation service Addiction Recovery Care moved into town. It was able to access Medicaid for rehabilitation services, and it formed a whole network of services and enterprises for recovering addicts including coffee shops, schools, panel beaters, aged care. This, of course, attracted more addicts which has changed the profile of the town. Many of the recovering addicts are ambivalent about Tim Robinson, the CEO and himself a recovering alcoholic, and his power, while at the same time acknowledging that he has changed their life. The story traces through two women working as aged care nurses who share a trailerhome, and it highlights the precariousness of addiction recovery.
History Extra How Roman Roads Transformed Europe. You know, I don’t think that I’ve ever been on a Roman road, although would I have recognized it if I was? (I haven’t travelled much in Europe, just in England and a bit in the south of Spain). Catherine Fletcher, author of The Roads To Rome: A History notes that there were eight main roads heading out of Rome itself during Roman times, and that they weren’t always straight if there was a big geographical problem in front of it. Romans could travel 30 miles a day on a Roman road, and they were later used in the Crusades as a way of quick army deployment. Napoleon dreamt of a road to Moscow, and Fascists were rather attracted to them too.
The Coming StormSeason 2: Episode 5 The Photocopier. Somehow or other Gabriel Gatehouse gets an invitation of a meeting of a start-up called Praxis that is full of all the tech-bros who are planning to start up a new state, with no bureaucracy but governed by block chain. Praxis, and other groups like it, draw on the book The Sovereign Individual by William Rees-Mogg in the 1990s which predicts the fall of the nation-state and the rise of the cybereconomy. (Yes, the father of the politician Jacob Rees-Mogg). There’s a connection with Jeff Giesea (former Trump supporter but no longer) and Peter Thiele, both tech entrepreneurs- this is all rather scary stuff.
The Rest is History Episode 295 The Rise of the Nazis: The Beer Hall Putsch Nazi Germany haunts all popular leaders in a democracy. Hitler didn’t win outright- he was given power because he was the biggest party in a systerm of horse-trading. How far back do we have to go to find the origins of Nazism? Historian Richard Evans looks to Bismarck in 1871, who built force, violence and the army into the German constitution. There was the theory of ‘germandom’ where Germans had the right to be united under the one Reich although Germany was a late-comer to imperialism. A sense of pan-Germanism arose, expressed through a ‘Band of Brothers’, Boy Scout sort of mentality. The Social Democrats were the biggest party but were never really trusted. During the 1880s and 1890s Darwinism had emphasized life as struggle and weakness, and this fed into a disdain for weakness. Judaism came to be seen as a racial rather than religious category, and antisemitism increased. The Germans didn’t think that they had started WWI. and they didn’t believe that they were defeated as such, even though they had lost the war. In 1919 Hitler was still in the army and started giving lectures for the National Socialist Workers Party, which he was good at, and he became their star speaker. In particular he used medical imagery for his anti-semitism (e.g. poisoning the blood etc). The Weimar republic at that time was headed by a monarchist but the fear of revolution, heightened by the Spartacist Uprising, helped to unite a society that might otherwise fractured. Germany had borrowed heavily to fight the war, because they assumed that they would win, and when they defaulted on their French loans, the French govt took over the Ruhr. All groups in German society, both left and right, had their own militias, and there was a general anti-government sentiment. At the Beer Hall riot, Ludendorf was influential but Hitler, who did not at this stage see himself as a leader, took the rap. The court case was manipulated in that Hitler had a choice of location and judge, and it provided an opportunity for Hitler to give a four-hour speech. At this stage there was a capitulation of all of the forces that should have been guardrails against Hitler. The President died, and there were elections at which the Nazi party received 3% of the vote. It started to work on increasing its presence amongst farmers and northerners but no one really thought that the Nazi Party could take power unless there was an unforeseen calamity. And then the Depression hit.
Rear VisionHow to end conflict- the art of peacemaking Peacemaking is front of mind in Gaza and Ukraine (neither of which I have high hopes for). The current day UN and United States definition is that peace = not fighting, however, in many other traditions peace is seen as a way of living together so that each has dignity. In medieval times, war was a way of settling rights, and it always ended in negotiation and compromise- but without blame between Christian nations. This changed with Versailles, when the idea of war guilt was introduced (which arguably, led to WW2). After WW2 there was the creation of the United Nations, and the idea of mediation between warring parties either through the UN or a sponsor nation. This doesn’t always work, especially as it tends to involve the imposition of democratic structures prematurely e.g. Rwanda. South Africa and Ireland are examples where good leadership was able to bring about peace, where it was recognized that you are negotiating with your enemy (not your friend) and that risk and compromise is inevitable. Some of the speakers spoke about the need to include people who have been designated ‘terrorists’ into the peace negotiations, otherwise they will just act as spoilers.
In the Shadow of Utopia In rounding out his first season after THREE YEARS of broadcasting- what a long-term commitment!- Lachlan Peters gives a roughly one-hour summary of everything that has gone before, both as a form of revision for those who have been listening to the whole series, and as a quick catch-up for those who are joining it here. Season One Recap: Cambodian history from Angkor to Independence is a really good episode, although I do wonder whether it moved too quickly for those who weren’t familiar with it. He has been talking throughout about the concept of a ‘hurricane’ leading to Pol Pot, with pressure coming from foreign pressures, combining with internal patterns. In going through his quick chronology, which he does very well, there are three underlying themes (i) geography with Vietnam on one side and what would become Thailand on the other (ii) the style of leadership stemming from God Kings and patronage and (iii) external factors like the Enlightenment in shaping French colonialism, Marxism and the Cold War. Well worth listening to.
It amazes me that, of all countries in the world, IRELAND should have voted for gay marriage and legal abortion. My impression of Ireland is that it is mired in religion and conservatism, and I don’t think that I’m alone in this perception. In this book, Derek Scally, after many years of living in Germany, returns to Ireland, the land of his childhood, and asks himself how these changes came about. It is a story both of his own personal journey from a weakly-held Catholicism into a consideration of how Ireland, as a country, can come to terms with its past.
The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, ‘The Leaning Tower of Piety’, he writes of his own Irish upbringing and his own contact through St Monica’s Church with Father Paul McGennis, who was later to plead guilty to four counts of indecent assault. In going through the church archives, he learns of the league table on donations that existed between the parishes, and through speaking to old parishioners he learns of the suspicions about Paul McGennis, and the inability of parish priest Michael Geaney to impose any authority on him. In Part I he challenges the perception that there is a special type of ‘Celtic Christianity’, suggesting that this is the result of previous centuries’ public relations, generating important political momentum, emotional comfort and offering touchstones against historical events like the Penal Laws and Protestant/English occupation. It was not enough: he suggests that Irish Catholics perceived themselves the Most-Oppressed-People-Ever. Yet, when he looks back to his own education within the Catholic system in the 1980s by revisiting the text books used at the time, he feels patronized and short-changed by the experience.
Part Two ‘Implosion’ looks at the effect of the clerical sexual abuse revelations in the 1990s. He focuses on Fr. Brendan Smyth, who was investigated in 1975 but went on to abuse children for a further sixteen years. The fallout, when it came, spread beyond his own activities: Cardinal Brady, who was involved in the 1975 investigation, was also accused of cover- up. He interviews Sean Brady, a man whom some see as a modest figure who knew which boats not to rock; while others see him as a coward and an accomplice to a predatory paedophile priest. Australian readers will see parallels with Archbishop George Pell. He goes on to explore the Magdalene laundries and the treatment of inmates in religious-run institutions. He argues that when the Catholic Church lost its monopoly on giving meaning or creating a sense of community, coupled with the sense of betrayal over the hypocrisy and intransigence of the church regarding sexual abuse, many left the church.
In Part Three ‘Among the Ruins’ he talks about the reformulated religion that transformed Famine-era faith into an earnest, Rome-focussed Sacred Heart Catholicism. He draws on his experience of living in Germany to wonder if Ireland does not need some form of national reckoning, as a form of healing and reconciliation. He considers the roles of museum and memorials in this process. At the end of the book he writes:
This journey has taken me from apathy to ambivalence, then anger to acceptance…[For] whatever anger I harbour towards the Irish Church, echoing the anger of those whose lives were ruined by its institutional inhumanity, I see remnants of its noble aspirations through the many ordinary Irish people who tried- and try- to lead better, Christian lives. No one can draw a line under the past, or airbrush away their role in it, but- for perhaps the first time ever- Irish people can approach their history on their own terms. That is, if they want to. (p. 307)
I’m not quite sure how to rate this book, and my reading was interrupted by a two-week holiday and so I did not read it as a continuous whole. I was happy enough to pick it up again, but I don’t know if I really grasped his argument well. In fact, summarizing it here gives me a better shape of the argument than the actual experience of reading the book did.
Shadows of Utopia Episode 11: Khmer Issarak/ Pot Pot in Paris I This episode covers the period 1945 – 1950. Just like an abusive partner promising to reform after a stint in jail, after the Japanese capitulation the French government returned, promising to be better. They had plans for a Colonial Federation of the states under their control (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). This triggered the French/Vietnam war, which was a matter of prestige for the French, and a matter of nationalism for the Vietnamese who had claimed their own independence during the war. As far as Cambodia was concerned, in 1946 there was a Cambodian/French modus vivendi which returned to Cambodia the territory in the west that had gone to Thailand, and provided a new constitution (albeit under French oversight). The King and the National Assembly would be voted by universal male suffrage, and three political parties, each led by Princes, emerged. Although Than had been sidelined, the Democratic Party became the heir of the early Khmer nationalists, and won 50 out of 67 seats at the first election. Outside of official channels Khmer Isserak became more prominent. In 1946 they seized Siem Reap in a guerilla action that united monks, criminals, warlords, and Thai-influenced communists, as well as freedom fighters and independence supporters. But when the Prince heading the Democratic Party died, the democrats fractured. Meanwhile, in October 1949 the future Pol Pot, Saloth Sar, arrived in Paris after gaining a scholarship to a trade school to study radio technology, possibly through his royal connections. The Communist Party was strong in France at this time. He went to work in Yugoslavia as part of a labour force during his holidays (shades of what was to come in Cambodia), and was introduced to communist ideology and Marxist-inspired politics in Paris through a group of students including Ieng Sary, Thioun Mumm, Keng Vannsak.
The Rest is HistoryCuster’s Last Stand: The Charge of the 7th Cavalry (Part 6) Again, from their website: “The U.S. was cast into a spiralling panic following the economic depression of 1873, and waves of paramilitary violence swept through the south as the debates surrounding Reconstruction swirled on. Amidst this uncertainty, the government, under the leadership of Ulysses S. Grant and his chief advisors, began drawing up a cold blooded plan to strike into the heart of Montana and settle the issue of the Plains Indians once and for all. Meanwhile, the drumbeats of war were sounding amongst the newly united Lakota and Cheyenne themselves, spearheaded by their war chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, as the pressures of white settlers and the railroads increased. Their numbers swelled in the wake of a failed winter campaign lead by General Crook, as swarms of refugees accumulated into Sitting Bull’s village – the largest assembly of Lakota ever seen on the Plains. The stage seemed set for a mighty reckoning in the summer of 1876, as the Federal government geared up for another assault. Much to his delight George Custer, spared from the brink of disaster by his reckless impetuosity, was recruited to the 7th Cavalry marching on one of the armies closing in on the Lakota encampment near the Little Bighorn River…the Battle of the Rosebud that followed would see a six hour struggle of monumental violence.
Autocracy in America. Bear in mind that I was listening to all this before the American election, when I was still cautiously hopeful that Harris would win. Or more to the point, Trump winning was just too frightening to contemplate- especially after listening to this podcast. It features historian Anne Applebaum (who I have a lot of time for- see my review of Twilight of Democracyhere) and Peter Pomerantsev. It’s produced by The Atlantic. Episode 1 Start with a Lie argues that the lie is the litmus test of loyalty – and haven’t we seen plenty of those coming from Donald Trump’s mouth? Evidence is irrelevant, and truth becomes a subset of power. They speak with Steven Richter, the county recorder in Maricopa county who was accused by Trump and his acolytes of ridiculous vote tampering in 2020 (e.g. shredding the Republican votes, feeding them to chickens and then burning the chickens) but the sheer absurdity of the lie is part of the test. They speak of belief in the lie as being part of belonging, rather than an intellectual choice. Episode 2 Capture the Courts In an authoritarian state, the public has no real access to justice. This episode features Renée DiResta, a scholar who researches online information campaigns. After putting out a report ‘The Long Fuse’, she struggled to counter false accusations leveled against her after a series of courts accepted them without investigation. They then go on to discuss Justice Cannon’s ruling on presidential immunity, and the distinction between rule BY law and rule OF law.
The Money (ABC) Yet another pre-election podcast. Oh to be able to return to that still-hopeful time! This episode was As America goes to the polls, the economy is doing well, but people aren’t feeling it. There were three speakers, but I was most interested in the last one, who I think is Christopher Rugaber. Who ever it was, they spent a day at the King of Prussia shopping mall in Pennsylvania. He made four observations. First, that people are quick to blame the government when things go wrong, but when they get a new job or a raise etc. they attribute it to their own individual effort. Second, that despite years of predicting the demise of the department store, they are actually booming with the car parks filled with workers’ cars long before the stores open. This is the flip side of deficit spending: that people DO actually spend the money they are given. Third, after paying $10.00 for an ice-cream that would have cost $7.00 last year, he realized that this is what people remember- not tax reductions, not extra childcare payments, not reduction in inflation, but the $10.00 ice-cream. Finally, that people (like himself) continued to buy brands like Levi, no matter how much they put up the price. They would complain about the price-rise but it was not enough to make them change brands. Interesting.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 