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.
Being RomanSoldiering for Softies Well, obviously not ALL Roman Soldiers were of chiselled jaws and flinty demeanour. In this episode, Mary Beard introduces us to Claudius Terentianus, who spends most of his letters moaning to his father, and asking for the most basic of equipment from sandals to swords. After a lifetime spent complaining, he eventually moves up the ranks a bit and ends up being able to retire quite comfortably.
History Extra. Native Americans: A History of Power and Survival. I’ve been listening to The Rest is History, where they are looking at Custer, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, so I thought I’d catch up on this more generalized history of Native Americans. I’ve always been mystified by the way that indigenous/European relations in Australia draw on ‘black’ language and politics of African Americans, when Native American/settler relations are far more relevant. This episode features Kathleen Duval, whose book Native Nations just won the Cundill Prize, a Canadian award for the “best history writing in English”. Her book looks at 1000 years of Native American history, starting in the year 1000 when Native American society was at the height of its organization, and comparable to cities in Europe at the time. The Medieval Warm Period made urbanization possible, and when it ended, people left the cities by preference. Native American nations were marked by trade, reciprocity and consensus decision making in confederencies that ebbed and flowed. The second part of her book goes from 1750 onwards. Spanish and Dutch colonization hadn’t changed the power balance, but this was to change from this point on. Part III looks at rebirth into nations. It sounds good.
Dan Snow’s History Hit The British Agent Who Tried to Kill Lenin tells the story of Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat, spy, and propagandist. He was born into a wealth Scots family and intended to go to Malaysia to work in the rubber industry, but was waylaid by scandal (I didn’t note what the scandal actually was!). He was restless and proudly Scottish. He ended up in Russia during WWI where he was an astute observer and politically agnostic. He became a “British Agent”, not an official position, but a conduit to the British government and their man on the spot. He was tasked with getting the Russian government back into the war after the Communist takeover and withdrawal in a plot by France, English and the US to use disaffected Latvians to overthrow the Bolsheviks. He was arrested and imprisoned by the Checka when he was betrayed by Latvian plants, but he was released under a prisoner exchange. He continued to hang around the Foreign Office where he worked as a Rogue Agent.
History ExtraImperial Spectacle: Inside Britain’s 1924 ‘Empire Exhibition’. In this episode Matthew Parker takes us to the Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park. The 200 acre site was ten times the size of the exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, and it included the Wembley Stadium, which still stands. It was opened in April 1924 by King George V on radio, and he was heard by 10 million listeners worldwide. Held after World War I, it was an expression of gratitude for the Empire’s contribution to the war effort. Europe and the banking system was in tatters, and it was hoped that the Empire, at that time at its territorial height, could replace it. With the rise of fascism in Europe, the Exhibition tried to engage the working class, but there was a rather patronizing snobbery when describing the appeal of trashy exhibitions to them. Even then there seemed something rather old-fashioned about the Exhibition with its ‘living exhibits’ of exotic races. It closed in October 1924 but re-opened the following summer, running from May 1925 through to September.
7.00 a.m. White Australians of a progressive bent are challenged by Alice Springs. The footage from a few months back of young kids rioting and trying to break into heavily reinforced hotel doors was confronting, and the Country-Liberal Party’s recent election victory in the Northern Territory with an openly ‘tough on crime’ policy, knowing full well that it will fall mainly on indigenous kids, raises many reservations. Yorta Yorta journalist Daniel James has a three-part series on 7.00 a.m. Episode 1: This is Alice Springs: Children of the Intervention takes up back to the Howard government Intervention, which is widely blamed by First Nations people today for being the root cause of the problems today. Is it? I don’t know, but it’s repeated again and again here, and I have to take it at face value. Episode 2: This is Alice Springs: The Coppers Race relations and the futility and delay of looking to white systems of justice came to the fore with the police shooting of Warlpiri teenager Kumanjayi Walker. Zachary Rolfe was acquitted, and the coronial inquest continues at the end of November this year. Episode 3: This is Alice Springs: Mparntwe picks up after the Country-Liberal Party victory, when many people in Alice Springs are packing up and leaving town (I can’t help thinking that this is the purpose of the CLP policy). Daniel James interviews one of the locals who is staying to teach kids to be ringers on cattle stations ( and here I found myself thinking of Ann McGrath’s Born in the Cattle). But even this example is not quite what it seems. An interesting, thought-provoking series.
The Rest is History Ep. 450 Custer’s Last Stand: Death in the Black Hills (Part 5) Once again, I’ll use the podcast’s description of the episode: “In the wake of the barbaric Washita River massacre, George Custer found himself drifting; addicted to gambling, at odds with his wife, and failing in his efforts to take advantage of the American gold rush in New York. Finally, Custer was sent to Kentucky to suppress the terrible post war fighting there, but again found himself alienated from many of his companions by his controversial views on Reconstruction. Restless and dissatisfied, the chance for danger and action finally came Custer’s way, thanks to the ambitions of the Northern Pacific Railway. With plans to build it right across Lakota territory, the venture was intended to and would fatally threaten their way of life, by spelling the death of the bison. With this threat on the horizon, the mighty Lakota war leaders, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse lead violent raids against the survey party sent to prospect the land, hampering and halting their efforts. So it was that in 1873 another expedition was sent, and with it went George Custer, bringing him into contact for the first time with the two mighty warriors who would shape his destiny. A fearful, bloody game of cat and mouse would ensue, culminating in an epic confrontation…” They point out that the Black Hills were considered “unceded Indian Territory”, a rather ambiguous status, but they were not traditional, sacred lands as we understanding Indigenous Country here in Australia. Rumours about gold finds also increased the population pressure.
Shell GameThis is a six-part series hosted by journalist Evan Ratliff, although you’re never really sure whether you’re listening to HIM or not. He created a voice clone using AI which pretty much sounds like him, except for the long pauses between utterances: something that I’m sure will be overcome in the future. He has great fun trying it out on cold-callers until he starts to feel a bit guilty, given that it’s someone’s job, so he then turns to scammers without any feelings of guilt. Ironically, the scammers are happy to play along because they’re just paid to keep people on the line. The rise of therapy-language (“thank you for reaching out” etc) makes it fairly easy to give the appearance of sincerity, and he tries it out with AI-generated therapists, and then with a ‘real’ therapist through Better Help. But even though he’s having fun with all this, even he draws the line with using his voice clone with his father who is battling cancer. Ironically, his father embraces the whole idea of a voice clone and embarks on some cloning of his own. Shell Game was named one of the the best podcasts of 2024 by New York Magazine, and it’s good.
In the Shadows of Utopia From Cambodge to Kampuchea I’m really enjoying this series, but the length of episodes is becoming ridiculous. This one went for 2 hrs and 45 minutes. It covers the period 1930 – 1945 and I learned just so much. After 75 years of French rule, there was little appetite in Cambodia to rebel against the French (unlike in Vietnam). In Vietnam Ho Chi Minh was part of Comintern, itself under Russian influence, but rather resentful that he was forced to call his party the Indo-Chinese Communist Party, even though there was virtually no activity anywhere other than Vietnam. Indo-China generally was affected by both the Japanese expansionism and the fall of the French government to become the Nazi-endorsed Vichy Government. In both Vichy France and in Cambodia itself, there was a harking back to the glories of the past: in France it was Joan of Arc, and in Cambodia it was Angkor. After yet another Thai/Cambodian war, where territory was lost once again, Japan stepped in and gave both Battambang and Siem Reap back to the Thai government (but not Angkor itself). In 1941 King Monivon lay dying at Bokor Hill Station (which I didn’t get round to seeing- but next time!), humiliated by the loss of his territory, and on his death, the French chose his grandson, Nordom Sihanouk to be King. He was only 19 years old and a bit of a playboy. Meanwhile, in 1936 the first Khmer-language newspaper started, edited by Son Ngoc Thanh. It increasingly took a pro-Japanese and anti-colonial line. In 1942 the French tried to impose the Gregorian calendar and a romanized alphabet (Oh! if only they had succeeded!!) and this led to strong resistance from the Monks. On 20 July 1942 the newspaper led a protest of perhaps 1000-2000 people, of whom about half were monks. The editor was arrested, along with 200 other people, including members of the Indo-Chinese community party. The editor Thanh escaped jail, but his letters reveal his naivete and lack of meaningful support for an uprising against the French, looking to Japan as the saviour of the “yellow nations”. The US bombed Phnom Penh as the war turned against the Japanese. In response, the Japanese began training local militias and they interned French officials (a bit of a surprise because these were Vichy French officials). Sihanouk declared independence at the request of the Japanese. Six weeks later, Thanh returned and was made foreign minister, and later Prime Minister after the defeat of the Japanese. There was strong distrust between Thanh and Sihanouk, and by now the French were talking about coming back. Thanh was arrested, and Sihanouk welcomed the French back. There was now a split between those nationalists who saw their future allied with Vietnam, and others who were keen to claim Khmer identity.
Meanwhile, in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence. The Indo-Chinese Communist Party embedded itself within the peasantry, who were suffering from a Japanese-induced famine. The Viet Minh arose after a series of brutal repressions, and soon after the Japanese defeat, Ho Chi Minh declared independence from the Japanese, hoping that the Allies wouldn’t oppose it. But the French are coming back.
Phew- a lot there! While I was in Phnom Penh I saw where the director of the National Museum died at the hands of Japanese interrogators, and I just assumed that the Japanese had taken over as part of their sweep down through Asia. It had never occurred to me that Cambodia would welcome the Japanese, as a way of freeing themselves from the French.
As I remember, it was in about Grade 5 that we “did” Australian history – the first taste of ‘aborigines, explorers, gold and Eureka’- and we used a plastic template to draw Australia. Poor old Tasmania didn’t even get a look-in, but I was also disconcerted by the borders of Victoria, which started with off the solid line of the Murray River before trailing off into dotted lines, like the other state boundaries. Not that the dotted lines were any use: they were impossible to fit a pencil point into, anyway, but they did give a visual sense of state borders. (And emphasized the importance of water compared to boundaries, even though that water might disappear completely from time to time).
Australians are not unaware of surveyors in their history. Travelling around South Eastern Australia, one often encounters the ‘Major Mitchell Trail’, or markers of the trail of Hume and Hovell, more often described as ‘explorers’ but at early stages of Australia’s colonization, the distinction was perhaps less clear cut. Many Australians are aware of Goyder’s Line that separates arable from drought land in South Australia, and the final proclamation of the Black-Allan line in 2006, more than 130 years after it was surveyed, brought the names of surveyors Alexander Black and Alexander Allan to (somewhat) public notice. But I must confess that I had never heard of Thomas Scott Townsend, the subject of this biography, although his name was given to the second-highest mountain in Australia and Townsend Corner marks where that solid line dissolved onto dots on my plastic school template. The author of this book, Peter Crowley, felt that Townsend had been short-changed:
As far as I am aware, this is the first biography dedicated to Townsend, a man who was the pre-eminent field surveyor of the south-east during the squatter age…I felt for Townsend and his family and wanted to restore his memory to the place it deserved. His triumphs and his travails were of compelling human interest, a tale of suffering and sacrifice endured in service to the public, and they were always going to be the backbone of this narrative. (p.18)
Narratively, Crowley gets you in from the outset. He starts with a suicide in 1869, more than twenty years after most of the action in this story, when the reclusive and belligerent Townsend kills himself by cutting his own throat. What could have led to this “pre-eminent field surveyor” taking his own life?
Thomas Scott Townsend was born in England in 1812. He, along with his parents and 10 siblings, lived at Woodend House in Buckingham Shire. His older brother Joseph was apprenticed to a land surveyor and then began his own surveying business, and it was later noted by Major Thomas Mitchell, the explorer and Surveyor General of New South Wales that Thomas Townsend had been “bred in a surveyor’s office in England”. Thomas had arrived in NSW at the age of 17, and after being unable to find employment, was the recipient of a recommendation to the Surveyor-General from the MP for Oxfordshire, generated no doubt as part of the lobbying and patronage network which underpinned colonial mobility around the empire. He was initially appointed as a draftsman in a temporary capacity in 1831, but remained an employee of the survey department for over 20 years. Those same patronage networks, deployed to the advantage of other new arrivals, were to stall his progress up the career ladder when other aspirants were appointed over him on the basis of similar recommendations from ‘home’. He had to wait under 1845 to be promoted to the position of ‘surveyor’ and the highest position he reached was Acting Deputy Surveyor General of New South Wales.
In these twenty years he was appointed to various projects: laying out towns in Albury, Geelong, Eden; acting as Surveyor-in-Charge of the Port Phillip District; surveying coasts in Gippsland and the South Coast; ascertaining the source of the Murray River; and traversing the Main Range of the Snowy Mountains, making an ascent of the then-unnamed Mt Kosciuszko. Even though the Surveyor-General, Major (Sir) Thomas Mitchell, was able to inveigle long periods of leave for himself to return ‘home’, it seemed that each time the opportunity for a voyage or desired excursion arose, the government found Townsend indispensable and directed him to another suddenly-urgent project. Located far from Sydney and beyond the reach of official orders, he devised his own surveying activities as well, using the time when snow and floodwaters made surveying impossible to go back over areas that had been surveyed in haste earlier. He was ridden hard by the government, but he was a self-driven man as well : perhaps there is a streak of madness in all explorers and surveyors? He was not the first man to enter these areas – he found that squatters had preceded him nearly everywhere he went, following generations-old indigenous paths to find open pastures – but the methodical, documented act of surveying was a form of exploration in its own right.
Surveying involved long periods living in tents in the bush, unless the territory was so impenetrable that supplies had to be left with the oxen and horses so that the surveying party could move unencumbered, sleeping in the open at night – surely a daunting prospect in south-east Gippsland and in the Great Dividing Range. Surveyors used the ‘chain and compass’ method, using a Gunter’s chain to measure distance and taking bearings and angles with a compass. Sometimes they had access to a circumferentor, a compass mounted on a tripod with a sighting arm, or later a theodolite to measure angles. They recorded information in field books, from which they later plotted their data onto maps. At this stage they did not use contour lines, but instead depicted ridges, spurs and valleys by parallel lines known as hachures. Thus, those early maps look quite different to the contour maps we are accustomed to today, and certainly they have their own beauty.
Townsend was instructed to record the indigenous names for the geographical features he surveyed, even though those other names were later overlaid by British names awarded as an act of homage to patrons at ‘home’. Crowley emphasizes throughout the presence of indigenous clans and nations across the whole area that Townsend surveyed. Indigenous guides could easily be procured from squatting stations, and Charley Tarra (or Tara) was a member of several surveying parties. Crowley notes the massacres associated with various squatters, although he does not interrogate the role of the surveyor in a political and legal sense. Certainly guns and violence led to appropriation of the land on-the-spot by the squatters, but it was the legal act of survey and resultant gazetting that imposed British title and sovereignty over Aboriginal land.
Townsend’s work was directly impacted by colonial politics. When he first arrived, the NSW government had already lost control of the squatters outside the Nineteen Counties, and pastoralists were moving into the Port Phillip district from across Bass Strait. When he arrived in Port Phillip as Surveyor-in-Charge, there was already a large backlog of work awaiting him, which only increased further with the influx of population during the gold rush. With the cessation of transportation, the source of cheap surveying teams dried up, and it became difficult to find men prepared to face the isolation and sheer hard work of the task. Squatting regulations introduced a degree of urgency into surveying work, with the imperative to mark out town reservations close to water supplies, to avoid them being swallowed up into large estates. Separation in 1851 brought politics into surveying, with suggestions of a border on the Murrumbidgee which would have placed the Riverina and the later Canberra district within Victoria. Townsend had his own opinion about where the boundary should be, suggesting that instead of rivers being used (which can, after all, expand and shrink depending on climate), mountain ridges and port access should guide the decision.
Crowley depicts well the arduousness of surveying work. It seems that Townsend suffered more from the heat of surveying the Murrumbidgee than he did the snowdrifts and dankness of the south-east. Men could get lost just when stopping aside to relieve themselves; sometimes ticket-of-leave and convict team members were unruly or absconded; and the sad death of Major Mitchell’s son 18 year old son Murray, who accompanied Townsend on his survey of the lower Snowy River, highlighted the isolation and dearth of medical assistance out on the field.
The isolation, the incessant work and the rootlessness of surveying work over such a long period of work did not augur well for a desk-bound job in Sydney once Townsend finally achieved the promotion he craved. In fact, he was quite clear with the governor that he felt that he still needed to be in the field to ensure the accuracy of the surveys conducted by men under his supervision. He married, but seemed unsettled and increasingly paranoid about his wife’s fidelity and sure that he was being ‘watched’. Many people were concerned about him, and felt that a trip back ‘home’, which had been postponed for so many years might alleviate his mental distress. This was not to be… and here we are back at the start of the story, with Townsend’s suicide. I had felt at the start of the book that Crowley had laboured the ‘ignored hero’ point a bit, but by the end, I no longer felt that way. Townsend has been overlooked. Strezlecki has garnered most of the praise for his exploration of the Great Dividing Range, and Alexanders Black and Allen received acknowledgement for tracing the Murray River that Townsend had surveyed twenty years earlier.
Crowley tells the story well, interweaving the biographical with the historical. He draws on official correspondence between Townsend and his colleagues and superiors, Colonial Office files with and about Townsend (which reflect the usual aggrieved tone of correspondents and pompous tone of Colonial Office officials), Townsend’s maps and drawings, and in quite a coup, family correspondence that fills in the last years of Townsend’s life. At times, particularly at the start of the book, I felt that he was distracted by the weeds a bit, giving more context and background information than was necessary. The book does not have an index, which would have been appreciated, but the old fashioned chapter summaries at the start of each chapter helped you to locate information. There was a single list of footnotes that spanned across all chapters. The book did seem to take an inordinately long time to get started, with a note about measurements, geographical notes about what constituted the Great Dividing Range, or the Murray River, a cast of characters, a timeline, acknowledgments and an introduction- all before we get to chapter one. Much of this could have gone at the end of the book.
The one thing that I cannot understand, however, is the dearth of clear, modern maps in this book. With the National Library of Australia as publisher, use of historic maps and documents is to be expected but they were virtually illegible once reduced in size and rendered into grayscale. For much of the book I had no idea where Townsend was or where he was going and no sense of distance or remoteness. This was a book that cried out for a visual representation of land: something to which Townsend devoted his whole life.
But these are quibbles about decisions that may well have been beyond the author’s control. Crowley captures well the incessant demands of the work, the beauty and intimidation of the lands he was surveying, and Townsend’s inexorable spiral into mania. It is both a very human story, and yet one placed within the vastness of unsurveyed territory. Townsend may have had to have wait more than 150 years for his biographer, but with Crowley’s book he receives the recognition earned and withheld for so many years.
Sourced from: review copy from Scott Eathorne, Quickmark Media
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 