The Global Story (BBC)The Death of Reading This episode was based on a recent essay by James Marriott ‘The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society’ which can be found on his Substack here. Both the essay and this discussion go back to the mid- 1700s when the spread of reading beyond the elites meant that power no longer had to be performed visually, but could be disseminated and reinforced by the written word. Marriott draws on Neil Postmans work ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, and argues that beyond the concern about the decline of reading in the 1990s, the spread of the smart phone from 2010 onward has led to a steep drop in educational standards. With the rise of TikTok and Instagram, we are returning to the primacy of visual display – a sort of counter-revolution in thinking and perception.
Journey Through Time Episode 48: The Paris Commune: Can the City of Light Govern Itself? After the uprising over the cannons on Montmatre, the radicals took over, but with no leader, they split almost immediately. Auguste Blanqui would have been the leader, but he was in prison (as indeed he was for whole decades of his life). Supplies were allowed in, but Paris was still lunder siege. Napoleon III’s column was pulled down, although it was later re-erected. Elections were held with 4 days to give the leaders legitimacy with the result that there was an anti-nationalist government but otherwise, the movement splintered. The new government started issuing executive orders (and don’t we know about THEM!) to separate church and state, provide rent relief and soldier pensions, provide free secular and compulsory co-education, cap salaries, and give workshops to co-ops. So far, all normal socialist fare, but also they imposed decimal time (10 day weeks, 10 hour days etc), banned night baking as a labour market reform for bakers, and banned croissants (can’t remember why). They treated legitimate and illegitimate children equally and had same and equal pay for teachers. The army was a citizen’s militia, and army discipline broke down almost immediately. 150,000 people per day fled Paris, where there was constant violence but no terror as such (in Revolutionary terms). From afar, Marx was interested but because he didn’t support the French International, he waited a while before writing about it. Women were influential in organizing, but they were not inspired by feminist or suffragist ideals. To get Auguste Blanqui released from prison, they took hostages which backfired on them. There were small mini-communes in the rural towns, but essentially Paris was on its own.
I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the ‘Shortest History’ part of the title of this series of books published by Black Inc dealing with world history, many written by Australian authors. Declaring to be the shortest history seems rather definitive and pugnacious, and almost a challenge to later authors to become even shorter. The blurb for the series claims that the books can be read in an afternoon -something that I doubt, in this case – but certainly they are a work of concision and discipline on the part of the author, in being able to confidently assert a fact or event in a single paragraph instead of hedging with qualifications, nuances and debates. Of course, much is elided in such an approach, but there is also a bracing forthrightness about a sweeping history that needs to tie together so many small details into an overarching narrative.
Don Watson comes to the task as a historian in his own right, political speechwriter, and a commentator on current-day American society and political culture. As well as his American Journeys published in 2008 (my review here), he has been a regular contributor to the Black Inc./Schwartz stable on American politics with three Quarterly Essays: No.4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America (2001), No 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the time of Trump (2016) (my review here) and most recently in 2024 with No. 95High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink, which I reviewed here. With The Shortest History…. he is writing as an outsider, and a long-term, well-informed watcher as well.
His outsider status is most apparent in the opening chapters of the book, where he makes clear that there were competing European powers – England, France, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden- that put ‘boots on the ground’ on what was to become American territory. Drawing the distinction between the 1776 establishment of the United States, and the history of ‘America’ starting in 1492, he goes even further back 20,000 years to the first peoples, and the early introduction of enslavement that followed early European ‘discovery’. In what, perhaps, might be characterized as ‘black armband history’, he continues to turn the spotlight around onto First Nations and Black experience as the narrative of United States history marches forward…always forward.
The book progresses chronologically, but the chapters are thematic. In his introduction Watson notes that:
While the history of the United States is to an uncommon degree a history of ideas, it is equally the story of men and women testing the truth of those ideas against experience: in politics, in churches, on frontiers, in cities, in industries, in battle, in homes, in schools, in Hollywood, in literature and in music. (p. xiv)
Watson places strong emphasis on ideas: on the intertwined Puritan ideas of harsh punishment and discipline set against competing ideals of individualistic self-reliance, which in turn existed alongside traditions of social justice, education, communitarianism and democracy. He notes the influence of Enlightenment philosophers and the scientific revolution in providing an intellectual framework for their grievances and the language to express it through the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and the Federalists papers. He puts his historian hat on to discuss Turner’s Frontier thesis on the ‘freedom’ of the frontier in the popular imagination and he notes the recurrent waves of religious ‘awakenings’ and the struggle between order and chaos-‘ the American id and the American superego’ (p 58). Challenging these were the ‘maniacal appetite for wealth’ whetted by the financial opportunities following the Civil War, and especially during the ‘Gilded Age’ of the 1890s which pushed aside “the restraining influences of conscience and religion, or the egalitarian principles implied in the country’s democratic creed” (p.94) The Civil War, in his telling, had a long advent of compromises on the part of the North, which was well aware of the incompatibility of slavery with the ideals espoused in the republic’s founding documents.
Although we know the political landscape in the United (huh!) States today as being Republican and Democrat, the meaning of both words has changed over time. To be ‘republican’ was to champion the idea of the American republic, and it was not necessarily democratic. The nature of the parties changed over time, with the immigrant influx between 1890 and 1920 shaping the cultural and political evolution of urban America:
The Democratic Party evolved into the party of both the burgeoning multiethnic cities and the reactionary South, while the Republicans remained the voice of white Protestant provincial America. (p. 112)
Looking at the policies of Presidents over time, particularly in the Progressive era, it is not easy to distinguish to which party the president belonged. For example Woodrow Wilson was a southerner from the Democratic Party, and a progressive as well as a segregationalist. Kennedy did not like Martin Luther King, and he had little interest in domestic politics. Nixon was mad, but he was the most liberal republican of the century excluding Teddy Roosevelt (p. 187). Some Presidents receive more attention than others. Probably because of current-day parallels, President Andrew Jackson receives more attention than he might have in a book written 30 years ago. For a former speechwriter for Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, I was surprised that he was so critical of FDR. It seemed to me that the emphasis on presidential personality and actions received more emphasis in the latter part of the book, within the time of Watson’s own memory, I would guess. Interestingly for a historian, he ascribes ‘luck’ as an important factor that determined a President’s actions and reputation.
This is not just a political history because Watson interweaves popular culture, including music, Hollywood and literature, as well as broader social movements including Communism and anti-Communism, evangelical religion and protest movements. However, the political emphasis does mean that it is a predominantly male history, with political actors Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton receiving more attention than other women in his narrative. As the book moves on, the early emphasis on indigenous and Black history is muted and where it is mentioned it is mainly in political terms. Particularly in the post-WW2 years, he integrates conformity, consumerism and commercialization into the “American Dream”, which was very much restricted to white America:
Nothing spoke more eloquently of the American dream than the bustling heartland towns, their Main Streets lined with mom-and-pop stores, barber shops, diners, ice cream parlours, theatres and movie houses, with Fords and Chryslers and De Soto Coronados parked in rows; and, just beyond them, unlikely numbers of regularly attended churches, schools, sports stadiums and public swimming pools (p. 154)
Watson started his book in the introduction, with the attack on the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. At first, I thought that this reflected Watson’s own expertise and reputation as a commentator on American affairs, but when he returns to 6 January at the end of the book as part of his argument, it is as a historian.
The United States was born with one foot in the Christian church and the other in commerce. It might equally be said that it had a foot in the high ideals of religion and the Enlightenment and a foot in the frontier philosophy of whatever it takes. The loathing felt for the liberal elites, and for intellectuals in general, was an old one, and the failure of liberals and intellectuals to understand either the people who loathed them or the degree of their loathing was just as old. The ‘Washington swamp’ was not new [and] …the coonskin hats and the shaman’s horns in the Capitol building were as if lifted from a picture in my childhood Davy Crockett book…All these gestures to contemporary grievance connected to threads of belief and myth, and patterns of ideological dispute, that are as old as the country itself. Extraordinary, even ‘unprecedented’ as the insurrection of 6 January 2021 seemed, it occurred in the same grindhouse of uncrossable divides and undying fixations.” p. 261
I guess that only time will tell if Watson’s decision to start and finish the book with Trump was a narrative framing, or whether it is a historical analysis in its own right. Only in coming years will we know whether Trump II marks a whole new phase, or whether as Watson suggests in 2025, the Trump presidency reflects a continuity that flows across the United States’ history. By its very nature, a ‘short history’ with its abridgments and encapsulation, is probably best placed to provide an answer.
Let’s just jump ahead, shall we? I have been listening to podcasts between September and November, but many of them have been current affairs podcasts, which just come and go.
This is the story of patient B-19, a 24-year old who, in 1970, walks into a hospital in Louisiana troubled by the fact that the drugs he’s been abusing for the past three years are no longer having the desired effect. He claims he is “bored by everything” and is no longer getting a “kick” out of sex. To Dr Robert Heath’s intrigue, B-19 has “never in his life experienced heterosexual relationships of any kind”. Somewhere along the way, during the consultations, the conclusion is drawn that B-19 would be happier if he wasn’t gay. And so they set about a process that involves having lots of wires sticking out of his brain. Julia and Adam hear from science journalist and author, Lone Frank, author of The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor.
Actually, I wasn’t particularly shocked by this episode. It was the 1970s after all, time of ‘Clockwork Orange’, and brain stimulation and operant conditioning was all the go. While most of us wouldn’t see being gay as something that had to be ‘cured’, I do wonder if truly deviant behaviour that would otherwise see a person incarcerated for life (an inveterate child abuser?) might not still turn to methods like this?
The Rest is History Episode 606: Enoch Powell Rivers of Blood With Nigel Farage on the loose, it seems appropriate to go back to revisit Enoch Powell and his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. As Dominic and Tom point out, Enoch Powell is better remembered than a lot of Prime Ministers are, and he influenced Thatcher and inspired the Brexiteers. He was born in Birmingham in 1912 and was a precocious child who seemed destined to be a classics scholar. He had no interest in women, but he was obsessed by Nietzsche. He was a Professor of Greek at Sydney University by the age of 25 (I didn’t know that!), but he really wanted to be the Viceroy of India (as one does). He fought in WW2 but not in a combat role. He was a Tory, but he was often critical of the party, and championed English nationalism in Parliament in his hypnotic droning voice. He decriminalized homosexuality, was anti-Vietnam, anti-US but economically very dry. Despite the influx of Windrush and British/Pakistani immigrants in the late 1940s, immigration was seen more as a regrettable necessity rather than a national issue. At first Powell did nothing about the reported ‘white flight’ from areas like his electorate of Wolverhampton, but by 1964 it was recognized that immigration had to be controlled to avoid the ‘colour question’, a question supercharged by television of unrest in Montgomery and Alabama in the US. Why did Powell change? He argued that he was representing the views of his electorate, and he held up an ideal of the English people and became more radical as a way of distinguishing himself from Heath. In 1967 there was an influx of Indians from Kenya after Kenyatta expelled them and an Act was passed to restrict immigration. The Labour government introduced a Racial Relations Bill in 1968 which prohibited racial discrimination in areas like housing. When the Tories decided to quibble over the details but accepted the principle of the bill, Powell was furious and this was the impetus for the ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’, which was publicized beforehand, so television crews were there to record it. He was sacked as Minister for Defence, but he had strong support on the streets. He never distanced himself from violence, but he was wrong- there were no rivers of blood. And until now Tories wouldn’t touch the issue again.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 577: The Irish War of Independence: The Violence Begins (Part 2) After their largely ceremonial electoral victory in 1917, Sinn Fein established an alternative shadow government which had cabinet positions, courts and issues a Declaration of Independence. It wanted to attend the Paris Peace Conference, but it didn’t get a seat at the table. The IRA was recruiting heavily, but the majority were more involved with logistics and protection rather than firing guns. The conflict hotted up in the early 1920s when the IRA began attacking police barracks and courts. There was a mass resignation of police, and they were replaced by ex-army soldiers, the notorious ‘black and tans’ and auxiliaries. In 1921 the Flying Columns and IRA intelligence ramped up, with localized violence. But this violence was not necessarily a sectarian war, but it certainly had sectarian aspects.
In Our Time (BBC). Apparently Melvyn Bragg is stepping down from In Our Time after 26 years. He is 85, after all, and he was starting to sound a bit quavery. So, they’re dipping back into the archives and they replayed an episode on Hannah Arendt from 2017. She was born to a non-observant Jewish family in Hanover in 1906, a family that was so non-observant that she was surprised when she found herself singled out as being Jewish. She had an affair with Heidegger, but then he became a Nazi. She was a classicist, and she maintained this interest throughout her life. She escaped to America in 1941 as a refugee, where she developed English as her third language. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, she warned of a new sort of atomized evil, like a fungus, and she saw Eichmann as thoughtless, rather than evil. Actually, I hadn’t realized that she was anything other than a political writer: she was just as focussed on the human condition as politics.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 576 The Irish War of Independence Part I. The Rise of the IRA Between 1909-11 Britain wanted to give Home Rule, but the Northern Irish unionists didn’t want it. World War I froze any progress on the question. Then, during the war, in 1916 the Easter Uprising took advantage of the opportunity of Britain being otherwise distracted, but it was quickly crushed, leading to the arrests of between 1000-1500 people. 187 were imprisoned, and 14 were executed, including Roger Casement. The Nationalists used the deaths for propaganda purposes in the midst of UK apathy. The Unionists, who constituted about 30% had influence in the British cabinet butBritain was taking an each-way bet as Sinn Fein became more prominent. Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, worked as a printer, and organized boycotts and agitation and stood for by-election. Michael Collins was a military organizer within Sinn Fein, not just a gun runner. He emerged when the other leaders were jailed in 1917. De Vallera was the President, and Griffith was the Vice-President of Sinn Fein and they accepted the aim of an independent Irish Republic. In December 1918 there were elections held in the UK and Ireland with an enlarged electorate, with 70% of electors voting for the first time. It yielded a Sinn Fein victory.
The Human Subject The Man With the Artificial Windpipe was Andemariam Beyene, an engineering student from Eritrea studying in Iceland. In 2011 he was desperate for a cure for the large tumour that had been discovered in his trachea. He had tried surgery and radiotherapy and nothing had worked.Dr Paolo Macchiarini, Karolinska Institute’s star surgeon presented himself as Andemarian’s best and last option. He proposed an experimental treatment – but one that had never been done before on a human being. Andemariam would be the first. Unfortunately, he agreed to it. Macchiarini was a good publicist, and published the results of the surgery soon afterwards- too soon, because Andemarian died, as did all three patients who had this surgery. Macchiarini ended up being jailed for 2 1/2 years, and his papers were retracted.
History HitThe Surrender of Japan In the broadcast to mark the surrender of Japan on August 15th, 1945 Emperor Hirohito’s voice crackled over Japanese airwaves to announce the unthinkable – the surrender of Japan. It was the first voice recording of him, and there would be many Japanese who had never heard him before. This episode, featuring Dr. Evan Mawdsley, points out the Allies wanted regime change because they distrusted the deepseated militarism of Japanese society. Technically, there was a neutrality pact between Japan and USSR signed in 1941, but on 9 August 1945 Russia entered into the Japanese arena, which meant that Japan could no longer defend Manchuria. Days later, the nuclear bombs were dropped. In a bit of what-if history, the podcast goes on to explore what would have happened had Japan not surrendered.
In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2 Episode 12 The Cambodian Civil War Begins Part 2: A Revolution Waged with Empty Hands Time Period Covered 1967-1968. In November 1967 Jackie Kennedy visited Sihanouk (in fact, I saw photos of her at the Raffles Hotel in Phnom Penh when I dropped by there one day). Sihankouk was convinced that there was a communist insurgency in his own country, surrounded by Communist countries, so he began looking increasingly to the United States.
Meanwhile, in November 1967 Pol Pot went to the north eastern base of the CPK (Communist Party of Kampuchea), which was supported by local tribespeople, but poorly armed. Both Vietnam and the CPK planned to have uprisings at New Year in 1968, but there was little support from the Communist parties in other countries: China discouraged the uprising because it was preoccupied with its own cultural revolution, and Vietnam ignored the Khmer pleas for help when skirmishes were being quashed. On January 17th and 18th the CPK attacked army and police depots in order to seize their arms, and the uprising began. It started in Battambang (over near the Thai border), where 10,000 villagers joined in, and moved into the jungles. With no support from China or Vietnam, the CPK went it alone, identifying itself as the vanguard of the revolution, and Pol Pot set himself up as leader. He lavished high praise on China, especially the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward (despite the reality) and the Chinese Student Association emulated the Big Character posters of the Cultural Revolution. All this pro-China action was too much for Sihanouk, who withdrew his ambassador from China. In January 1968 Sihanouk cracked down on the Battambang uprising, blaming everyone. He brought back Lon Nol, who undertook a scorched-earth approach against the uprising. Yet Sihanouk continued to support the Viet Cong and the Vietnamese communists who were in Cambodia, just not the home-grown ones. The United States was aware of the border camps and the Pentagon was even considering invading Cambodia, which was officially neutral, but the State Department put the kibosh on the plan. Sihanouk said that he couldn’t prevent crossings from Vietnam over the border, so he couldn’t object to the US engaging with them. He said he would shut his eyes to any American bombing. Did he know? Did the bombing start under LBJ? Meanwhile, the Tet offensive was under way in Vietnam.
Rear Vision (ABC)2014 and Ukraine’s relationship with Russia. This is a replay of an episode from 2014, just as Russia had invaded Crimea. It all seems rather prophetic now. Ukraine was the largest republic of the former USSR, and it withdrew from USSR in 1991. With hindsight, they were dudded by the Bucharest Memorandum of 1994 whereby they gave up their nuclear arms for a security ‘assurance’ – not a guarantee- of territorial integrity from their guarantors including Russia (something that Bill Clinton now regrets). In the wake of huge inflation and very low wages, the Orange Revolution took place in 2004 ending with the election of Viktor Yushchenko. At the time of recording (2014) Crimea had just been invaded by Russia. Crimea had been settled with many Russians who had been encouraged to move there by Stalin, but many of the original Tartars had since returned, and in 2014 comprised about 35% of the Crimean population. Interesting, in he light of current events.
In the Shadows of UtopiaEpisode 11 Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution I listened to this just after reading Linda Jaivn’s book Bombard the Headquarters (my review here), and this makes a really good companion listen. In fact, well done young Lachlan, because this episode hangs together really well. He points out that the Cultural Revolution, as well as changing China, also acted as a test of loyalty of Mao’s officials. He draws some parallels with different phases of the French Revolution, and sees the dispersal of young people into the provinces as a way of reining the revolution back in. He reminds us of the Sino/Soviet conflicts, and suggests that China’s rapprochement with the US was an example of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ in action.
99% InvisibleAll About That Bass I’ve started playing bass ukulele- yes, there is such a thing- so this episode really interested me. It’s about the Roland 808 drum machine, which apparently is ubiquitous- even (drummer) Phil Collins used one on ‘One More Night’. When the Roland 808 was released in 1980 it cost $1200 (about $4600 in today’s currency), and was intended to replace drummers. It was when they realized that they could use the ‘decay’ function to replicate the bass and kick drum sound that the Roland 808 gave the bass the prominence that it now has in hip-hop and R&B.
The Human Subject(BBC)The Boy with an Ice Pick in His Brain. Actually, despite all the warnings about gruesome details that preface this episode, I didn’t find it particularly disturbing. It’s about Dr Walter Freeman, who championed the lobotomy process throughout the US, even by psychiatrists whose surgical skills must be questionable. The Boy with the Ice Pick in his brain was 12 year old Howard Dully whose step-mother arranged to have a lobotomy for ‘childhood schizophrenia’ (which sounded just like 12 year old cussedness to me). It was Freeman who operated on Rosemary Kennedy as a 23 year old, who never recovered from the surgery.
Since the Orange One has launched his mayhem on the world – did this second presidency really only start in January?- China and Xi Jinping are presenting themselves as a calm, considered and stable presence on the world stage in comparison. It’s a seductive thought, but after reading this small book, I came away convinced that there is a fundamental difference between China and Western democracies in terms of both means and ends that we ignore at our peril.
Many historians mark 16 May 1966 as the start of the Cultural Revolution, when Jiang Quing (Mao’s fourth wife) and Mao circulated a document amongst the Party members which warned of ‘counter-revolutionary revisionists’ who had infiltrated the Party, the government, the army and cultural circles. This document was only made public a year later, but it was popularized in August 1966 by “Bombard the Headquarters”, a short text in written by Mao Zedong himself and published widely. It was a call to the students, who were already confronting their teachers and university lecturers, exhorting them that ‘to rebel is justified’. Yet the headquarters he was urging them to target were the headquarters of his government; of his party. Within three months there would be 15 to 20 million Red Guards, some already in university, others as young as ten. They were urged to ‘smash the Four Olds (old ideas, culture customs and habits) to make was for the creation of a new revolutionary culture. Mao did not explicitly call for the formation of the Red Guards, but he harnessed them as an alternative source of power to the government and, at first, beyond the control of the army until it also joined in the Cultural Revolution in January of 1967.
With Khruschev’s denunciation of the cult of Stalin, Mao felt that Russia had betrayed the revolution and that China needed to return to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even though 1966 is seen by many as the starting point, Mao had been moving towards this point for several years, moving against the deputy mayor of Beijing and historian Wu Han, removing the People’s Liberation Army chief of staff and premier Luo Ruiquing, and splitting with the Japanese Communist Party because it failed to call out Soviet revisionism.
Some of his party colleagues, most especially Liu Shaoqui, Deng Xioping and Zhou Enlai, held qualms about Mao’s call for continuous revolution led by the Red Army. And well they might have, because quite a few of Mao’s judgment calls – The Great Leap Forward and the Hundred Flowers Campaign- brought unseen (to him) consequences, and the schemes ended up being abandoned. But despite any reservations his colleagues may have held, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution went forward, with the Red Guards murdering 1800 people in Beijing alone in Red August 1966. The Red Guards were joined by the workers in late 1966, and the Army in January 1967.
At a dinner to celebrate Mao’s 73rd birthday on 26 December 1966, he proposed a toast to “all-out civil war and next year’s victory”. He got his civil war. Children denounced parents; both the Red and the conventional army split into factions. The targets of the Cultural Revolution were the Five Bad Categories- landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and ‘rightists’. Temples, churches and mosques were trashed; libraries set alight, hair salons and dressmakers’ shops attacked, and even the skeletons of a Wanli emperor and his two empresses were attacked and burned. The verb ‘to struggle’ came to have a new meaning as ‘enemies’ were “struggled” into the airplane position, forced to bend at the waist at 90 degrees with their arms straight behind, with heavy placards hung around their necks and hefty dunce caps on their heads. Teachers, academics, musicians, writers, local officials were all ‘struggled’, with day-long interrogations that ended with instructions to return the next day for more after being allowed to go home overnight. No wonder so many people committed suicide.
By September 1968, the civil war was declared over, with ‘the whole nation turning Red’. However, with the deteriorating economic situation, and with a perception that people living in the cities were not pulling their weight, Mao decided that ‘educated youth’ needed to receive re-education by the poor and middle-class peasantry (p. 68). In 1969 as many as 2.6 million ‘educated youth’ -including present-day president Xi Jinping- left the cities for the country side. Some did not have to go too far from home, but others were exiled to the brutal winters of the Great Northeast Wilderness, or the tropical jungles of Yunnan in the south-west. Some villagers were ambivalent about these ‘soft’ teenagers, although they welcomed the goods and knowledge that they brought with them. The young people were often shocked by the poverty and deprivation in the villages, which contrasted starkly with the propaganda of the happy prosperous countryside they had accepted.
The Cultural Revolution had morphed in its shape, with the 9th Party congress declaring that the Cultural Revolution was over in April1969, and Mao criticizing his wife Jiang Quing and her radical associates in the ‘Gang of Four’ in May 1975. The outside world was changing too. A border war with USSR in March 1969 provoked fears of nuclear war, and the United Nations recognized the People’s Republic of China over Taiwan. President Nixon visited China in February 1972 (Australia’s Gough Whitlam, then opposition leader, had visited in July 1971) and Mao died in September 1976, eight months after the death of Zhou Enlai. In 1981 the Party declared that the Cultural Revolution had been a mistake, and that Mao had been misled by ‘counter-revolutionary cliques’. All at the cost of at least 4.2 million people being detained and investigated, and 1.7 million killed. Some 71,200 families were destroyed entirely. It has been estimated that more people were killed in the Cultural Revolution than the total number of British, American and French soldiers and citizens killed in World War II (p. 106)
The Cultural Revolution may seem an event of the 20th century it’s not that far away. Xi Jinping and his family were caught up in the Cultural Revolution, and tales of him toiling alongside the peasants in the countryside is part of his own political mythology. We here in the West are well aware of the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989, but there is no discussion of them in China. When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, discussion of the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and the resulting famine, were all increasingly censored. Xi Jinping abolished the two-term limit to presidential office in 2018, making it possible for him to be President for life. New generations of nationalist fanatics have arisen, likened (for good or bad) to the Red Guards.
This is only a short book, running to just 107 pages of text. In its formatting and intent, it is of a pair with Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Death of Stalin (reviewed here), and both books deal with hinge-points that, although taking place some 50 years ago, resonate today with even more depth. As with Fitzpatrick’s book, Bombard the Headquarters opens with a timeline and a cast of characters, but I found the brevity of Jaivin’s character list made it harder to establish the various protagonists in my mind, exacerbated further by unfamiliar names. What I really did like was the way that she interwove the stories and experiences of individuals alongside the ‘massed’ nature of this revolution. When we see the huge crowds of people in Tiananmen Square, and the chilling precision of the Chinese army at the parades that dictators are so fond of, it is hard to find the individual, but she has worked hard to keep our attention on the people who lived through, suffered, and did not always survive such a huge experiment in social engineering.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: Review copy from Black Inc. books, with thanks.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 261: The Tupumaros I’m doing a presentation on Jose Mujica, the recently deceased ex-president of Uruguay, who was a guerilla fighter with the Tupamaros in his youth. This episode made me realize how anglo-centric ‘The Rest is History’ is because obviously Tom and Dominic (I’m on first name basis with them now) knew little about Uruguay or the Tupamaros until they did the research for this episode. They point out that Uruguay was a small, progressive country known as the Switzerland of South America, but after WW2 the prices of wool and meat declined and inflation and unemployment rose. Raul Sendic, the founder of the Tupamaros, was the bright boy of a peasant family. In 1963 the Tupamaros began a series of bank robberies and kidnappings, most of which ended with the hostage being released after about 10 weeks, before moving on to international figures like the British ambassador and then US advisor Dan Mitrioni. This sparked off mass arrests, and they give a figure of 1 in 5 Uruguayans being arrested (a figure I haven’t found elsewhere). Democracy was suspended between 1973 and 1985 and all the Tupamaros were arrested or exiled. Jose (Pepe) Mujica was one of these prisoners, kept in a horse trough for 2 years, with no toilet, and he was driven half-mad before his release in 1985. On the day that Mujica was elected president, Uruguayans confirmed by referendum that the amnesty for both prisoners and human-rights abusers should remain. After his presidency Mujica retired in 2015 to his farm, where he grows chrysanthemums. (He died recently, hence my interest in him).
Guardian Long ReadsOperation Condor: the Cold War conspiracy that terrorized South America. This podcast by Giles Tremlett was originally broadcast in 2020. During the 1970s and 80s, eight US-backed military dictatorships jointly plotted the cross-border kidnap, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of their political opponents. Now some of the perpetrators are finally facing justice. I like Giles Tremlett, whose book Ghosts of Spain I very much enjoyed. I had heard of Operation Condor, but thought that it was a spy novel about CIA agents! Instead, it was an agreement between right-wing governments in South America to allow friendly dictatorships to cross national borders to arrest their citizens who had fled into exile. Most South American countries passed Amnesty Laws as a compromise for the return of democracy, so few court cases against human rights abuse have been mounted in South American countries (although I note that recently Sydney nanny Adriana Rivas has lost her appeal as part of avoiding extradition to Chile for her role in Pinochet’s regime). Instead, it is European courts who are opening up cases against officials in dictatorships because they are not bound by the amnesty laws. It’s an interesting and rather chilling thought that Western countries were considering getting advice from South American Operation Condor officials, in order to introduce a similar system in Europe during the IRA and the Baader-Meinhof group terrorist campaigns.
I’ve been thinking recently of public displays of grief after a leader has died. Some weeks ago, the ex-President of Uruguay Jose Mujica died, and I was struck by the spontaneous and heartfelt applause that accompanied the journey of his casket from the presidential palace to the National Assembly.
In contrast, I remembered the extravagant hysteria after the death of Kim Jong-il some thirteen years ago.
I’ve been thinking about the deaths of leaders while reading Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Death of Stalin. Fitzpatrick is an eminent Australian historian of Soviet history, but this small book is written for a general audience.
The title echoes the Armando Iannucci movie of the same name, which Fitzpatrick admires:
In his The Death of Stalin, the British film director Armando Iannucci memorably depicted the death scene as black comedy, with Stalin’s potential successors united only by ambition and relief, milling around distractedly at his deathbed. That is indeed how the main eye-witness accounts describe it, although to be sure these were eye-witnesses with their own agendas. There is black comedy in this [i.e. Fitzpatrick’s] book too, not just in connection with Stalin’s death but also with the fate of his corporeal remains (buried, dug up, reburied) and the subsequent persistent apparitions of his ghost. But not everything about Stalin’s death is comic. It had serious implications for his country and the world in the twentieth century and beyond; this book sets out to unravel them. (p.2)
Chapter 1 starts with a biographical sketch of Stalin. Under the chapter title is a police photograph of Stalin taken in the early 1900s, showing a quite handsome, chiselled young man – quite unlike the pudgy, square man he became in later life. He was involved in the Russian revolution from the start, in fact he made it back to Petrograd before Lenin did after the February Revolution of 1917. Although a member of the Politburo since its inception in August 1917, he became the quintessential backroom man, a role formalized with his appointment as general secretary of the party in April 1922. Despite Lenin adding a postscript to a document that came to be known as ‘Lenin’s Testament’, warning that Stalin’s rudeness rendered him unsuitable as party secretary, Stalin and the Central Committee saw off an opposing faction and he became leader after Lenin’s death. His ascendancy was welcomed by Western observers, who saw him as a centrist. He mounted a program of mass collectivization and industrialization guided by a Five Year Plan. By 1934 he announced a new phase of relaxation, and he introduced the new Soviet Constitution. But he changed direction again at the end of 1934 when his friend Sergei Kirov was assassinated by what turned out to be a lone-wolf actor. Mass terror was released, directed initially against members of the party itself, then to the broader population. He startled the Soviet public and the West by signing a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in 1939, which was broken in June 1941 when Germany launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. Despite the huge cost in infrastructure, military and population loss, Stalin emerged from WW2 with enormously enhanced prestige at home and internationally. Within a few years, unfounded fears of Soviet communism (unfounded because Stalin knew that Russia was in no state to launch WW3) settled into the Cold War, fueled by mutual hostility and suspicion, but tempered by the nuclear threat and the use of proxies. By 1949 the cult of Stalin reached a peak as Stalin’s 70th birthday was celebrated.
By early 1953, Stalin would be dead. In Chapter 2 ‘Stalin’s Death’ we see Stalin as a lonely, isolated, paranoiac man who insisted on the attendance of his Politburo colleagues at film nights at the Kremlin, and crude, men-only dinners at his dacha. The day to day running of the business of government was carried out by the Politburo, with sudden interventions by Stalin, and shifts against his erstwhile colleagues. One of these initiatives was the arrest of a number of physicians from the Kremlin hospital, known as the ‘Doctors Plot’. As we know from the film ‘The Death of Stalin’, this backfired somewhat when there was no one to treat him in the dacha when he had what appeared to be a stroke. Actually, Iannucci didn’t have to embellish much in his depiction of Stalin’s death: the fear of finding him dead; him not actually being dead; sending in the housekeeper; having to find a doctor because they had all been arrested; the arrival of his daughter and drunk son. However, unlike in the film, they quickly set up an efficient government, calling themselves ‘the collective leadership’ (p. 37)- a fact that might have undermined Iannucci’s black comedy somewhat. His body lay in state in the Hall of Columns in Moscow for three days and was buried in the Mausoleum, with his name emblazoned under that of Lenin.
Chapter Three examines reactions at home, noting the recorded responses of writers and members of the public, before then moving on to the immediate, radical policy changes that were set in train. First was the announcement of a mass amnesty for non-political prisoners in the Gulag, then the withdrawal of charges against the doctors. There was a change in direction on the nationalities policy and an abrupt halt to the Stalin cult. The first six months of 1953 was described as a ‘cultural thaw’, but this was not necessarily welcomed by the Soviet public. Beria was ousted and put on trial and swiftly executed. This made it possible to put all the blame for the Stalinist terror onto Beria’s shoulders.
Reactions Abroad are dealt with in Chapter 4. The rest of the world wasn’t really sure what would happen when Stalin died. Western intelligence was at a low ebb between the end of the war and Stalin’s death, and so the West missed the signals that the ‘collective leadership’ might be willing to deal. Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles, one of the most virulent anti-Communists on the US political scene (p. 65). He and his brother Allen, who headed the CIA, favoured undermining the Soviet Union by making trouble in the satellite-states, rather than provoking a head-on confrontation. It was, as A.J.P. Taylor said, a turning point that failed to turn (p. 71). It was only in 1956, with Krushchev’s partial denunciation of Stalin that there was Western recognition of the thaw.
The closing Chapter 5 ‘Stalin’s Ghost’ looks at his legacy. For the first years after Stalin’s death the terror of the 1930s was the great unmentionable. This was broken in 1956 with Krushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ to the Congress in Moscow which denounced Stalin, the cult of personality and the Purges and terror under his government. Although writers embraced openness about Stalin’s reign, the reactions of ordinary people varied. Some simply did not believe it, and there was public protest in Georgia, where the speech was seen as an insult. In some of the Soviet satellites, the Soviet Thaw encouraged local Communist parties, including in Hungary, to remove unpopular Stalinist leaders and put in Communists with a reform agenda. The Soviet Thaw didn’t extend that far: Soviet tanks were sent in to Hungary, and reformer leaders were arrested. Krushchev was ousted in 1964, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and replaced by Brezhnev who oversaw a replay of Hungary 1956 in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Even though a breach opened up between Brezhnev and the intelligentsia, Stalin was not rehabilitated. That had to wait for Vladimir Putin. The book ends on a rather chilling note.
There is a lot in this small book, which is presented so clearly that it can engage readers who are not particularly familiar with Russian history. The book provides a timeline spanning 1879 to 2000, and a full ten-page ‘cast of characters’ including not only Russian political and cultural personalities, but also Mao Tse Tung (Zedong), Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. The book has endnotes, but they are not footnoted throughout the text.It is liberally illustrated, albeit in black and white (although that echoes the theme of the book quite well), and by bringing it right up to the present day and referencing the Iannucci film it has a contemporary edge. It’s a good read.
Background Briefing (ABC)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 Resident Judge of Port Phillip 