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By the late 1960s there were huge opportunities for Richard Nixon to capitalise on the growing discontent across America towards the counter culture. Millions of Americans looked on with disdain at a generation of anti war protesters and young men and women who actively rejected the lifestyles of their parents generation. Nixon, and every Republican president and presidential candidate since has tried to tap into the social conservatism of small town and rural America. In the late 1960s Woodstoc
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Following the disastrous chaos and violence of the cultural revolution, Deng Xiaoping, one of Maoist China’s inveterate survivors and a hate figure for Mao himself, began a series of changes of global significance in 1978. Deng’s four modernisations (agriculture, industry, education, science and defence), and the policy of opening up China to foreign investment were the product of two fears. Firstly, that a disorderly, anarchic China would eventually see the collapse of party rule, and secondly,
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The Republican Party and the right of the American liberal establishment colluded in the immediate post war years to wage war against the American left. The Republicans saw it an opportunity to undermine the New Deal years and their liberal collaborators view of the illiberalism of the Soviet Union justiified any and all political crack downs on those they viewed as Soviet agitators in the USA. The chief target for accusations of subversion was the Communist Party of the USA, but actual Soviet i
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Noam Chomsky pointed out when he was observing the role of the press during the Vietnam War, that it had a significant role to play in atrocities. The job of print and broadcast media, he argued, was to legitimise and explain away mass killings and to tell the story of why they were necessary. Looking at the role of the Soviet press, there is abundant evidence for this. Chomsky was writing about a notionally independent US media which generally found itself in broad agreement with the government. Here we will look at the role of a heavily controlled newspaper in…
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By 1937 the Soviet newspaper Pravda (its editorial board pictured above), was a key part of the mechanisms of denunciation and terror. It presented lurid tales of corruption and embezzlement that most Soviet citizens knew happened in the party constantly, weaponising their anger against those accused in the show trials. The purpose was to build a mass popular base for Stalin’s attacks against the party itself. This podcast explores how the paper operated as part of the wider culture of denunciat