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Explaining History’s reporter at large, Michael O’Sullivan write from China, where he is currently based, on the precepts of Confucian thought. A figure deeply associated with China in popular consciousness, there is no denying the influence that Confucius has had on China. From the Second century BCE until 1911, the body of this teachings Confucianism was the official orthodoxy of Imperial China and had a deep impact on Chinese Society and societies throughout Asia. Over the millennia this ideology was constantly changing with other thinkers contributing to the core Confucian beliefs of: “man is morally perfectible, that learning is the…
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Today’s post will be a quick discussion of points raised by Christopher Duggan’s excellent book Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy. Regarding the information environment of the regime and its impact on public perception. While it is indulgent, I feel it is important to stress how crucial a role information plays in any society. Firstly, it is important to realise that Fascist policies regarding information, did not spring out of the ground. As a result of the chaotic nature of the unification of Italy (Risorgimento) and the fractured nature of both, society and the polity, the Kingdom of…
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By Michael O’Sullivan, Explaining History Asia Correspondent. The 21st century has been dubbed by some experts and observers as the “Asian Century” most especially with the dramatic rise of China in the global political and economic power structures since the 1980s. While initially founded as a Communist state following the Civil war in 1949, there has since been a debate as to whether modern China since the reign of Deng Xiaoping still fits that model. Indeed, it is the position of Rana Mitter and other scholars that the current political and economic model of China more closely resembles the…
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In 1966, a politically sidelined Mao Zedong returned to power in Beijing, appealing to millions of students and young people across China to wage war against the established party bureaucracy. Mao and the Red Guards – 1966 Watch this video on YouTube.
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Two partitions at the end of the British Empire that have created the longest running conflicts of the 20th and 21st Centuries are discussed here: The Partition of Palestine and India Watch this video on YouTube.
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What You’ll Learn in This Episode What the Gulag was — its origins, scale, and how it functioned as an economic and political institution How the camp system expanded dramatically under Stalin from the late 1920s onwards Who the Gulag’s prisoners were and how they were treated What role the Gulag played in the Soviet economy and why it was less economically rational than often assumed What Was the Gulag? The word “Gulag” is an acronym from the Russian — Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerey, the Main Camp Administration — but it has come to mean something far larger than a bureaucratic…
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Most of the writing on individual perpetrators of the Holocaust focuses on senior figures (Hitler, Himmler, Goering being obvious examples) and the tier below them (Hans Frank, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann) as well as camp commanders such as Rudolf Hoess and Franz Stangl. Colonel Alfred Filbert is a name that will probably be unfamiliar to most readers of Holocaust histories, but Dr Alex Kay of the Institute of Contemporary History in Berlin has written a compelling biography of him, detailing his involvement in the mass killing of Jews on the Eastern Front in 1941. It is a work of detailed scholarship,…
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Here too is a quick nano-vid on the subject of Stalin’s rise to power How did Stalin rise to power? Watch this video on YouTube.
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Ok everyone, been busy writing a book on China for a few months so the blog has been a bit neglected, anyway, here’s a quick study video on Britain’s post war consensus: Watch this video on YouTube.