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In this episode, I draw on My Palestine by Mohammad Tarbush to examine two often-overlooked episodes in the history of Zionism and its global reception.First, we revisit the 1975 United Nations General Assembly vote that declared Zionism a form of racism—an extraordinary moment that sent shockwaves through international diplomacy, reshaped alliances in the Cold War, and left a lasting legacy in debates about race, colonialism, and nationhood.Second, we turn to the influential role of the British
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In this episode, I read from Pankaj Mishra’s Bland Fanatics, a searing critique of liberalism and its reception beyond the West. Mishra explores how, across much of the Global South, liberalism is not the triumphant, self-evident good it is often assumed to be in Euro-American discourse, but instead a system bound up with histories of empire, inequality, and cultural dislocation. Through his lens, we examine why the liberal ideal — so celebrated in Western political thought — can appear hollow,
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How did neoliberalism go from fringe idea to ruling ideology in the United States? In this deep-dive episode of Explaining History, we trace the hidden rise of America’s most influential right-wing think tanks—Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute and more—from their birth in the 1970s oil-crisis chaos to their role in dismantling the New Deal order.You’ll discover:• The 1971 Powell Memo that sparked a billionaire-funded “war of ideas”.• How a handful of corporate dynasties (K
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Britain’s Austerity TrapWhy is one of the world’s richest countries still behaving like it’s broke?In this episode of Explaining History, we dive into Yanis Varoufakis’s searing critique of Britain’s ongoing austerity dilemma under the new Labour government. Despite hopes for change, Chancellor Rachel Reeves faces the same iron cage of fiscal rules, banker subsidies, and Treasury orthodoxy that has strangled public spending for decades.We unpack the hidden costs of so-called “zombie austerity,”
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This episode draws from the excellent book Red Memory by Tania Brannigan, an oral history of the Cultural Revolution. Here we examine the role of thought, how Mao sought to stimulate public thought during the Hundred Flowers Campaign of the late 1950s to seek out enemies and how struggle sessions were a form of thought torture, making ones own self unbearable. *****STOP PRESS*****I only ever talk about history on this podcast but I also have another life, yes, that of aspirant fantasy author and
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***PLEASE LISTEN TO THE END***Chilean folk icon Violeta Parra (1917-1967) was far more than the singer of “Gracias a la Vida.” In this episode, Erica Verba—Director of Latin American Studies at Cal State LA—reveals how Parra transformed from teenage street-busker and RCA-Victor recording artist into the archivist, painter and political catalyst who ignited Latin America’s Nueva Canción movement.We trace her itinerant childhood with the “Circo Pobre,” her reinvention as a self-taught ethnomusico
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Join us on The Explaining History Podcast as we sit down with historian and author Mark Bridgeman to unravel the extraordinary life—and daring deceptions—of Violet Charlesworth, Britain’s first notorious female fraudster. In his landmark new book, Nothing for Something, Bridgeman spent three years mining court records, witness statements, private archives, and first-hand site visits to reconstruct a scandal that captivated Edwardian Britain.Violet Charlesworth, before her 25th birthday, bilked a
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This episode explores part of the story of St John Philby, father to Kim and eventually advisor to King Ibn Saud. Philby was one of the few administrators that the British government and its colonial government in India could find who understood Arabia and Mesopotamia. In 1915 as British fortunes against the Ottoman Empire took a turn for the worst, Philby was sent to Basra to reorganise the city’s finances after the retreat of the Turks. He would eventually help to organise the financial admini
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The project to permanently shrink the British state and to inflict mass hardship on the most vulnerable which was commenced after 2010 has cost untold numbers of lives. The last calculations put the dead at around 338,000 people but it is likely now to be far higher and Britain has exchanged one austerity government for another. Now the Labour Party continues the brutal economic assault on the poor, the unwell and the disabled that the previous Conservative administrations had commenced. Today I
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In this episode, we dive into the turbulent decade of the 1970s, exploring how the oil shocks and economic crises of the era shattered the postwar order in America. Drawing from historian Gary Gerstle’s influential work The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Era, we examine how stagflation, energy insecurity, and geopolitical tensions fueled public disillusionment with Keynesian economics and paved the way for a neoliberal revolution.In This Episode:The 1973 and 1979 oil shocks and their devastati