History Re-Read
23 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago -You are very welcome to this podcast: History Re-Read. On the first Monday of every month, I present a commentary on a famous text from history. Something familiar that many of you will already have read, while others, myself included, might feel it to be something we should have read, or must have read but can’t remember doing so. Over the other Mondays of the month, I am relating that text audiobook style either in full or abridged form.
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Episodes
The Futurist Manifesto
November 30, 2021 03:00 - 1 hour - 65.7 MBFuturism fuelled Italian Fascism, aesthetically; its Russian variant inspired a worker’s revolution and then ameliorated the early years of communism for an erstwhile bourgeois class that then had to behave itself in keeping with proletarian principles. In addition to the analysis, there is the Manifesto related in full, the preface to a Russian volume of prose and poetry, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which stands as something of a manifesto for the Russian Futurists. Then there is t...
The Italian Fascist Manifesto (1919)
November 29, 2021 03:00 - 3 minutes - 3.84 MBMussolini had been in peacetime editor of Avanti, the main social newspaper. He was now owner of what was to be the essential organ of the Fascist movement in Italy from 1914. This was ‘The People of Italy.’ Here, the Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle or simply the Fascist Manifesto was first published on June 6, 1919. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Marinetti’s Call from The Summit
November 22, 2021 03:00 - 6 minutes - 6.93 MBFuturism for Marinetti was about capturing the movement of the machine in art, at immeasurable, still more, unimaginable levels of speed prior to the industrial revolution. The motor car exemplified this. Futurism was about both the violence implicit in the impact of industrialization on society as well as the manner of man needed to operate its machinery, and, for Marinetti, the welcome danger of speed for man by means of the machine as automobile. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy fo...
Demands of the Futurist Manifesto
November 15, 2021 03:00 - 7 minutes - 6.76 MBWhere Italian Futurism exulted the machine, Russian Futurism was more about the folk traditions of the country. Despite the Russian Futurist expressing no interest in paying homage to their Italian forerunners, the movement in both these countries had much in common. Chiefly, a call for a complete break from the past, with the great Renaissance painters like Leonardo and Raphael being ditched alongside writers of international renown, like Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Hosted on Acast. ...
Marinetti’s Car Crash
November 08, 2021 03:06 - 7 minutes - 6.89 MBit could be argued that prior to 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was a failed writer, and that the Futurist Manifesto was something of a publicity stunt. He had had little success with a drama for the stage performed in Paris the same year the Manifesto appeared, and similarly disappointed with an attempt at writing a novel a year later. He later enjoyed considerably more success with Zang Tumb Tumb, as a self-promoting Futurist. This is a sound poem based on his experience of reporting on...
The Futurist Manifestos (Italy and Russia: 1909 and 1912)
November 01, 2021 03:00 - 42 minutes - 41.5 MBFuturism fuelled Italian Fascism, aesthetically; its Russian variant inspired a worker’s revolution and then ameliorated the early years of communism for an erstwhile bourgeois class that then had to behave itself in keeping with proletarian principles. Today, Futurism has become part of the consumerist landscape. Modern smartphone cameras have all manner of devices to recreate the iconography of movement established by Futurist artists like Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni. Moreover, ...
Extract from Chapter 3 of the Communist Manifesto
October 25, 2021 03:00 - 15 minutes - 14.6 MBHere, Marx and Engels, discuss three kinds of socialism: Feudal Socialism, Petty-Bourgeois Socialism, and German or "True," Socialism. They talk about each as a stepping-stone to Communism. Each a penultimate stage in the march of history. The literature and no less the readership relating to each is critiqued with contempt. Especially the German ‘philistine’ petty-bourgeoisie: “To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires and officials, it serv...
Extract from Chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto
October 18, 2021 03:32 - 6 minutes - 6.74 MBHere Marx and Engels state their case for the Communist movement as being in the vanguard or all other workers’ movements. Through the manifesto’s stated tenets, Communism is given a doctrinal importance, with the implication that dissent from other proletarians is as much a threat to the movement as resistance from the bourgeoisie. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Extract from Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto
October 11, 2021 03:00 - 8 minutes - 8.68 MBThe long history of class struggle is explained in beautiful English, full of Latinate syntax. Marx and Engels then go on in the same rhetorical vein, evocative of Cicero, no less, to describe the way capital in relation to manufacturing has reduced artisanal skills to mere labour, to be bought and sold as any other commodity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Communist Manifesto (1848)
October 04, 2021 03:00 - 44 minutes - 41.6 MBThe German Communist Party (the DKP), campaigning in this year’s German elections had a banner proclaiming Die Krise heißt Kapitalismus! A Crisis Called Capitalism. This claim has been central to Marxist thought since 1848, when the manifesto was published more or less at the same time in French, German and English. That there is a state of economic crisis is something most adults living in the west since 2007 -2008 would agree on. At least when looking at the standard of living for the ma...
On Liberty (Extract from Chapter 4)
September 27, 2021 03:17 - 7 minutes - 1.82 MBMill insists society cannot be founded on a contract. It is up to the individual to be conscious of their responsibilities to others. He goes on to make the distinction between moral outrage, where punishment should only amount to the ‘disapprobation’ of others, if those others are in no way harmed by the actions of the individual – and criminal culpability, whenever others are harmed, warranting lawful punishment. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On Liberty (Further extract from Chapter 3)
September 20, 2021 03:32 - 12 minutes - 12.5 MBMill decries the individual who chooses what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclination. ‘It does not occur to them,’ he says, ‘to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of.’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On Liberty (Extract from Chapter 3)
September 13, 2021 03:00 - 11 minutes - 11.5 MBHere, Mill bemoans the lack of strong will among the men of his day, comparing them to the kings of Holy Roman Empire who resisted the Popes. He then goes on to dismiss the Protestant mind-set, which, in the form of Calvinism, he detests. It all comes across as uncomfortably elitist today. The tone can be gauged from the following. If it be any part of religion to believe that man was made by a good being, it is more consistent with that faith to believe, that this Being gave all human facu...
On Liberty
September 06, 2021 03:00 - 32 minutes - 31.3 MBThis issue remains all over the media. Wearing a mask to abide by the law based on the principle of protecting others is an example of negative freedom; choosing to wear a mask based on a concern for the wellbeing of oneself and others is an example of positive freedom. If someone decides not to wear a mask at all, there might be valid reasons for her or him not to do so. They sometimes find it ill fitting and a problem if they wear glasses, which tend to steam up. Furthermore, they may wo...
The Lodge Reservations over U.S. Membership of the League of Nations
August 30, 2021 03:00 - 11 minutes - 11.4 MBThe following is in highly esoteric American legal English. Commentaries of them may be found on the relevant page in Wikipedia - they might almost be taken as plain language translations. The stentorian tone of the original language is emblematic of the arrogance of Empire which, de facto, was what America had become as a result of the First World War. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Lodge Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of 1912
August 23, 2021 03:25 - 6 minutes - 71.5 MBIt was not mentioned explicitly in the analysis that Lodge had earlier stated his position in a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine following the recent opening of the Panama canal, which was expected expand American shipping (both merchant and Naval) to rival and then supersede that of Britain and Germany. In a separate development, Japan were rumoured to want to purchase Magdalena Bay on the Baja California Sur on the Baja California Peninsula off the South-West Coast of Mexico. Both Japan a...
The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of 1904
August 16, 2021 03:35 - 10 minutes - 10.1 MBThe Roosevelt Corollary of December 1904 was made as part this President’s state of the Union address that year. It asserted that the United States would intervene as a last resort to ensure that other nations in the Western Hemisphere fulfilled their obligations to international creditors, and did not violate the rights of the United States or invite “foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.” Nine years earlier, Attorney General Richard Olney had warned t...
Text of The Monroe Doctrine 1823
August 09, 2021 03:11 - 8 minutes - 8.11 MBJohn Quincy Adams while Secretary of State, later U.S. President, wrote the text concerning Imperial Spain’s threat to the western hemisphere, the New World, for his President’s annual address to Congress, James Monroe's seventh address to both houses on December 2, 1823. It articulated America’s foreign policy following talks with the British and Russian Tsarist Empires through diplomatic channels, and asserted that the Americas, namely North America, Latin America and the islands of the Car...
The Monroe Doctrine
August 02, 2021 03:00 - 51 minutes - 48.4 MBThe fifth President of the United States, James Monroe, proclaimed in 1823 that the New World, the Western Hemisphere, was closed to further colonization; and that any attempt by the European powers of the Old World, whether Portugal and Spain diminished powers in the south to recolonize or Britain and France in the North to newly colonize would be viewed as acts of hostility. Yet America’s self-appointed role as protector in the region, and the countries just mentioned, against European ex...
The Monroe Doctrine (Preview)
July 19, 2021 13:42 - 19 minutes - 18.9 MBPREVIEW The season will start in earnest next month (August 2021) The Monroe Doctrine: American foreign policy from the time of nation’s 5th President (James Monroe) through to the present can be seen through the prism of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Not fully understood as a doctrine at the time, it became so a generation later. It was meant as a warning to Europe against further colonization of the Americas. Later, in 1904, under President Theodore Roosevelt, who more punitively wan...
A Change of Direction
June 19, 2021 19:35 - 12 minutes - 12.9 MBThe idea had been in this series of podcasts to have a kind of three-act structure for each, taking in the Views from Germany, Russia and America in the 20th century from the perspective of 100 years on. I had hoped when starting out 18 months ago to present historical events episodically on a monthly basis. But history cannot be trifled with in this way. A big thank you to those following previous podcasts. I hope you will not be too disappointed with the next direction explained here as t...
The Impact of Weimar’s First Reparation Instalment
May 19, 2021 19:47 - 31 minutes - 29.4 MBTHE VIEW FROM GERMANY Twenty-four hours before the deadline of May 31st 100 Gold marks were duly paid to the inter-allied reparations commission. But not under the chancellorship of Constantine Fehrenbach. Yet, his party, Zentrum, the Catholic Centre Party retained its in influence in all the main offices of State, after Fehrenbach and the independent diplomat, Walter Simons, the Foreign Minister, both resigned. Harrington, Joseph F. The League of Nations and the Upper Silesian Boundary ...
April 1921. Upper Silesia: Security and Ethnic Make-up Across City & District.
May 02, 2021 20:59 - 41 minutes - 41.9 MBTHE VIEW FROM GERMANY The Sicheheitpolizei (Sipo) was made up of disparate elements of the Freikorps and others ready to do violence for the sake of the nationalist cause. When I say ‘disparate,’ by way of analogy, I mean as disparate as the many of claiming German linage in order to register to vote in the plebiscite – but that is for later. They were a security force ostensibly acting a as law enforcement agency in the name of the Government but ill-disciplined enough individually to ter...