Peru’s president Pedro Castillo has been overthrown in a coup and is in Peruvian jail while the former Vice President Dina Boluarte has taken over, vowing NOT to hold an election any time soon. People have taken to the streets in Lima to protest and demand new elections and a constitutional referendum. Meanwhile in Argentina, the former president Cristina Fernandez Kirchner has been sentenced to six years in prison, supposedly for corruption. Former Bolivian President Evo Morales (himself overthrown in a coup) has said these are two coups in South America in a week. It’s just me for this short emergency podcast, where I tell you what I’m reading and how I’m trying to make sense of these events.
Audio
World War Civ 6: Russia in 1900
First one of a mini-series about the 1905 Russian Revolution, we talk about the economic, political, and social conditions of Russia on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War. Foreign investment, infrastructural deficits, the question of nationalities. We also talk about the disastrous summer of 1874 when the revolutionaries went down to the countryside, debates about terrorism versus propaganda, peasants and industrial workers, and other revolutionary dilemmas.
In Real Time with Stan Cox 8: No Red Wave, Plenty of Red Flags
Stan Cox is back with his November dispatch about the US midterm elections, in which the feared Red Wave didn’t materialize — but Stan wastes no time in warning us that 2024 is also going to be scary. We geek out on the election results, look at a shocking admission by a conservative that big government is good, actually, and have a little chat about nonviolent strategies… in the latest In Real Time with Stan Cox.
World War Civ 5: The Dreyfus Affair
There is no better entree into pre-WWI France than the sordid Dreyfus Affair. The whole story in all its gory detail including its implications for the France-Russia alliance and the echoes of 1871 casting a cloud over 1895 France. Anti-semitism, frame ups, spies, corruption, incompetence, trials, retrials, people of conscience, and echoes a century later.
Anti-Empire Radio episode 116: The Assassination Attempt on Imran Khan
Waqas is back to talk about the Nov 3 attempt on Imran Khan’s life; the assassination in Kenya of journalist Arshad Sharif; Similarities and differences between the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the attempt on Imran Khan; the possibility that the Pakistani military might find a way out of this (by having Bajwa step down on schedule and then allowing an election) as opposed to plunging the country into the abyss ( by going through with the assassination of Imran Khan).
*Apologies about the audio – used my webcam mic instead of my podcasting mic in my echoey studio. Back to normal next time!
AER 115: Lula’s back! Will there be another coup?
On October 30, Lula was elected to the presidency after surviving a political persecution that threw him behind bars and kept him from running in 2018, paving the way for Bolsonaro’s disastrous term. Brazilian scholar-activist Diana Aguiar is back to answer questions like: is Lula’s government coup-proof? What will he be able to do in power? What will the right-wing do out of power? What happens in the region and what’s Brazil’s role in the world going to be in the next four years?
WWC 4 – Causes of WWI – Britain’s slow and gentle decline
Reading Corelli Barnett, David Cannadine, and others, our stop today on the pre-WWI Europe tour is Britain, which has reached the very heights of world domination only to discover that they are being out-innovated and out-educated by rising imperial rivals. While social imperialists begged for consolidation of the white Anglosphere, a strategy given the old college try, it wasn’t to be. How the British system went into decline and the role it played in causing WWI, in this episode of WW Civ.
WWC 3 – Causes of WW1 pt 3 – Life & Ideas
In this long episode we ask the question: what in the intellectualism of the early 20th century may have contributed to the climate that led to WW1? After reading Losurdo’s long book about Nietzsche, Justin does a deep dive into Nietzschean thinking about Great Men and genius and mediocrity; Dave covers militarism and nationalism; Justin comes back with some history on the 2nd International and the widespread belief in the inevitability of socialism; and we talk about the dual beliefs that war was inevitable and that war was impossible — and how they both contributed to the war happening.
In Real Time with Stan Cox 7: A Thousand Rebellious Communities
Stan Cox is back for In Real Time episode 7, where we track the climate crisis and do other environmental talk. Stan reports back from some interviews he did with activists who are working locally on the climate crisis as we head towards two touchstones in November – the COP 27 conference in Egypt, from which nothing much is likely to emerge; and the November US elections, from which not much good can be expected either. And a bit from me about connections between neocolonialism and environmental destruction.
WWC 2 – Causes of World War 1 pt2 – The Alliance System
How do you turn a local conflict into a world war? Create an intricate set of alliances that guarantees it! Dave takes us on a tour of the construction of the alliance system from the Emperors’ Leagues to the Congress of Berlin to the Triple Alliance to the Reinsurance Treaty and more. How British and Bismarckian Balance-of-Power games made things so balanced that they could only collapse, in our second episode on the causes of WW1.