Explaining History

In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we explore Keith Lowe's *Prisoners of History* and the contested world of memorialisation – focusing on one of the strangest and most controversial memorial sites in Europe.

Monuments occupy public space, and they impose meaning on it. Walk through any city and you'll find statues placed with particular agendas – to memorialise the past in certain ways, to place a particular interpretation on history. As a result, they are almost always contested. The recent removal of statues associated with the transatlantic slave trade, from Edward Colston in Bristol to Confederate monuments across the American South, provoked a furious reaction from the right, who framed it as a free speech issue. What they were really defending was the right of white supremacy to own and occupy public space.

Keith Lowe argues that there is no escaping the monsters of our past. We can try to ignore them, rehabilitate them, or annihilate them – but their absence becomes its own kind of presence. There is only one final course open to us: ridicule.

This brings us to Grūtas Park in Lithuania – a sculpture park displaying the statues of Stalin, Lenin, and other Soviet figures that were torn down after independence in 1990. Lithuania's 20th century was one of repeated invasion, occupation, and mass deportation. Around 300,000 Lithuanians were sent to Soviet gulags in the 1940s and 50s. So when independence came, the statues were decapitated, blowtorched, and dynamited. The government then stored the best-known examples in warehouses – until a former wrestling champion and mushroom farmer named Viliumas Malinauskas offered to take them off their hands and build a park.

His proposals were extraordinary: tourists arriving on cattle trucks, actors dressed as guards herding them onto trains, barbed wire, guard towers, the whole gulag experience. Critics called it a "Stalin theme park." Over a million people signed a petition against it. Former partisans and political prisoners accused Malinauskas of profiting from their misery.

But the park opened anyway – and became a hit. What makes Grūtas Park so interesting, and so troubling, is that it creates a space that is completely ahistorical. It was built in the era of the "end of history," when we thought we could turn the past into a meaningless theme park.

History didn't end. Spoiler alert.

**Topics covered:**
- Keith Lowe's *Prisoners of History*
- The contest over public memorials and public space
- Francis Galton, eugenics, and the limits of ridicule
- Lithuania's experience of Soviet and Nazi occupation
- The fate of Stalin and Lenin statues after 1990
- Viliumas Malinauskas and the creation of Grūtas Park
- The petition, the protests, and the constitutional court ruling
- The postmodern, ahistorical aesthetics of the park
- The "end of history" and its illusions

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*If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.*
Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.
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In this solo episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we explore the Macmillan years – that remarkable, contradictory period of post-war British history when the country was forced to confront its diminished place in the world, even as it sought to cling to the vestiges of imperial power.

When Anthony Eden led Britain into the Suez Crisis in 1956, he did so believing that Britain could still act unilaterally on the world stage. The rebuke from Eisenhower told a different story. The crisis exposed the weakness of Britain's post-war economy, triggered a run on the reserves, and revealed that the country could no longer act without American permission.

Harold Macmillan – who became Chancellor in the aftermath and then Prime Minister in January 1957 – understood the lesson. Suez had been a tactical defeat, he told his cabinet, but it could yet prove "the prelude to a strategic victory." What followed was a decade of managed decline: the military budget was cut, national service was abolished, and the white paper on defence argued that spending 10% of gross national income on defence was excessive.

Drawing on Kenneth Morgan's *The People's Peace*, we examine the "one nation Toryism" that characterised Macmillan's government – a form of liberal conservatism that would be denounced by today's Tory party as "creeping Bolshevism." We trace the withdrawal from empire: the end of the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya, the winding up of the Cyprus troubles, the independence of Ghana and Nigeria, and Macmillan's famous "wind of change" speech before the South African parliament in 1960.

But we also confront the darker side of British decolonisation – the concentration camps and torture in Kenya, the police state in Nyasaland, and the selective memory that allows Britain to present its retreat from empire as "relatively tranquil and civilised."

**Topics covered:**
- The aftermath of Suez and the reality of decline
- Macmillan's "strategic victory" and one nation Toryism
- The 1957 Defence White Paper and massive retaliation
- The abolition of national service
- The end of the Mau Mau emergency and the Hola Camp scandal
- The Cyprus settlement and the release of Archbishop Makarios
- Macmillan's "wind of change" speech
- The dissolution of the Central African Federation
- Britain's diminishing role in the Middle East
- The intervention in Jordan, 1958
- Parallels with American decline today

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*If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.*
Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.
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MI6 and the First World War – The Birth of the Secret State

In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we explore the origins of MI6 – the Secret Intelligence Service – during the First World War, drawing on Keith Jeffery's official history of the organisation.

Intelligence history matters, not because of the romantic glamour of espionage, but because of the place secret organisations occupy in the social and political history of the twentieth century. Britain's secret state did not emerge fully formed. It was improvised, contested, and shaped by the crises of global war – and by the personal tragedy of the man who built it.

In this episode, we examine the earliest years of the Secret Intelligence Service under Commander Mansfield Cumming – the original "C" of spy fiction fame. When the First World War broke out, the Secret Service was a fledgling organisation, born in a period of anti-German hysteria and fears about spies and infiltration. It had no clear place in the hierarchy of Whitehall. Cumming spent the first months of the war navigating between the War Office, the Admiralty and the Foreign Office – briefing each in turn, seeking approval for spending, and defending his institutional autonomy against successive military attempts to absorb his service.

We trace the chaotic, fluid movements of personnel in the opening months of the war, as the pressures of total war moved men around "like counters." We also examine Cumming's own tragedy – a motor accident in France that killed his only son and cost him part of a leg. The story grew, as stories do, into legend: Compton Mackenzie's embellished account of Cumming hacking off his own foot with a penknife to free himself. The reality was more prosaic – but the consequences were not. Cumming's incapacity brought the Secret Service more closely under War Office control and prompted GHQ in France to establish its own independent intelligence service.

**Topics covered:**
- The origins of MI6 and the Secret Intelligence Service
- Mansfield Cumming, the first "C"
- The interdepartmental battle for control of intelligence
- The War Office, Admiralty and Foreign Office
- The chaos and flux of wartime Whitehall
- Cumming's motor accident and the death of his son
- The growth of the secret state in wartime
- The mythology of intelligence work

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*Keith Jeffery's official history of MI6 is available from all good bookshops. Please consider buying from an independent retailer.*

*If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.*
Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.
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Website: explaininghistory.org

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In this solo episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we examine the recent electoral victory of the Alternative for Germany (AFD) in the state of Saxony-Anhalt – and what it tells us about the global resurgence of the far right.
The AFD's crushing victory has alarmed commentators around the world. An openly fascist party emerging in Germany has a special and terrifying significance. But as veteran left intellectual Tariq Ali argues in a powerful Substack essay, this is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a global trend – and it is a direct consequence of the failures of neoliberalism and the "extreme centre."
Ali writes that the election results "are not a huge surprise." The so-called firewall created by the extreme centre parties of the German elite has only aided the AFD's growth. The Christian Democratic Union, which won 37% in 2021, is now down to 18.5%. Meanwhile, Die Linke has won more votes than the Social Democratic Party, and the Sahra Wagenknecht Party has crossed the 5% threshold.
The problem, Ali argues, is that the political and economic elites insist "that no reforms are possible and the current form of capitalism is fixed indefinitely." Telling people that an economic system that erodes their living standards year after year is the only option has created a vacuum that the far right is only too happy to fill.
We also explore the historical context: the incomplete reckoning with Europe's fascist past, the failure of post-war denazification, and the erosion of the social democratic contract that once made Germany and other European countries resistant to extremism.
Topics covered:
The AFD's victory in Saxony-Anhalt
Tariq Ali's analysis of the rise of the far right
The failure of the "extreme centre"
Neoliberalism and the erosion of living standards
The collapse of the post-war social democratic contract
Europe's incomplete reckoning with fascism
The global nature of far-right resurgence
If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.
Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.
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# Episode Description

In this solo episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we tackle one of the most persistent problems in how we teach and understand the civil rights movement: the "happy ever after" narrative.

For many years, students have been taught that the struggles of the 1950s and 60s culminated in victory – that the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act somehow "solved" racism in America. This is, of course, nonsense. History doesn't work like that. The civil rights movement achieved significant gains, but the idea that racism was somehow "sorted" in 1968 is deeply misleading.

Drawing on Kevin Verney's excellent book *The Debate on Black Civil Rights in America*, we explore the historiographical challenges of writing about the post-1968 period. Historians are naturally cautious about passing judgment on recent decades, which means the story of African American life since 1980 is often reduced to a few paragraphs about the emergence of a black middle class – and, bizarrely, a section on performers like Michael Jackson and Will Smith.

We examine the debate around Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns, the argument over whether race or class is the primary division in American society, and the continuing crisis of inner-city poverty and police violence that the "happy ever after" narrative conveniently ignores.

Topics covered:
- The "happy ever after" problem in civil rights historiography
- The challenge of writing about recent history
- Jesse Jackson and the debate over black political leadership
- Race vs. class in post-civil rights America
- William Julius Wilson and the "declining significance of race"
- Inner-city poverty and institutionalised racism
- The limitations of liberal reform

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*If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.*
Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.
▸ Support the Show & Get Exclusive Content
Become a Patron: patreon.com/explaininghistory
▸ Join the Community & Continue the Conversation
Facebook Group: facebook.com/groups/ExplainingHistoryPodcast
Substack: theexplaininghistorypodcast.substack.com
▸ Read Articles & Go Deeper
Website: explaininghistory.org

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.