75 avsnitt
Making sense of this crazy world HistorymadeEasier
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- Historia
I am a student of history, a teacher of history and a writer of history. You could say history is a passion of mine.
I have a website for students and I had been mulling around this idea of a podcast for some time. Would people be interested? Would I make it interesting? That’s essentially what was holding me back. But with a new year starting, the craziness still all around us, I thought what the hell – give it a go, John!
The primary purpose of the podcast is to use history to help us make a little more sense of this crazy world we are living in. I aim to do this by using history. It’s not the only tool to be used, but it is my chosen tool. Everything happens in a context and that context is recent history. But that recent history is almost always the result of older history. We have to go back into our past to understand today.
I could easily rattle off a hundred other aims but trust me, they will be introduced as we go along. But there are two other aims I must own up to straight away.
The first is that I really want to lay it on the line that history is always about people. I think it was the great historian, Eric Hobsbawm who said unemployment is an economic statistic but a human experience. And you can’t appear to be further away from people than with dry statistics – but you’re not.
And the second is that there is always more than one story to tell; more than one “truth”. History is an interpretation of the past, nothing more. There are always other interpretations. When we look at this crazy world of ours today and try to make sense of what is happening, it is so important to bear that in mind - someone else thinks differently. And if we don’t understand that other interpretation, if we don’t even know it exists, then we can’t reach an understanding of what is happening. And our truth is less secure! I hope that makes sense.
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German Reactions to the Treaty of Versailles
You would be hard pushed to find a single German who didn’t hate the Treaty of Versailles and those who had forced it on their nation; and for many, those who had accepted it: the November Criminals as they were labelled. And that’s what this episode is going to look at, and in doing so, help explain why we had a second world war.
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Dealing with Germany and Reshaping Europe
As a break from the Middle East, I thought it would be interesting to look at how the allies in Paris dealt with Germany and take in briefly how Europe was reshaped. It seems to me that you would find it interesting as there is no doubt that the Treaty of Versailles, the treaty that dealt with Germany, is a major factor in any explanation of the second world war and all that entailed, whilst the other treaties went a long way to reshape Europe. So, the first of two episodes looking at how Germany was dealt with and, with this episode at least, how Europe was reshaped.
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Enter Ataturk
I said you would meet Mustafa Kemal or Ataturk properly, well, now’s the time. I’ve given hints of his place in Turkish history and now it’s time to do that properly too. Because you can’t understand modern Turkey and what Erdogan has done with Ataturk’s Turkey unless we go back to what Ataturk established.
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Dealing with the Turks
This episode is going to take a look at how the peacemakers dealt with Turkey as we shouldn’t underestimate the significance of Turkey today. It has a different relationship to the countries of the Middle East, and Russia too, than do western European countries and America; while it is a member of NATO, and has been since 1952. And that alone makes it very important.
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Manoeuvrings in Paris
This episode continues our look at the Paris Peace Conference that followed WW1 as it gets down to the nitty gritty of the negotiations that did so much to shape the way the Middle East looks, and feels, today.
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Manoeuvrings before the Paris Peace Conference
This episode begins a considered look at the manoeuvrings both immediately before and during the Paris Peace Conference, the conference that shaped the world after WW1. Its really important because this conference set in motion the grievances that the Arab world and the Muslim world hold against the West today, and that includes, not only the fact that there is an Israeli state, and the situation in Gaza and the West Bank today, but it also goes a long way to explaining the sorry state of Lebanon too, and also any proper explanation of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the regime of Saddam Hussein and the tragic civil war in Syria.