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Reds na hireann explores communism in 20th Century Ireland, The Great British Sewing Bee returns, Rose Byrne and Seth Rogan star in Platonic, while American Born Chinese features Michelle Yeoh . . .

Reds na hireann, 9.30pm, TG4

Here's something a little quirky a documentary exploring communism in Ireland until the fall of the Soviet Union.

Back in the days when the catholic church ironically ruled Ireland with Stalinist zeal, Uncle Joes Irish admirers werent many, but they were certainly committed to the communist cause.

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Through intimate, irreverent and entertaining interviews and a rich cache of archival footage, it traces the rise, challenges and impact of communism on Irish politics, society and culture.

The film climaxes with the Soviet Union's collapse and reflects on communism's legacy in Ireland.

Here's my interview with director Kevin Brannigan.

Mark Moriarty: Off Duty Chef, 8.00pm, RT One

Streaming on RT Player

This week Mark demonstrates different ways to cook lamb, beginning with a boulangere, layering thinly sliced potatoes and tender meat in a casserole dish and baking it to perfection.

He then takes inspiration from his recent honeymoon in Greece and shows how to make a gyro, marinating and grilling the lamb and assembling it in a warm wrap with a tangy tzatziki sauce.

Gaelic in the Joy, 9.35pm, RT One

Streaming on RT Player

Following the encouraging performance in their first game, Philly McMahon and Rory O'Connor are feeling more confident.

But then the governor of Mountjoy Prison drops the bombshell that the prison officers want the game of gaelic football to be 15-a-side.

With the team struggling to find any more players, Rory has an idea on how to recruit more players and organises a challenge game against ex-prisoners and staff from the Solas care after-prison group.

The Great British Sewing Bee, 9.00pm, BBC One

As the latest season begins, Sara Pascoe, Patrick Grant and Esme Young welcome 12 new sewers to the competition in Leeds.

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For their first pattern challenge, the sewers make a top with a twist at its centre to give them a straightforward construction task with an added brain teaser.

In the transformation task the competitors take the traditional `office uniform" of a pencil skirt and a blouse and make it reflect their own style.

Finally in the made-to-measure challenge, the contestants try to perfectly fit a dress with cut-out details.

Peaky Blinders, 9.35pm, RT2

Starring Cillian Murphy, Natasha O'Keeffe, Paul Anderson and Sophie Rundle, the final season of this BBC period gangster drama begins.

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Tommy Shelby (Murphy) sets off to North America, where the end of Prohibition brings opportunities, but he faces new danger from an old adversary who is finally making his move.

In his Boston hotel room, Tommy takes a call and receives very concerning news, forcing him to cut short his trip and head straight back to Birmingham.

Platonic, Apple TV+

Rose Byrne and Seth Rogan lead the charge in this new comedy about two friends who reconnect in mid-life.

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Sylvia and Will (Byrne and Rogan) are platonic pals who more or less pick up where they left off decades before.

The first three episodes of season one are available immediately and the rest will be released on a weekly basis until the final episode drops on July 12.

American Born Chinese, Disney+

This action comedy series is based on the 2006 graphic novel of the same name by Gene Luen Yang and stars Michelle Yeoh.

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Jin Wang, a high schooler struggling with his school and home life, meets Wei-Chen, the new Taiwanese exchange student at his school.

Then a sequence of events lead him to become involved in a battle between gods of Chinese mythology.

James May: Oh Cook! Prime Video

Former Top Gear co-presenter James May is not a chef. Which is the whole point of this new series.

This is kind of like Cooking for Dummies as the premise is that you dont need to be a brilliant cook to make delicious food.

Transporting viewers to the Far East, the Med, and the local pub all from the comfort of a home economists kitchen the man called May will knock up delicious recipes that pretty much anyone can actually make.

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Kids, 9.00pm, Channel 4

As this documentary series concludes and they approach adulthood, Havana and Kane try to make sense of their pasts.

Sixteen-year-old Havana no longer sees her mum and has never known her dad but with help from the service she hopes to find her father.

After spending his childhood in multiple foster placements and children's homes, Kane returns to Coventry to be near his mum but wants to understand why he was taken into care in the first place.

11 Minutes: Americas Deadliest Mass Shooting, 9.00pm & 9.45pm, BBC Two

The FBI joins the investigation into the attack on the 2017 Las Vegas Harvest music festival, as doctors concentrate resources on treating the wounded most likely to survive at overwhelmed local hospitals.

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Then at 9.45pm, the final episode takes a look at the impact the attack on the 2017 Las Vegas Harvest music festival had on survivors.

Many are still searching for closure, while for some the bond they formed that night with strangers restored their faith in humanity, while for others activism is a way to channel their grief.

Read more from the original source:
What's on? 10 top TV and streaming tips for Wednesday - RTE.ie

As the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign grows closer, the war in Ukraine and Washingtons support for Kyiv stands to play a bigger role in the Republican primaries than foreign-policy issues normally do. While Republican candidates of the not-too-distant past portrayed Russia as an enemy, this time around the primaries will feature voices much more ambivalent about the war and U.S. military aid. These voices include those of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who referred to the war as a territorial dispute and not part of the United States vital national interests, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who said that if elected he would not give another dollar to Ukraine. Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has refused to say who he thinks should prevail in the conflict. These statements, among others, suggest that Republican candidates are playing to a base that is increasingly skeptical of both the utility and the justice of the war effort.

As the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign grows closer, the war in Ukraine and Washingtons support for Kyiv stands to play a bigger role in the Republican primaries than foreign-policy issues normally do. While Republican candidates of the not-too-distant past portrayed Russia as an enemy, this time around the primaries will feature voices much more ambivalent about the war and U.S. military aid. These voices include those of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who referred to the war as a territorial dispute and not part of the United States vital national interests, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who said that if elected he would not give another dollar to Ukraine. Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has refused to say who he thinks should prevail in the conflict. These statements, among others, suggest that Republican candidates are playing to a base that is increasingly skeptical of both the utility and the justice of the war effort.

The specter of an antiwar right is hard to square with the image that generations of Americans have held of the 1960s antiwar movement: long-haired hippies clashing with police, singing Give Peace a Chance. Despite their myriad differences, some of those opposed to their respective wars today and half a century ago share a common element: Both base their opposition on deep-seated critiques of U.S. policymakers and institutions, and both see that critique reflected in the United States overseas adversariesthe North Vietnamese leadership then, and Russian President Vladimir Putin now. Worryingly, in both cases, the United States adversaries have taken advantage of these alignments to try to exploit domestic divisions for foreign-policy ends. Republicans opposed to U.S. support for Kyiv will find themselves played should they fail to recognize Putins moves as the gambits they really are.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the majority of the anti-Vietnam War student protestors thought that the United States, which backed the South Vietnamese government in its fight against the communist North and its local allies, had no business being involved in the conflict. They believed that the war was being conducted poorly and the resources deployed overseas could be put to better use at home. Many of the leading figures of this movement, however, were also motivated by another conviction: the belief that their struggle and that of the Vietnamese Communists were really one and the same.

These figures saw the United States as the headquarters of imperialism, at the heart of which was a military-industrial complex that sought power for the sake of wealth and gave the world only violence and exploitation in return. At an antiwar rally in November 1965, Carl Oglesby, president of Students for a Democratic Society, condemned the United States as a colossus that does not want to be changed, a corporate-government alliance that in the name of profit suppressed revolution both at home and abroad by calling it communism. He argued that the foreign and domestic issues of his era were cut from the same cloth: Can we understand why the Negroes of Watts rebelled? Then why do we need a devil theory to explain the rebellion of the South Vietnamese? Struggles at home for civil rights, economic equality, and gender rights were therefore part and parcel of the same struggle as that of North Vietnam and its National Liberation Front (NLF) against the United States and its allies. As Che Guevara, a hero to many in the antiwar movement, declared, the way to defeat imperialism was to fight more wars against the American empire: to create two, three, or many Vietnams.

This conviction led some key figures in the U.S. antiwar movement to see the Vietnamese Communists as their allies in the fight against American imperialism at home and abroad. At a 1967 conference between an American antiwar delegation and a delegation of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, Tom Hayden, a prominent activist, identified his cause with that of his Vietnamese counterparts, telling them, We are all Viet Cong now.

North Vietnam saw an opening in this sympathetic audience and was eager to capitalize on U.S. domestic failures to aid its cause. As historian Lien-Hang Nguyen writes, The key to Hanois ultimate success in the war lay not in launching general offensives or even winning hearts and minds in South Vietnam; rather, it resided with its world relations campaign aimed at procuring the support of antiwar movements around the world. The goal was to undermine domestic support for Washingtons policy in Vietnam and pressure a U.S. withdrawalan outcome that eventually did occur in 1973. To this end, the NLF, for example, was tasked with fueling antiwar sentiment in North America and Western Europe.

At the same time, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union Communist Party passed a resolution directing the KGB to organize statements by leading political figures abroad to mobilize public opinion against U.S. policy in Vietnam. A year later, the ruling party of North Vietnam directed its foreign propaganda apparatus to exploit all the forces and all the public opinion of the worlds people, including the American people, to [make them] agree with and support our peoples anti-American cause for national salvation, according to documents in the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History. Mindful of their target audience, the North Vietnamese politburo passed a resolution calling for framing the war as a struggle against American imperialism, rather than as a communist revolution, to make their cause more directly relevant to activists in the United States. Echoing Haydens sentiment, in 1969 North Vietnamese Culture Minister Hoang Minh Giam told Black Panther Party leader David Hilliard: You are Black Panthers. We are Yellow Panthers.

Read More

Why anti-gay propaganda has been part of Russias strategy against Ukraine from the start.

Long before the invasion of Ukraine, Americans views on Russia were increasingly shaped by domestic politics. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, whose administration attempted to reset relations with Russia, mocked his opponent Mitt Romney for naming Russia as the United States number one enemy. The 2016 election, however, was a turning point in this regard. Prior to then, more Republicans than Democrats saw Russia as an enemy; since the election, however, those opinions have reversed. As Democrats decried Russian interference in the election, Republicans increasingly came to associate anti-Russia sentiment with anti-Trump sentiment, seeing the former as just a way to undermine the legitimacy of their president and party.

The Trump years also saw the crescendo of a right-wing obsession with so-called wokeness, prompting attempts to reaffirm traditional conceptions of gender, growing assertions that the United States was a Christian nationor, at least, a Judeo-Christian oneand to reestablish a celebratory account of U.S. history epitomized by Trumps 1776 Commission. Key to this effort was the idea that wokeness had captured the heights of American cultural powerHollywood, the mainstream media, and higher educationin the belief that, as Andrew Breitbart has famously pronounced, politics is downstream from culture.

Sensing an opportunity to undermine his adversaries, Putin has embraced this dynamic and now poses as the avatar of the conservative critique of Western society. Where once the North Vietnamese claimed to embody the anti-imperialist cause, Putin now claims to embody anti-wokeness, positioning Russiamost famously though crackdowns on LGBTQ+ rightsas a bastion of traditional Christian values. In public speeches, he has decried cancel culture, reverse racism, and gender ideology that he calls a crime against humanity. He has married these criticisms to attacks on globalization, asserting that it has led to an uneven distribution of wealth and exacerbated inequality as some have attempted to open up other countries borders for the sake of their own competitive advantages. He has portrayed these policies as serving the interests of a decadent, cosmopolitan elitea rhetorical move that parallels Trumps political synthesis of social conservatism and populist economics.

Putin draws on Russian history to lay claim to the mantle of traditional conservatism. He argues that wokeness has already been tried by the Bolsheviks with their revolution: For us in Russia, these are not some speculative postulates, but lessons from our difficult and sometimes tragic history. By drawing a clear line between the pitfalls of wokeness and the failures of communism, Putin makes an argument that many among the U.S. right have been desperate to hear. His populist rhetoric holds up a mirrorand an alternativefor many of the United States deepest fault lines and greatest discontents, not unlike the North Vietnamese leaders did a few decades ago.

So far, this tactic seems to have achieved some success. New research indicates that support for Putin is higher among U.S. Christian nationalists, who feel that liberal democracy is infringing on their religious beliefs, Northeastern University religion and anthropology professor Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, part of the research team, said. Beyond his vocal defense of what some consider traditional Christian values, Putins notion of defending nationalism from the cosmopolitan global elite is also finding echoes in some corners of the Republican Party. U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, alongside other members of the Trumpist right, have seemingly embraced Putins logic, tweeting recently, [Y]ou can either be the party of Ukraine & the globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine & the working people of America. The idea that globalists are out to destroy old established identitiesnation, race, religion, genderin the name of profit animates some to oppose support for Ukraine. Dominick Sansones argument in the American Conservative is illustrative of this kind of thinking: The real issue at stake in Ukraine is whether the future of international relations will involve a continued expansion and consolidation of a transatlantic one-world government.

Clearly, Putins modern-day application of a 1960s strategy has resonated with its intended audience, perhaps in part due to the broader similarities between these movements. Both see their respective wars as the product of an elite that has lost touch with the people in its unaccountable quest for power and profit. They see the United States as dominated by corruption and decadence, a country that has failed to live up to its stated ideals.

Unfortunately, their visions for the future have very little to do with the real aims of the North Vietnamese then, or Putin now. In 1975, when the North Vietnamese army finally marched on Saigon, they did not set up a multi-party democracy as many in the antiwar movement had hoped. Instead, they annexed the South and imposed a violent communist transformation that led hundreds of thousands to flee for their lives. At the time, many in the antiwar movement recognized their mistake, though Hayden was not among them.

Today, Putin does not actually seek to restore American democracy, but to undermine it. A victory for him will not help the causes of traditional morality, or free speech, or whatever else he claims to represent. His pose is tactical, and those who imagine that a foreign adversary will help bring the changes they want to see in the United States will ultimately be disappointed. Republican candidates who seek to cater to this sort of opposition are not helping restore Americas greatness; they are betraying it.

Read this article:
Putin Wants You to Think He's an Anti-Woke Crusader - Foreign Policy

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan easily won Sundays run-off election, capturing 52 percent of the vote to rival Kemal Kilicdaroglus 48 percent. The outcome gives Erdogan, who has been president for the past decade, another five-year mandate.

Although polls had initially suggested that he risked losing in the first round because of anti-Erdoganism, the unification of opposition groups, economic problems, and Kurdish votes. The result was ultimately determined by Turkeys political fault lines and Erdogans strong leadership.

The early political concepts of Ottomanism, Turkism, and Islamism can help in understanding these dynamics.

Yusuf Akcuras 1904 treatise Three Kinds of Policy - a classic of Turkish political literature, comparable to The Communist Manifesto for communism in terms of its impact on the development of Turkism - put forward the concept of Turkism as an alternative to Ottomanism and Islamism for the salvation of Ottoman Empire.

The policy of Ottomanism pursued by Mahmud II and the Young Ottomans during the 19th century proved unsuccessful due to the emergence of nationalist and independent movements among non-Muslim groups alongside the growing demographic dominance of the Muslim population within the empire.

As a result, Abdul Hamid II adopted an Islamic policy aimed at strengthening the Ottoman Caliphates role in the empire. Akcura maintained that this policy would fail, and the only way forward was through Turkism. Turkish nationalist ideas especially took root after the founding of modern Turkey in 1923.

Akcuras ideas heavily affected the establishment of modern Turkey and he also played an active role in the country as a politician and intellectual.

His core arguments have transcended their era and remain relevant to contemporary developments, even shaping the outcomes of elections.

While Kilicdaroglu, leader of the Republican Peoples Party (CHP), did not explicitly convey a sense of failure in his election-night speech, there will likely be consequences for his loss.

The support he has received from political groups that would otherwise not align themselves with Kilicdaroglus ideology and that was offered simply on the basis of their anti-Erdoganism, may not be sustainable in the long run. This coalition will struggle to maintain cohesion and continuity in its objectives beyond the election.

Under Kilicdaroglus leadership, the CHP has transformed from being fiercely secular and nationalistic to more inclusive and liberal - a modern-day equivalent of Ottomanism, advocating the notion of equal citizenship for all groups. This has found widespread acceptance among minority communities, Kurds, and left-wing and liberal political actors.

It will be crucial in the years ahead to explore how Erdogan's strong leadership will be replaced within the conservative political tradition

Kilicdaroglu sustained the nationalistic roots of the CHP by building a coalition with the right-wing Good Party under the banner of the Nation Alliance. In the 2019 municipal elections, the pro-Kurdish Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) tacitly supported this alliance and helped the CHP to win in two major cities, Istanbul and Ankara, beating the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Kilicdaroglu also managed to enlarge the Nation Alliance with conservative parties in the context of helallesme (reconciliation), amid discriminatory and aggressive secularist state practices, such as the headscarf ban.

But some of his policies, along with Kilicdaroglus close relations with the HDP, have raised concerns among nationalists.

To avoid the same fate as Mahmud II, who was accused of being an infidel sultan because of his modernist and Ottomanist practices, Kilicdaroglu pivoted towards a hardline nationalistic discourse in the second round of voting.

This had an interesting result, as both the ultra-nationalist Victory Party and the HDP together supported Kilicdaroglus candidacy.

However, his support in Kurdish-populated areas decreased in the second round. The Nation Alliance now faces a significant crisis, amid a conflict between secular nationalists and leftists that could have significant implications for the upcoming 2024 municipal elections.

On Sunday night, Erdogan delivered a victory speech. Yet while observers have often commented in the past on the inclusiveness and conciliatory tone of his speeches, he took a different approach this time, blasting the opposition.

He took particular aim at the HDPs support for Kilicdaroglu.

His intention is to disrupt the harmony of the Nation Alliance - a discourse that will likely continue in the lead-up to next years municipal elections when the AKP will hope to retake Ankara and Istanbul.

Turkey elections: Erdogan defeats Kilicdaroglu and secures five more years in power

When Erdogan came to power as prime minister in 2003, despite his strong leadership in conservatism, he also initiated liberal processes such as EU integration, enhancing minority rights, and peace talks with Kurdish groups.

But after Erdogan in 2015 failed to secure a parliamentary majority, the move towards a heavily centralised presidential system began, along with an alliance with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and liberal discourse faded.

At the same time, tensions between conservatism and nationalism have remained significant on issues such as abolishing the nationalist oath for students, and the presence of pro-Kurdish Huda-Par candidates on AKP lists. The lack of strong leadership has led to fragmentation within the Turkish nationalist movement, which has struggled to gain equal representation in a parliament that favours unified groups. While the MHP, Good Party, Great Unity Party and Victory Party received more than 23 percent of the vote on Sunday, their representation in parliament has fallen to around 15 percent of seats.

Kilicdaroglus adoption of nationalist rhetoric in the second round of elections reduced both the participation and support of Kurds.

The fact that the HDP cannot clearly sever its ties with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is recognised as a terrorist group, puts the Nation Alliance in an even more difficult position. It brings into question the future of the alliance and creates an atmosphere of uncertainty for the upcoming municipal elections.

Meanwhile, Erdogan has maintained his position as the main representative of conservatives in Turkey.

Yet, considering that this will be his last term as president, it will be crucial in the years ahead to explore how his strong leadership will be replaced within the conservative political tradition.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Read more:
Turkey elections: Erdogan's win highlights political fault lines - Middle East Eye

The August Coup, an attempted Soviet coup d'tat, Moscow, 1991. Wikimedia Commons. The powerful of one era are not the same as those of the preceding one

Levi Roach,Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Exeter and author of Empires of the Normans: Makers of Europe, Conquerors of Asia (John Murray, 2022).

There is an element of truth to the old adage that history is written by the winners. Whether we like it or not, we view the past from a modern standpoint, privileging (consciously or otherwise) the interests and ideals of the world we know. As a result, we tend to treat developments towards modernity as natural and disparage the apparent dead ends that stood in its path. Yet this is not the only sense in which history is written by the winners. It is the institutions that helped forge modernity that have overseen the preservation of earlier records. The collections of the British Library and National Archives tell us at least as much about modern Britain as they do about its medieval and early modern past; the same is true of their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. And these trends are themselves nothing new. Already in the ancient and medieval worlds, it was the great religious and governmental libraries and archives that conditioned the preservation of knowledge. We know much more about medieval inquisitors than the heretics they confronted, more about state officials than their subjects.

Yet as with most aphorisms, that history is written by the winners is only true in a quite restricted sense. As history progresses, political, social and economic circumstances change. The powerful of one era are not the same as those of the preceding one, even when they are their lineal descendants. And factors beyond raw political power condition the survival of records. Particularly important in the period I study, the Middle Ages, is the literacy that enables records to be created in the first place. Before the introduction of the written word, we are largely dependent on the views of outsiders, whether they be the winners or not. Thus it is the victims of the Vikings who report their attacks, not the piratical protagonists themselves. The same is true of the great Slavic uprising of 983, which saw three bishoprics sacked in what is now eastern Germany. We hear of this almost exclusively from the German victims, not the pagan victors. As ever, history is about more than simple binaries.

Lucy Wooding, Langford Fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College, Oxford and author of Tudor England: A History (Yale, 2022).

Some history does seem to have been written by the winners. In the history of Englands Reformation, since we became a Protestant nation defined in contrast to Catholic enemies overseas, the narrative was for centuries heavily tinged with Protestant triumphalism. The pre-Reformation Church was described in terms of superstition and oppression, Protestant ideas were characterised as libertarian and enlightened, and, later, Catholics were associated with assassination plots and the Spanish Armada. Only in the latter decades of the 20th century, when attitudes to religious identity were recalibrated, did this narrative become open to question. A different historical interpretation was then able to emerge, suggesting that the pre-Reformation Church in fact had many strengths, and that Protestantism, advanced by a literate elite, had shattered many of the cherished notions of traditional religious culture.

There is a problem, however, with thinking about winners in history. Who exactly do we mean? In Tudor England, should we identify the winners within the political elite, the nobility, the intelligentsia? Looking closer at the political establishment, it is clear that the views of Elizabeth I were frequently at odds with those of her chief ministers. Within the social elite, we can see that the estates of Catholic nobles bordered those of their Puritan critics. In the intellectual world, no two writers, or poets, or playwrights, or political theorists could agree. The notion of any one group emerging as the winners is deeply misleading, obscuring the diversity and multiplicity of people and ideas in any given era.

History can be a means of winning when it is put to political use. In every age, just as today, insecure politicians manipulate the past for their own purposes. But this is not history written by the winners, so much as history hijacked by those trying to win.

At the same time, though, history contains its own inbuilt remedy to this. Properly done, history will reveal the manipulation at work. It does not describe the past, it debates it. So if history can be manipulated by the unscrupulous, it can also challenge those who are desperate for victory rather than truth.

Philipp Ther, author of How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War (Polity, 2023).

The history of Europes post-communist transition after 1989 was obviously written by the winners of the Cold War. In fact, so complete was the victory that Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed that there would soon be nothing more to write about. It was, he said, the end of history, with the world developing into free market economies and liberal democracies.

Perhaps we should really be asking what we mean by winners. Can we be sure who they are? And how soon do we call their victory? Fukuyama was right about the rise of global capitalism, but forgot that it can thrive in authoritarian regimes as well.

Today it is easy to criticise him. Most social scientists dealing with the post-communist era followed his assumptions by studying the consolidation of democracies, privatisation and other pro-market reforms. They largely ignored decreases in voter participation and other early signals for a crisis in democracy. Other side effects of neoliberal reformssuch as rising regional and social inequality were also hardly noticed.

History written by the winners implies that there must be losers. In the post-1989 era, this Manichean interpretation of history entailed a condemnation of communism (which I personally share) that was out of line with the mixed experiences of those who had lived under it. While (in the West, at least) communism was thrown in the dustbin of history, Cold War anti-communism lived on, as did the old subdivision of Europe into West and East. This worked fairly well until the global financial crisis in 2008. Since then the neoliberal hegemony has been broken, first because the demonised state had to fix the global financial crisis, and then, politically, in the annus horribilis of 2016, which brought a radical swing towards anti-liberal right wing populism and nationalism. In this context we might ask: did the so-called winners of the Cold War even win? No victory is permanent, so no history is, either. It is certainly possible to suggest that Western hubris thinking of itself as the victor was one of the reasons why the so-called winners of the Cold War have lost the peace in the period after 1989.

Bridget Heal, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of St Andrews.

A recent comment in the Guardian quipped that if youd met any professional historians and looked at their clothes, cars, and houses, youd soon stop claiming that history is written by the winners. Colleagues on Twitter remarked that they had never felt so seen. Joking aside, the professionalisation of the discipline a process in train since at least the 18th century means that nowadays history is largely written by historians. In the 21st century that scholarly community is still nowhere near as diverse as it needs to be, but it is at least attuned to the need to analyse the past in its full complexity.

The question of winners and losers is surely of greatest consequence in discussions of the history of slavery and of colonialism. It is key to global history, too, which seeks to challenge conventional narratives of the rise of the nation state. Whose voicesdo we listen to? Whose experiences and actions do we judge worthy of analysis? These questions have also shaped my own field of early modern European history. Here, since at least the 1970s, scholars have sought to recover the history of marginalised or persecuted individuals and groups, and of those who left few or no written records.

For the early modern period, womens history, queer history, the history of religious minorities, and the history of refugees and migrants all now have long-established pedigrees. In studying the witch-craze of the 16th and 17th centuries, for example, historians have managed to go beyond the deforming perspective provided by official records to recover the beliefs of those accused, using approaches informed by anthropology and psychology. Even the history of war, long a bastion of top-down historical writing focused on politics, diplomacy and military strategy, has undergone a transformation, with burgeoning interest in the experiences of society at large and of those who suffered most from wars impact.

So yes, of course history tends to be written by the winners. But luckily there is a dedicated band of highly trained, poorly paid and badly dressed historians out there trying to circumvent that.

Excerpt from:
Is History Written by the Winners? - History Today

-Analysis-

BERLIN An open letter published by the Future of Life Institute at the end of March called for all labs working on artificial intelligence systems more powerful than GPT-4 to immediately pause their work for at least six months. The idea was that humanity should use this time to take stock of the risks posed by these advanced systems.

Thousands of people have already signed the letter, including big names such as Elon Musk, who is an advisor to the Future of Life Institute. The organization's stated aim is to reduce the existential risks to humankind posed by such technologies.

They claim the AI labs are locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful minds that no one not even their creators can understand, predict, or reliably control. Forbesmagazine wrote, In the near term, experts warn AI systems risk exacerbating existing bias and inequality, promoting misinformation, disrupting politics and the economy, and could help hackers. In the longer term, some experts warn AI may pose an existential risk to humanity and could wipe us out.

Although these warnings sound sensible, the fact that Elon Musks name is at the top of the list of signatories to the open letter is worrying enough. When Musk starts speaking about ethics and social responsibility, alarm bells start ringing.

We may remember his last big ethical intervention: his takeover of Twitter, to ensure that it remained a trustworthy platform for democracy.

So what has caused this sudden wave of panic? It is about control and regulation but control in whose hands? In the suggested six-month pause humankind can take stock of the risks but how? Who will represent humankind in this capacity? Will there be a global, public debate?

What about those IT labs that will (as we must expect) secretly continue their work, with the authorities turning a blind eye, not to mention what other countries outside of the West (China, India, Russia) will do? Under such conditions, a serious global debate with binding conclusions is unimaginable. What is really at stake here?

In his 2017 book Homo Deus, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, who also signed the open letter, predicted that the most realistic outcome of developing true AI would be a radical division within human society, one that would be far more serious than the divisions imposed by class.

Harari predicted that, in the near future, biotechnology and computer algorithms would join forces to produce bodies, brains and heads, meaning that the gulf between those who knew how to construct these and those who didnt would widen dramatically: those who are driving forward progress would achieve godlike abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind would struggle to survive.

The panic expressed in the open letter from the Future of Life Institute is motivated by a fear that those driving forward progress will no longer be able to control what they create in short, it is expressing our fear of our new, digital overlords.

Clearly what the open letter is aiming for is not a wide-ranging public debate it is more like cooperation between governments and companies. The threat posed by advanced AI is very serious, and it affects those in power and those currently involved in developing, owning and controlling AI.

The future waiting on the horizon is nothing less than the end of capitalism as we know it: the prospect of a self-reproducing AI system that requires less and less human involvement the explosion of automated trade on the stock exchange is the first step in this direction. So the true choice facing us is clear: a new form of communism or unchecked chaos, in which machines interact with us as pseudo-human partners.

Many lonely (and also not so lonely) people spend their evenings having long conversations with chatbots, talking about new films and books, debating political and ideological questions, and so on. Its not surprising that they find these exchanges relaxing and satisfying: to repeat an old joke of mine, what they get from this exchange is an AI version of decaffeinated coffee or a sugar-free drink a neighbor with no hidden motives, an Other who perfectly meets their needs.

There is a kind of fetishistic denial at work here: I know (that Im not talking to a real person), but still (it feels like I am, without any of the risks that arise from a conversation with a real person)! Therefore a chatbot is at its most disingenuous when it openly admits that it is just a machine for example, if you ask a chatbot which films it likes, the response will likely be an honest admission that it is a machine and has no individual preferences. I recently asked a chatbot: Should I be a communist? The answer I received was:

As an AI chatbot I have no personal opinions or convictions, and I cant make decisions for you. In the end, the decision to embrace a particular political ideology, for example communism, is a personal choice that should be made based on carefully weighing the principles, values and possible outcomes of the ideology.

Why is that a lie? The content of the answer is true, but it is a lie because of the implied position: a chatbot speaking as if it were a real person, in that it openly admits its limitations and the fact that it is not, in fact, a real person. This mystification is the opposite of the fetishistic denial: the AI system is not denying anything, it is simply saying, I know that Im not a real person!, without a but still because the but still is the very fact that it is speaking (and thereby imitating subjectivity).

On closer reading, it is easy to see that the attempts to take stock of the threats posed by AI will tend to repeat the old paradox of forbidding the impossible: a true post-human AI is impossible, therefore we must forbid anyone from developing one To find a path through this chaos, we should look to Lenins much-quoted question: Freedom for whom, to do what? In what way were we free until now? Were we not being controlled to a far greater extent than we realized?

Instead of simply complaining about the threat to our freedom and intrinsic value, we should also consider what freedom means and how it may change. As long as we refuse to do that, we will behave like hysterics, who (according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan) seek a master to rule over them. Is that not the secret hope that recent technologies awaken within us?

The post-humanist Ray Kurzweil predicts that the exponential growth of the capabilities of digital machines will soon mean that we will be faced with machines that not only show all the signs of consciousness but also far surpass human intelligence.

We should not confuse this post-human view with the modern belief in the possibility of having total technological control over nature. What we are experiencing today is a dialectical reversal: the rallying cry of todays post-human science is no longer mastery, but surprising (contingent, unplanned) emergence.

The philosopher and engineer Jean-Pierre Dupuy, writing many years ago in the French journal Le Dbat, described a strange reversal of the traditional Cartesian-anthropocentric arrogance that underpinned human technology, a reversal that can clearly be seen in the fields of robotics, genetics, nanotechnology, artificial life and AI research today:

How can we explain the fact that science has become such a risky activity that, according to some top scientists, today it represents the greatest threat to the survival of humankind? Some philosophers respond to this question by saying that Descartes dream of being lord and master of nature has been proven false and that we should urgently return to mastering the master. They have understood nothing. They dont see that the technology waiting on the horizon, which will be created by the convergence of all disciplines, aims precisely for a lack of mastery.

The engineer of tomorrow will not become a sorcerers apprentice due to carelessness or ignorance, but of his own free will. He will create complex structures and try to learn what they are capable of, by studying their functional qualities an approach that works from the bottom up. He will be a discoverer and experimenter, at least as much as a finisher. His success will be measured by how far his own creations surprise him, rather than by how closely they conform to the list of aims set out at the start.

Even if the outcome cannot be reliably predicted, one thing is clear: If something like post-humanity truly comes to pass, then all three fixed points in our worldview (man, God, nature) will disappear. Our humanity can only exist against the backdrop of inscrutable nature, and if thanks to biogenetics life becomes something that can be manipulated by technology, human life and the natural world will lose their natural character.

And the same goes for God: what people have understood as God (in historically specific forms) only has meaning from the perspective of human finiteness and mortality. God is the opposite of earthly finiteness, and as soon as we become homo deus and achieve characteristics that, from our old human perspective, seem supernatural (such as direct communication with other conscious beings or with AI), that is the end of gods as we know them.

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The AI Capitalists Don't Realize They're About To Kill Capitalism - Worldcrunch