Hauntologies by Elia Ayoub
The Fire These Times
67/ Cultural Dementia: How the West Lost Its History and Risks Losing Everything Else (with David Andress)
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67/ Cultural Dementia: How the West Lost Its History and Risks Losing Everything Else (with David Andress)

This is a conversation with David Andress. He is a Professor of  Modern History at the University of Portsmouth and is the author of the  book “Cultural Dementia: How the West has Lost its History and Risks Losing Everything Else

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Music by Tarabeat.

Topics Discussed

  • What is Cultural Dementia? And why use that term instead of Amnesia?

  • Why focus on France, the UK and the US?

  • The current crises in the three countries

  • George  Orwell’s reflection on the relationship between  imperialism/colonialism, the UK’s welfare state and the white working  class

  • France’s Trente Glorieuses

  • Prospects of Le Pen and the far right winning in France

  • The ‘Brexit spirit’

  • Impact of Trumpism on US politics and what might come next

  • What is neoliberalism and how is that term (mis)used?

  • What is populism and how is that term (mis)used?

  • Berlusconi, the five star movement and racist politics in Italy

  • Canada, Australia and New Zealand’s specific contexts with regards to immigration and racism

  • Cambridge Analytica

  • The delusion of ‘socialism in one country’

  • The realities and delusions of Brexit (including example of CANZUK proposals and how India is excluded)

  • Ladybird libertarians (term by Otto English)

  • Isolationism within the British Labour Party

  • Weaknesses within Left parties, especially Labour (Attlee, Wilson, Blair)

  • The specificity of France and republicanism there

  • How Melenchon and Le Pen agree on Vichy’s status as ‘not France’

  • Chauvinism on the Left in France

  • The metaphor of the mansion

  • The Rhodes Must Fall  protests in the UK

  • The ‘race question’ and white supremacy in the US

  • The specificity of the US constitution (and how it is outdated and embeds conservatism)

  • How history is taught (I gave the example of Lebanon)

Recommended Books

  • Priya Satia, Time’s Monster; History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2020)

  • Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire; Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019)

  • Olivette Otele, African Europeans (Hurst, 2020)

I also added:

  • The Good Immigrant by Nikesh Shukla

  • Afropean: Notes from Black Europe by Johny Pitts

Discussion about this podcast