This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

A shaded line drawing of a large stone building, people, dog and horse-drawn carriage. — The Melbourne Athenaeum, Melbourne’s first Mechanics Institute, in 1855. (State Library of NSW: ST Gill)

Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

From the colonial context of the Paris attacks to radical Scotland in Australia, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

Shadows of Algeria: the Lost Context of the Paris Attacks

Robert Fisk
Counterpunch

It wasn’t just one of the attackers who vanished after the Paris massacre. Three nations whose history, action–and inaction–help to explain the slaughter by Isis have largely escaped attention in the near-hysterical response to the crimes against humanity in Paris: Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

battle_of_algiers_1232724603_resize_460x400 The French-Algerian identity of one of the attackers demonstrates how France’s savage 1956-62 war in Algeria continues to infect today’s atrocities. The absolute refusal to contemplate Saudi Arabia’s role as a purveyor of the most extreme Wahabi-Sunni form of Islam, in which Isis believes, shows how our leaders still decline to recognise the links between the kingdom and the organisation which struck Paris. And our total unwillingness to accept that the only regular military force in constant combat with Isis is the Syrian army – which fights for the regime that France also wants to destroy – means we cannot liaise with the ruthless soldiers who are in action against Isis even more ferociously than the Kurds. Whenever the West is attacked and our innocents are killed, we usually wipe the memory bank. [continue reading]

Doris Lessing’s MI5 File: Was She a Threat to the State?

Lara Feigel
Guardian

“A communist must consider himself a dead man on leave,” Anton tells Martha in Doris Lessing’s 1958 autobiographical novel, A Ripple from the Storm. “A communist is hated, despised, feared and hunted by the capitalists of the world. A communist must be prepared to give up everything: his family, his wife, his children, at a word from the party.”

‘Probably pro-communist’ … Doris Lessing, pictured in 1950. Photograph: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images

The scene takes place during the second world war, and Anton is the leader of Southern Rhodesia’s small communist group. He and Martha are accurate depictions of Gottfried and Doris Lessing. Gottfried was a Russian-born German refugee who would soon convince Doris that it was her revolutionary duty to marry him. She had already given up a husband and two children to devote herself to communism and create a free world in which her estranged children could grow up. [continue reading]

As Cuba and the United States Reengage: The Presence of the Past

Louis A. Perez, Jr.
Origins at OSU

At noon on December 17, 2014, Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced to their respective nations that the United States and Cuba had agreed to resume full diplomatic relations. The occasion was dense with history.

It could hardly have been otherwise, for it is impossible to assess what December 17 portends without understanding what preceded it. “There is a complicated history between the United States and Cuba,” President Obama acknowledged, and admitted too that “we can never erase the history between us.” He affirmed the desire to leave “behind the legacy of colonization and communism,” concluding with the recognition that “change is hard,” especially “when we carry the heavy weight of history on our shoulders.” In Havana, Castro also spoke of history. But while Obama hoped “to cut loose the shackles of the past,” President Castro summoned history not as rationale for change but as a reason for continuity. [continue reading]

I Was Held Hostage by Isis. They Fear Our Unity More Than Our Airstrikes

Nicolas Hénin
Guardian

As a proud Frenchman I am as distressed as anyone about the events in Paris. But I am not shocked or incredulous. I know Islamic State. I spent 10 months as an Isis hostage, and I know for sure that our pain, our grief, our hopes, our lives do not touch them. Theirs is a world apart. Most people only know them from their propaganda material, but I have seen behind that. In my time as their captive, I met perhaps a dozen of them, includingMohammed Emwazi: Jihadi John was one of my jailers. He nicknamed me “Baldy”.

Even now I sometimes chat with them on social media, and can tell you that much of what you think of them results from their brand of marketing and public relations. They present themselves to the public as superheroes, but away from the camera are a bit pathetic in many ways: street kids drunk on ideology and power. In France we have a saying – stupid and evil. I found them more stupid than evil. That is not to understate the murderous potential of stupidity. [continue reading]

These Walls Speak Volumes

Simon Leo Brown
ABC News

Near the centre of towns and suburbs across Victoria are century-old buildings marked with two words: Mechanics Institute. Born from a radical Scottish movement aimed at educating the working class, Mechanics Institutes spread across the English-speaking world.

In few places did the movement take hold as strongly as it did in Victoria, according to Pam Baragwanath, co-author of a new book on the institutes. “We had more in Victoria than anywhere else in Australia,” she told 774 ABC Melbourne‘s Red Symons. The book, These Walls Speak Volumes, documents every Mechanics Institute in Victoria, of which there are around 1,000. [continue reading]