Keith and Patrick are finally back together after a hiatus, and the topic is narratives in history: how to write them, why they matter, and how much we should be using them to understand the past. We dig into two specific examples, the fall of the Roman Empire and the crisis of the 17th century, to tell us more.

10: Narratives Of Rise And Fall

Writer Roy Scranton looks at the signs of this doomed civilization - a collapsing political system, massive environmental degradation and a future of inevtiable, irreversible climate change - and explains why the thrilling and terrifying task required of us is to let go of this world and create a new one, together, while there's still time.

Roy is author of "We're Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change" from Soho Press: https://sohopress.com/books/were-doomed-now-what/

Learning to live on a dying planet.

Focus groups have long-been derided by the left, right, and center for watering down culture and reducing creative and political endeavors to dull, show-of-hand reductionism. 

But what if focus groups – which first arose from socialist experiments in 1920s Vienna – are not inherently bad? What if they've simply been exploited by the capitalist class and could, potentially, have much to offer a left-wing, democratic vision of the world?  

We are joined by author and professor Liza Featherstone to discuss the problems and potential of the much-maligned, but often scapegoated, focus group.

News Brief: Consumer Society and the Curation of Culture

Since the dawn of the American Empire, thin moral pretexts in our politics and press have been used to justify our wars and conquest. The invasion of Cuba and Philippines in 1898 was declared to be a fight for freedom from Spanish oppression. Vietnam was about stopping Communist tyranny. T he pioneer myth of Manifest Destiny and “westward expansion” was built about “taming” and “civilizing’ the land from violent savages.

But one current that flows through all of these imperial incursions has been the idea that the United States – as well as its allies the Great Britain and Israel – are out to protect women. Today's endless occupations in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are, in large part, justified in perpetuity because the United States is a self-declared, unique protector of modernity and women’s rights. 

All the same, the Pentagon is increasingly promoted, in press releases and media puffy pieces, as a place where women can exercise their agency: the ultimate apex of meritocracy and a vanguard of equality. 

But what if this approach misses the point of equality altogether? What if this is simply a craven branding exercise, putting a liberal face on what is a fundamentally oppressive system of violence? On this episode, we explore various ways "empowerment" has been used to sell colonial objectives and how one can differentiate between actual progress and the superficial language of inclusion used cynically in service of mechanized violence.

Our guests are University of Delaware professor Dr. Kara Ellerby and University of Bristol senior lecturer Dr. Sumita Mukherjee.

Episode 65: How Empire Uses ‘Feminist’ Branding to Sell War and Occupation

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