British Chinese compose nearly one per cent of the British population, but they are culturally and politically ignored with precious little representation in politics or television.

In this Origin Story special edition, we trace the history of the British Chinese community, from the days of Roman Britain to the present day. Along the way, we see the construction of the first Chinatown in London's Limehouse, at the height of Empire, when ports function as joining-places for the world. We witness the racism that hit Chinese communities during the wars, when fear of 'Yellow Peril' and miscegenation resulted in deportation programmes against the very people who had helped Britain in the fight against Germany. And we follow the second triumphant wave of immigration in the 20th Century, in the restaurant business, as Chinese food helps democratise the practice of eating out in Britain.

We then look at the extraordinary accomplishments of the British Chinese in the modern era, particularly in education, culture and the economy. And we start to tease apart a richer, deeper story about multicultural Britain, one which is much more varied and surprising than people allow for in the barren conversation about immigration we read in the newspapers every day.

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Reading list

• William Poole, The Letters of Shen Fuzong to Thomas Hyde, 1687-88, British Library Journal, volume 2015, article 9

• Earle Gale, Chinese pathfinders paved the way in UK hundreds of years ago, China Daily

• Marc Horne, Extraordinary tale of first Chinese Scotsman, The Times

• Anonymous, William Macao

• Sylvia Hahn, Stanley Nadel (eds) Asian Migrants in Europe: Transcultural Connections

• Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez, The Chinese in Britain, 1800–Present 

• Anonymous, Liverpool Chinatown History

• Jody-Lan Castle, Looking for my Shanghai father, BBC.co.uk

• Anonymous, London by ethnicity: Analysis, The Guardian

• Emily Thomas, British Chinese people say racism against them is 'ignored', BBC.co.uk

• John Hills et al, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK: Report of the National Equality Panel, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE. 

• Tze Ming Mok and Lucinda Platt, All look the same? Diversity of labour market outcomes of Chinese ethnic group populations in the UK, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

• Zain Mohyuddin and Sophie Stowers, Minorities Report: The Attitudes of Britain's Ethnic Minority Population, UK in a Changing Europe

• Anon, Chinese ethnic group: facts and figures, Gov.uk

• Anonymous, Ethnicity pay gaps, UK: 2012 to 2022, ONS• Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome back to Origin Story. In this bonus episode Dorian tells the unnervingly relevant story of Enoch Powell’s so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech. On 20 April 1968, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West delivered probably the most explosive political speech in British peacetime history, bringing into the mainstream opinions previously confined to the far right. As Keir Starmer discovered, even the faintest echo of the speech is toxic on the left, yet on the right newspaper columnists and politicians like Robert Jenrick are reviving Powell’s rhetoric with impunity.

We start by examining Powell’s youth as a brilliant scholar, war hero and ardent imperialist who developed an idiosyncratic version of nationalism. As a junior minister and pioneering neoliberal  in the 1950s, he barely mentioned race or immigration but he became increasingly obsessed during the 1960s, and increasingly vocal. Powell contrived his speech to have the biggest possible impact and he succeeded. While he was sacked by Tory leader Ted Heath and denounced as an evil race-baiter by the establishment (even The Beatles took a shot), he became the most popular politician in Britain almost overnight. It was the first eruption of what we now know as right-wing populism and its aftershocks extended from Rock Against Racism and no-platforming to the Great Replacement Theory and Brexit.

How did one speech poison British politics? What led Powell to deliver it? What can it teach us about the timeless tricks of anti-immigrant oratory? Did he merely activate the British public’s latent racism or actively feed it? What lessons have politicians failed to learn about how to deal with anti-immigrant sentiment? And why are Britain’s elites more tolerant of overt racism in 2025 than they were in 1968?

Support Origin Story on Patreon:

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Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘An Evil Speech’, The Times (22 April 1968)

• Anonymous, ‘Coloured Family Attacked’, The Times (1 May 1968)

• Paul Foot, The Rise of Enoch Powell (1969)

• Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998)

• Tom McTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 (2025)

• Sarfraz Manzoor, ‘Black Britain’s Darkest Hour’, The Guardian (2008)

• Caroline Moorhead, ‘A Would-Be Leader Deserted by Destiny’, The Times (12 May 1975)

• Enoch Powell, the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, 20 April 1968

• J. Enoch Powell, Freedom and Reality, edited by John Wood (1969)

• Andrew Roth, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune (1970)

• Michael Savage, ‘Fifty years on, what is the legacy of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech?’, The Observer (2018)

• Douglas E. Schoen, Enoch Powell and the Powellites (1977)

• Robert Shepherd, Enoch Powell (1996)

• Evan Smith, No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (2020)

• Bill Smithies and Peter Fiddick, Enoch Powell on Immigration (1969)
Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome back to Origin Story. This bonus episode is something a bit different: a story about the power of music and the music of power. 

Tortured genius? Stalinist stooge? Undercover dissident? Perhaps no musician better represents the competing demands of art and politics than Dmitri Shostakovich, who died 50 years ago this week. He has been called the most brilliant symphonist of his age and the most controversial composer since Wagner.

Shostakovich’s career began with Lenin and ended with Brezhnev but his great antagonist was Stalin, a self-styled music buff and maestro in the art of fear. From symphony to symphony, Shostakovich danced on the edge of a knife. Sometimes he was the Soviet Union’s favourite composer, bathing in privilege and acclaim. At other times he was an “enemy of the people”, bullied into silence and terrified for his life.

Nobody knew what Shostakovich’s music was really saying until the posthumous publication of his memoir Testimony made an extraordinary claim that turned all assumptions on their head. But was this just a dying man’s attempt to save his reputation and was Testimony even his words or a brilliant forgery? His admirers and detractors have been fighting the

“Shostakovich wars” ever since.

How did Shostakovich and contemporaries like Prokofiev manage to produce great art in a dictatorship, and what did it cost them? Why did his Leningrad Symphony transfix the world? How did he inspire the most consequential review in the history of music criticism? And can we ever truly know what his music meant or is it all in the ear of the beholder? Listen closely.

Support Origin Story on Patreon:

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Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, Pravda (28 January 1936)

• Anonymous, ‘Shostakovich and the Guns’, Time (20 July 1942)

• Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time (2016)

• James Devlin, Shostakovich (1983)

• Jeremy Eichler, ‘The Composer and the Dictator’, New York Times (2004)

• Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (2000)

• Michel Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin (2025)

• Dorian Lynskey, ‘Settling a Soviet Score’, Jewish Renaissance (Spring 2025)

• Brian Morton, Shostakovich: His Life and Music (2006)

• Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)

• Nikil Saval, ‘Julian Barnes and the Shostakovich Wars’, The New Yorker (2016)

• Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov (1979)

• Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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What is ICE? Who are these men we see gathered around students and politicians in the US, with their faces covered, wearing unmarked clothing, often throwing people into unmarked cars? Where did this organisation originate? How did it turn into what looks like a militia? And where will its loyalties lie in future if there is a threat to Trump's hold on power?

This special edition of Origin Story looks into US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a body which was once responsible for tracking undocumented immigrants who were a threat to national security, but has now metastasised into a group which seems to target all immigrants and many US citizens.

We track its birth under George Bush Jr, its actions under Barack Obama and then its radicalisation and expansion under Donald Trump. Then we peer into the alarming evidence about its behaviour and its part in Trump's broader agenda, before listing the comparisons with Nazi Germany. Everything you need to know about one of modern America's most disturbing developments.

Support Origin Story on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome to the grand finale of Origin Story season seven, as we conclude the remarkable story of Martin Luther King Jr. With the march from Selma to Montgomery and the passing of the Voting Rights Act, 1965 marked the zenith of the civil rights movement as a unified, effective force under King’s leadership. The decade-long fight to desegregate the South had given it strategic clarity and mainstream support. After that, things got much trickier as King switched his attention to economic injustice in cities like Chicago and came out against the war in Vietnam.

Estranged from President Johnson, challenged by the young firebrands of Black Power, hounded by the FBI and horrified by the despair that fuelled urban riots, King spent the rest of his life on the back foot. In 1968, he staked everything on an ambitious Poor People’s Campaign but his movement had fragmented and public opinion had turned against him. On 4 April, he was shot dead in Memphis.

The assassination simplified King into a martyr. We track the explosive unrest in the days after his death, the long struggle to make Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, and the way his philosophy has been caricatured and neutered by those who believe that civil rights have gone far enough. Finally, we unpack some of King’s most famous quotes to separate the myth from the reality.

Why did the movement unravel after Selma? Did King pick the wrong battles or were the forces ranged against him too powerful to vanquish? What happens when a human being becomes a symbol? How has his message been whitewashed by the right? Does President Trump’s backlash politics prove that King was right to lose faith in white America’s willingness to reject racism? And what can today’s activists learn from King’s victories and defeats?

Thanks for listening to season seven of Origin Story, and for supporting our work. We’ll be back soon with bonus episodes and Q&As.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome to the final topic of Origin Story season seven: the extraordinary life and legacy of Dr Martin Luther King. By Origin Story standards, there’s an unusual moral clarity to this story — a genuinely good man up against genuine horrors — but that doesn’t make it a straightforward one. The mainstream caricature of King as a kindly, colour-blind saint is not just a simplification but a cynical misrepresentation, designed to drain his example of its power.

Born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a prominent pastor, King was a brilliant student who developed a sophisticated worldview grounded in both Christianity and philosophy. His Gandhi-inspired belief in nonviolent resistance became central to the civil rights struggle when he was thrust onto the frontlines during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-6 and quickly became the most admired black man in America. He was just 27.

King’s new role as leader and symbol of the movement was both an honour and a burden. Abused, threatened, assaulted and jailed, he wrestled with his own feelings of inadequacy and guilt as well as the violent forces of white racism and the obsessive attention of the FBI. We follow him through his great triumphs — Montgomery, Birmingham, the March on Washington, Selma — but also his setbacks, his mistakes and his complicated relationships with presidents and fellow activists.

What made this previously unknown preacher the unrivalled leader of the civil rights movement for more than 12 years? How did he develop, and evolve, his philosophy of nonviolence? Who were his loyal allies, vicious antagonists and complicated frenemies? How did he play to his strengths and transcend his weaknesses? And what gave him the strength to carry on in the face of both the American South’s barbaric racism and his own

ceaseless insecurities?

This is an inspiring and often surprising story of moral courage and strategic leadership pitted against terrible odds — one with vital lessons for anybody who seeks to change the world for the better.

Plus! Another Origin Story playlist, featuring songs about and inspired by Martin Luther King. It’s sequenced to tell his story chronologically.

Reading list

• Ralph Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (1989)

• Jonathan Eig, King: The Life of Martin Luther King (2023)

• Marshall Frady, Martin Luther King, Jr: A Life (2001)

• Martin Luther King Jr, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958)

• Martin Luther King Jr, Why We Can’t Wait (1963)

• Martin Luther King Jr, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

• Dr Martin Luther King Jr, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches, edited by James Melvin Washington (1986)

• Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr (1982)

• Jason Sokol, The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr (2018)

Articles

• Renata Adler, ‘The Selma March’, The New Yorker (1965)

• Jelani Cobb, ‘Martin Luther King, Jr.’s History Lessons’, The New Yorker (2022)

• Alex Haley (uncredited), Playboy interview: Martin Luther King (1965)

• Howell Raines, ‘Driven to Martyrdom’, New York Times (1986)

• Kelefa Sanneh, ‘Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of Respectability’, The New Yorker (2023)

• Time, ‘THE SOUTH: Attack on the Conscience’, Time (1957)

• Time, ‘America’s Gandhi: Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’, Time (1964)

• Calvin Trillin, ‘The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi’, The New Yorker (1964)

Video

• 60 Minutes interview with Martin Luther King (1966)

• BBC Face to Face interview with Martin Luther King (1961)

• Martin Luther King, ‘I Have a Dream’ speech (1963)

... Full reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome back to Origin Story, where we’re discussing the concept of economic growth. Growth is the world’s great obsession. When it’s booming, it makes everything easier. When it stagnates or goes into reverse, everybody panics. But what exactly is it, what drives it and what does it cost us?

For most of human history economic growth didn’t exist. The average person was no better off than their distant ancestors. Even when the age of growth began with the Industrial Revolution, nobody knew how to measure it or control it until the 1940s. Enter GDP, which quickly became the most important number in the world despite its creators acknowledging from the start that it was both artificial and deeply flawed.

We talk about what GDP does and does not measure and how it has adapted to an increasingly complicated global economy. We meet the economists who created it (hello again, John Maynard Keynes) and those who tried to reform or replace it. Robert F Kennedy claimed in 1968 that GDP “measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile”. Is the number that rules the world really fit for purpose?

Then we explore our addiction to relentless growth and ask if there is a more sustainable way to thrive: green growth, slow growth or degrowth? Preserving our natural resources without risking economic and political disaster is the great challenge of our times.

Is growth essential to the survival of democracy or the cause of many of its problems? What fuelled the miraculous growth of previous eras and why isn’t it working anymore? Can advanced economies escape the low-growth trap or do we need to rethink our whole approach to growth and prosperity? Does GDP still tell us what we need to know? And are we valuing the right things?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

• Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (1972)

• Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man & Technology (1971)

• Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (2014)

• Diane Coyle, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters (2025)

• Ehsan Masood, GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change (2021)

• Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020)

• John Maynard Keynes, How to Pay for the War (1940)

• Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist (2017)

• Daniel Susskind, Growth: A Reckoning (2024)

Articles

• John Cassidy, ‘Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth’, The New Yorker (2020)

• Herman Daly, ‘The Canary Has Fallen Silent’, New York Times (1970)

• Editorial, ‘Pandemic Calls for a New Approach to Growth’, Financial Times (2020)

• Editorial, ‘Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50 year argument’, Nature (2022)

• Idrees Kahloon, ‘The World Keeps Getting Richer. Some People Are Worried’, The New Yorker (2024)

• Carolyn Kormann, ‘The False Choice Between Economic Growth and Combatting Climate Change’, The New Yorker (2019)

• Katy Lederer, ‘The End of G.D.P.?’, The New Yorker (2015)

• David Marchese, This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession with Growth Must End, New York Times (2022)

• Bill McKibben, ‘To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower?’, The New Yorker (2023)

• John Merrick, ‘The prophet of the new right’, The New Statesman (2025)

• Peter Passell, Marc Roberts and Leonard Ross, ‘The Limits to Growth’, New York Times (1972)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome to the first ever episode of Origin Story dedicated to a planet. We’re taking a long look at the place of Mars in the popular imagination, from ancient civilisations to fin de siècle Mars mania to the current techbro obsession with exploration and colonisation. Is there life on Mars? Let’s find out.

The ancients associated the red planet with gods of war. With the invention of the telescope in the 17th century, astronomers began to understand Mars better and speculate about its inhabitants. Thanks to the amateur astronomer Percival Lowell, the romance of the red planet, and its alleged “canals”, became a craze in the 1890s. H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs imagined the Martians as colonisers and colonised respectively, while luminaries like Nikola Tesla and Francis Galton hatched outlandish schemes to contact them.

Science played the killjoy. Even as a new wave of Mars mania swept the post-war world, NASA probes unveiled the reality of a cold, dusty, dead planet. But their findings allowed for a new breed of romance: the possibility of actually reaching and settling on Mars. 

Ray Bradbury compared Mars to a mirror. What does humanity’s fascination with it say about our own dreams and fears over the centuries? How did the fictional Martian turn from a friendly pacifist into a ruthless killing machine? Why is there such a thin line between fact and fiction? Is Elon Musk’s obsession with settlement really possible or just another delusion? And why exactly do so many people want to travel to a planet that makes the least hospitable places on earth look like Center Parcs?

It’s a mindboggling tale of scientific discovery and wild fantasy, with an all-star cast including Lord Tennyson, William Herschel, Thomas Edison, David Bowie and Arthur C. Clarke. Plus! Our first ever Origin Story playlist, with 23 songs about Mars. We have lift-off.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

• Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950)

• Albert Burneko, ‘Neither Elon Musk nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars’ (2025)

• Stuart Clark (ed.), The Book of Mars: An Anthology of Fact and Fiction (2022)

• Robert Crossley, Imagining Mars: A Literary History (2011)

• Marc Hartzman, The Big Book of Mars (2020)

• Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

• Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023)

• Nicky Jenner, 4 th Rock from the Sun: The Story of Mars (2017)

• Dorian Lynskey, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024)

• Lord Tennyson, ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ (1886)

• Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963)

• Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (2023)

• H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)

• Robert Zubrin, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must (1996)

Audio and video

• Alternative 3, written by David Ambrose and directed by Christopher Miles (1977)

• The Bunker: Why Elon Musk’s plan for life on Mars is a terrible idea (2025)

• The Martian, written by Drew Goddard and directed by Ridley Scott (2015)

• A Trip to Mars, directed by Ashley Miller for the Edison Company (1910)

• The War of the Worlds, written and directed by Orson Welles (1938)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome back to Origin Story and join us as we wrap up the story of appeasement. It’s 1938. After the Anschluss, Hitler makes his bid for the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and tests the moral and strategic arguments for appeasement to breaking point. While Chamberlain insists it would be madness to go to war over “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” opponents like Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee are equally convinced that selling out the Czechs will only encourage Hitler to go further.

Desperate diplomacy culminates in the Munich Agreement but Chamberlain’s “triumph” is short-lived as opposition mounts across the country. The German invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 destroys appeasement as a mainstream proposition, leaving only an uneasy alliance of fascists and pacifists. When Stalin chooses Germany over Britain and France, war is inevitable.

We look at the people who still wanted to make a deal with Hitler even once the war had begun, the fall of Chamberlain and the revenge of Churchill. We debunk the revisionist case for appeasement, explore how the legacy of Munich has been used and abused to justify military intervention ever since, and ask whether history is repeating itself over Putin and Ukraine.

Why did Munich’s popularity collapse so quickly? How did Chamberlain misread Hitler’s intentions so badly? What motivated the die-hard appeasers, and the historians who defend the policy even now? Are the lessons of appeasement a double-edged sword? And which of Chamberlain’s foes had the best zingers?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘A New Dawn’, The Times (1 October 1938)

• W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’ (1939)

• Frederick T. Birchall, ‘Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich’, New York Times (16 August 1936)

• Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to

War (2019)

• Cato (Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen), Guilty Men (1940)

• Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, Fascism: The Story of an Idea (2024)

• Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement (1966)

• Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9 (1980)

• Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage: A Story of the Past or the Future (1922)

• Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ‘How the appeasement of Hitler played into his hands’, New Statesman (2019)

• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)

• Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (2004)• James Levy, Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain 1936-1939 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)

• Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War (1998)

• Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties: 1930-1940 in Great Britain (1940)

• George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937-1939, edited by Peter Davison (1998)

• ‘Policy of His Majesty’s Government’, day three of House of Commons debate on Munich, Hansard (5 October 1938)

• Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005)

• Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (1937)

• Viscount Rothermere, Warnings and Predictions (1939)

• A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961)

• Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells and directed by William Cameron Menzies (1936)

• Neville Thompson, The Anti-Appeasers (1971)

• Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (1958)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome back to Origin Story. This week we turn to the story of the appeasement of Hitler’s Germany during the 1930s. With appeasement in the news again in relation to Ukraine, understanding the mistakes of 90 years ago is urgently necessary. How did noble impulses like optimism, fairness and the desire for peace lead to history’s most infamous foreign policy disaster?

During the 15 years following the First World War, horror of conflict and a growing consensus that the Treaty of Versailles had immiserated Germany made appeasement a positive effort to ensure peace in Europe. Even Winston Churchill was on board. But the arrival of Hitler put paid to that. The question now became: how could a militarily weak Britain rein in an unpredictable dictator, not to mention Italy and Japan? And what did Hitler really want?

We move from the desperate fudging of Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin to the evangelical appeasement of Neville Chamberlain, and from crisis to crisis: Manchuria, Abyssinia, the Rhineland, the Anschluss. We meet the most fervent appeasers and their most furious opponents. As Chamberlain’s government begins to crack, Hitler sets his sights on Czechoslovakia…

How did appeasement transform from a benign peace-making strategy into a moral and diplomatic disaster? Why is Chamberlain’s reputation as a weak, indecisive leader so misleading? How did Hitler manage to fool so many powerful people? When could Britain and France have stopped him in his tracks? And what combination of good intentions, bad judgements and apocalyptic delusions led to catastrophe?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘A New Dawn’, The Times (1 October 1938)

• W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’ (1939)

• Frederick T. Birchall, ‘Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich’, New York Times (16 August 1936)

• Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to

War (2019)

• Cato (Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen), Guilty Men (1940)

• Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, Fascism: The Story of an Idea (2024)

• Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement (1966)

• Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9 (1980)

• Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage: A Story of the Past or the Future (1922)

• Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ‘How the appeasement of Hitler played into his hands’, New Statesman (2019)

• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)

• Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (2004)• James Levy, Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain 1936-1939 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)

• Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War (1998)

• Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties: 1930-1940 in Great Britain (1940)

• George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937-1939, edited by Peter Davison (1998)

• ‘Policy of His Majesty’s Government’, day three of House of Commons debate on Munich, Hansard (5 October 1938)

• Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005)

• Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (1937)

• Viscount Rothermere, Warnings and Predictions (1939)

• A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961)

• Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells and directed by William Cameron Menzies (1936)

• Neville Thompson, The Anti-Appeasers (1971)

• Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (1958)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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