The Hated and the Dead

Robert Muldoon served as prime minister of New Zealand from 1975 to 1984. His direct, bullying style of leadership, which he claimed represented “government of the ordinary bloke”, made waves across the world, and is reminiscent of the tactics of modern demagogues like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.

Muldoon also represented a New Zealand still intertwined with Britain, its former imperial master, and closed off to the rest of the World. That New Zealand has since largely died, and the country has become more liberal, more open and more culturally at ease with itself. In this sense, Muldoon’s story might tell us much about the changing Commonwealth, and whether the Crown abroad, on the weekend of the Coronation of a new monarch, has a future.

My guest today is Bernard Hickey. Bernard is an independent New Zealand journalist and political commentator, he has a very informative and wide-ranging Substack newsletter called The Kaka, which I recommend to you all.

The Hated and the Dead now has its own website. Please do share the website with as many people as you can, and post it to your social media feeds. 

Pablo Iglesias was the Second Deputy Prime Minister of Spain from 2020 until 2021. For the first time, my guest and I take a look at a figure from Europe’s modern left: Iglesias was the leader and co-founder of anti-austerity party Podemos- "we can" in Spanish.

Although Podemos and Iglesias did not topple the Socialist Party and sweep to power as Syriza did in Greece, they have entered government alongside them, and to some extent have been successful in shifting Spain’s economic policy leftward. Iglesias, whose rather petty infighting and sniping quickly alienated many Spaniards from him, has now left politics.

However, Podemos remains crucial to understanding how Europe’s politics has changed since 2008. The melding together of unbridled economic and social liberalism, which seemed hyper-dominant in 90s and 2000s, has been replaced with a politics both more left-wing and more right-wing than what preceded it.

My guest for today is Michael Reid. Michael is a senior editor at the Economist, where he writes on matters mostly related to Latin America but also to Spain. He is also the author of a new book Spain: The Trials & Triumphs of a Modern European Country. 

Francisco Macías Nguema was the 1st President of Equatorial Guinea from 1968 until his execution in 1979. His wooden public appearances, punctuated by rambling and spasmodic outbursts, often explained away as kookiness, were in fact suggestions of something else: that Macías was completely mad. 

Suffering from hallucinations and paranoia, Macías’ fear of assassination led him to murder perhaps as much as a third of the population of Equatorial Guinea. Some of the anecdotes my guest tells about Macías in the conversation you’re about to hear are totally unbelievable.

My guest today is the journalist and author Paul Kenyon. Paul is the author of several books including Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa. Dictatorland contains one chapter dedicated to the plight of Equatorial Guinea, but more widely tells the story of various African countries in the first generation after independence, and how so many fell into dictatorship and kleptocracy. 

Rafael Trujillo was Generalissimo of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. The violence deployed by his regime was extraordinary, with Trujillo’s men murdering an estimated 30,000 Haitians in a matter of weeks in 1937, not to mention thousands of Dominicans across three decades, in what my guest today describes as the violence of the Trujillo plantation.

Trujillo’s story, and indeed the story of the Dominican Republic, can be read as a story of domination, perhaps suffocation, by the United States. The image of the United States as the Great Satan in the World, which can only do wrong, is a simplistic and misleading one, but it isn’t difficult to see where it comes from if you read about the Caribbean and Latin America.

My guest today is Junot Diaz. Junot is a Dominican-American author, who has written multiple novels including The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008. He is also a Professor of Creative Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his insights on the experience of growing up Dominican in the United States are fascinating. 

Helmut Kohl served as Chancellor of West Germany between 1982 and 1990, and as Chancellor of Germany between 1990 and 1998. The story of German reunification, which Kohl presided over, is the focus of today's episode.

In thirty years, Kohl’s West Germany, divided and incomplete, has become the powerhouse of Europe, rebuilding Eastern Europe after the Fall of Communism and becoming master of the Euro. But despite this, Germany has also become more internally polarised, more unequal, and more anxious about its place in the World.

In this sense, Germany is a sort of microcosm for the entire Western Alliance; it has become larger than ever before, but also more fractious, and less self-confident than it was before.

My guest for this conversation is Kristina Spohr. Kristina is a Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, and is the author of several books, including Post Wall Post Square, which details the building of the post-Cold War World in the crucial years between 1989 and 1992. 

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, referred to hereafter as AMLO, has been President of Mexico since 2018. AMLO's redistributive, pro-development populism has proven highly attractive in a country which seems perennially stuck between the rich world and the poor one, with the President promising to instigate the Fourth Great Transformation in Mexican history.

How has that gone? Underwhelmingly might capture it. Mexico today is not a disaster society by any means, but AMLO hasn’t really vanquished the idea that Mexicans remain in between the rich world and the poor world at all. Whilst hardworking, there is a great naivety about AMLO’s policies which perhaps brings his judgement into question. He also retains a highly simplistic view of how democracy works; namely that if he doesn’t get his way, he tries to blow the system up.

My guest for this conversation is Chris Sabatini. Chris is a Senior Research Fellow for Latin America at Chatham House in London. Chris has recently finished editing a new book, Reclaiming Human Rights in a Changing World Order. As well as AMLO, Chris and I discussed the Drug War, and US attitudes towards Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to introduce Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. 

20 years on from the Iraq War, we look at Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq from 1979 until 2003. 

The 2003 Invasion, and the lead up to it, represents how poorly figures at the top of government can understand their counterparts and the countries they lead. The US did not understand Iraq well at all; but an important second part to that statement that is often glossed over is that Saddam really didn’t understand the US, either. If he had, he, or his regime, might still be in charge of Iraq today. 

I hope that this episode gives people a better sense of what Iraq is like 20 years on from the War- a part of the story often not considered enough- and a clearer picture of where US foreign policy lies today. The US is still haunted by Iraq, and in this sense, the Iraq War cannot be seen as separate or removed from the World we live in today; on the contrary, the global power dynamics of 2023 were forged there.

My guest for this conversation is Shadi Hamid. Shadi is senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute. He has also written various books about the Middle East, including The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea, which was released in October. Shadi’s perspective on what happened after 2003 is nuanced in a debate which has been severely lacking that quality, and may challenge those of you with particularly negative feelings towards the War in Iraq. 

Andrej Babiš is the Czech Republic's richest man, and served as prime minister from 2017 until 2021. He was also the losing candidate in this year's presidential election, which to some extent ended up being one of those contests known for the person who lost it, rather than who won. 

Babiš’s premiership, far from the runaway modernising success he promised, was dominated by scandals focused on alleged conflicts of interest. To some, he also signified a dilution of the Czech Republic's support for Western institutions.

Babiš was no longer prime minister by the time the War in Ukraine started last year, but Putin’s invasion cast a long shadow over February’s presidential election. Babiš, forced to pander to voters by promoting causes it wasn’t clear he believed in, promised a less-than-steadfast support for Ukraine, with many claiming his presidency would constitute the Czech Republic being a bridge between East and West. 

My guest for this conversation is Jan Molaček. Jan is the Editor of Denik N, which is the Czech Republic’s first crowdfunded digital newspaper. He also works on Radiozurnal, the biggest radio station in his country. 

Rupert Murdoch is the most famous media mogul of the last fifty years. Australian by birth but American by citizenship, he owns The Sun, the now defunct News of the World, the New York Post, Twentieth Century Fox and the Wall Street Journal.

Amid the rise of social media, the vice-like grip that he once had over celebrity gossip and media through print seems to have diminished. His reputation in the UK was nearly destroyed following the phone hacking scandal in 2011, and for left-wing opinion on both sides of the Atlantic, he remains lucifer in the flesh.

My guest for this conversation is Peter Jukes. Peter has had a long career in journalism, and is the author of three different books about Murdoch, including The Rise and Fall of the House of Murdoch. He is also the editor of Byline Times, a monthly newspaper that focuses on investigative journalism, seeking to expose the nefarious activities of the rich and powerful. 

Edward VIII reigned as King of the United Kingdom for 325 days in 1936. He is the only British monarch to voluntarily renounce the throne, a decision which eventually led to the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II.

The reason why 1936 was a year of three Kings was Edward’s infatuation with American socialite Wallis Simpson. Among royal observers, Edward VIII has become a shorthand for a monarchy in crisis, and for dereliction of duty. But is this fair? Was Edward badly treated? Would it have been a good thing for Britain to keep hold of a King who manifestly didn’t want to do the job?

My guest today is the journalist and writer Anna Pasternak. Anna has devoted much of her working life to writing about the British Royal Family, and is the author of The American Duchess: The Real Wallis Simpson, and the controversial Princess in Love, which documented Princess Diana’s affair with James Hewitt. She also writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard.