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Democracy in America

In 1831, a 25 year-old Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, trained as a lawyer, and preoccupied with democracy, came to the US to study this new political scheme. Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, arrived at Newport, RI, in an America comprised, then, of 23 states and 13 million people. They stayed for nine months, and then returned to France at which time de Tocqueville began his epic poem entitled “Democracy in America.” At a time then when slavery was an economic base in the South, and abolitionism was beginning to thrive in the North, America had three frontiers: geography, industry, and democracy. In this program of Radio Curious, we’ll be talking with Alexis De Tocqueville, through the person of Chautauqua scholar, Dick Johnson.

Alexis de Tocqueville recommends “Democracy in America,” by Alexis de Tocqueville.

Originally Broadcast: July 17, 1996

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Who was Charles Darwin and what led him to describe what we now call the theory of evolution? These curious questions are ones that I have been following since I was about ten years old. In 1978 I had the good fortune of visiting the Galapagos Islands, 600 miles west of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean. Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands in 1831 for month as part of a five-year voyage around the world. There he saw birds and animals that helped him formulate some of his ideas about evolution he published The Origin of the Species, 22 years later in 1853. Since then the world, science and religion has not been the same.
Now, at a time when concepts of evolution and natural selection are attacked from certain theological and political perspectives, “The Darwin Conspiracy,” a novel has been written by John Darnton, a writer and editor for the New York Times. “The Darwin Conspiracy,” although fiction, is said by John Darnton to be 90% accurate. It covers Darwin’s life and thinking before and after his publication of “The Origin of the Species.”

I spoke with John Darnton from his home in New York City at the end of October 2005. He began by describing who Charles Darwin was, in his time and place.

The book John Darnton recommends is “Snow,” by Orhan Pamuk.

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Once again we focus on the continuing genocide in the northeast African countries of Sudan and South Sudan. When the nation of South Sudan gained its independence from Sudan on July 9, 2011, the hopes for peace and safety of its citizens were high. That reality however has not come to be. The people of this area, especially those from the Nuba Mountains, continue to flee for their lives amidst an ongoing deadly famine.

Professor Emeritus, Samuel Totten, Ph.D., a genocide scholar, now retired from the University of Arkansas, is our guest for the fifth time on Radio Curious. Professor Totten, who has visited Sudan and South Sudan multiple times in the past decade, hopes to visit there again the end of July, 2018. In this program, he describes recent conditions in this remote part of Africa; the heroic efforts of others who have devoted their lives to the betterment of the people of South Sudan—told in the book he edited in 2017, “Sudan’s Nuba Mountains People: Accounts by Humanitarians in the Battle Zone”—and the plans for his pending trip there. He also explains what motivates him to risk his life by doing this work.
When Dr. Sam Totten and I visited by phone from his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on July 9, 2018, we began when I asked him to describe the location of Sudan and South Sudan on the African continent.

The book Sam Totten recommends is “The Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” by Barton Gellman.

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Socrates of Athens, who lived before the Common Era, is respected as one of the greatest independent thinkers of all time. Socrates himself refused to be recognized as a teacher. Instead, Plato, his well-known student and reporter of Socrates’ dialogues, tells us he asked to be seen as a “midwife of ideas.” Socrates’ passion to achieve self-understanding, and the proper ways to live, continues to be studied and emulated to this day.

Chataquan scholar Ron Gross portrays Socrates in this archived interview, recorded in January 2003. We began our conversation when I asked him to describe the process of self understanding.

The book Socrates recommends is “The Trojan Women,” by Euripides. Ron Gross recommends “The Clouds,” by Aristophanes.

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To create thought around Yom Hashoah, known in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day I offer you an archive interview with Ralph Appelbaum, the designer the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington D.C., which opened in April 1993, when this interview was recorded.

When Ralph Appelbaum and I were Peace Corp Volunteers in the mid 1960s, living in nearby towns in southern Peru, we often shared our future plans.  This interview shares the story of one of Ralph’s plans which he manifested on a material plane, about 30 years later.

Appelbaum says that a museum’s architecture should focus on the experience by creating time and space events. In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Appelbuam’s design depicts the suffering, torture and death of millions of people during World War II in Europe, on land controlled by fascist Nazis.  He also directs attention to the responsibility of bystanders.

Please keep in mind that this interview was recorded in April 1993.  That was when Ralph Appelbaum and I visited by phone from his loft in New York City.  We began when I asked him to describe his vision of a museum designer.

The audio of this program was enhanced by Gregg McVicer of UnderCurrentsradio.net, who was our guest in 2013.

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You may remember the Radio Curious interview with Bernard Offen, recorded in May 2005, and re-boradcast the end of May 2017.  In telling the story of his youth in Poland during World War II, being forced into four different concentration camps established and controlled by the Nazis, Bernard Offen characterized those camps as “Polish concentration camps.”

Soon after the 2017 re-broadcast, I received an email from Stefan Komar, our guest in this edition of Radio Curious.  Komar pointed out that calling any German concentration camp in German occupied Poland “Polish,” or referring to a German concentration camp in occupied Poland as “in Poland”, “of Poland,” or “Poland’s,” is insensitive to the families of the millions of ethnic Poles who were killed, forced into slave labor, tortured, maimed, terrorized and starved during the brutal and inhuman German occupation of Poland in the name of “Deuthschland, Deutschland Uber Alles.”

Komar, who was born in Queens, New York, lived in Warsaw, Poland, for about 10 years beginning when he was 12 years old. Currently he’s a Captain in the New York Police Department, after serving with the NYPD for 37 years.

A few days before Stefan Komar, and I visited by phone from his home in Queens, New York, on January  28, 2018, many newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-israel-poland-nazis-20180128-story.html) reported a “bill passed by the lower house of Poland’s parliament”  would make it illegal to utter the phrase “Polish concentration camp” or to assign Poland culpability for Nazi crimes committed on its soil.  The Israeli government was Infuriated, as reported in Reuters, (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-poland/israel-and-poland-clash-over-proposed-holocaust-law-idUSKBN1FH0S3), among other news outlets, and called the Polish law revisionary history.
This is clearly a curious issue to follow.  In doing so Komar provided a link to “A Platform for Polish Jewish Dialogue,” (http://www.dialog.org/) which may be found at Dialog.org, and a youtube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SztV961KKhA&t=58s, on Polish history including a discussion on how the Nazi occupation of Poland may be characterized.  These links may be found on radiocurious.org.

Stefan Komar and I unfortunately did not directly discuss this new law or the Israeli reaction.  We did however put the topic in context from his point of view.  We began our visit when I asked him to discuss the characterization of these concentration camps.

The books Stefan Komar recommends are “Hollywood’s War with Poland, 1939-1945” by M.B.B. Biskupski; and “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century,” by Paul Kengor.

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Not such a long time ago, time was an arbitrary measure decided by each community without consideration of other localities.

In this edition of Radio Curious, we visit with Clark Blaise, author of “Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time.”

In the mid 19th century, with the advent of continent-spanning railroads and transatlantic steamers, the myriad of local times became a mind-boggling obstacle and the rational ordering of time to some became an urgent priority for transportation and commerce. Standard Time was established in 1884, leading to an international uniformity for telling time. Arguably, the uniformity of time was a “crowning achievement” of Victorian progressiveness, one of the few innovations of that time to have survived unchanged into the 21st century.

Under the leadership of Sir Sandford Fleming, amid political rancor of delegates from industrializing nations, an agreement was reached to establish the Greenwich Prime Meridian passing through Greenwich, England and the International Date Line that wanders it way through the Pacific Ocean. The 1884 agreement resulted in a uniform system of world-wide time zones that exists today.

I had a good time visiting with Clark Blaise in the spring of 2001 as we discussed how our current notion of time was established. We began when I asked him to explain what standard time is.

This interview with Clark Blaise, author of “Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time,” was recorded in the spring of 2001 and first broadcast in the last week of 2011.

The book Clark Blaise recommends is “Time of Our Singing,” by Richard Powers.

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An artifact of Chinese-American heritage in the form of a long-lost film and the Asian American woman responsible for this film’s creation is the topic of this edition of Radio Curious.

Our guest is documentary filmmaker Robin Lung, who made the film Finding Kukan. Finding Kukan tells the story of Li Ling-Ai, a Chinese-American woman who hired Rey Scott, an American photojournalist, to travel to China and capture the life of people in that war-torn country, including the massive bombing of the wartime capital. Their landmark film, Kukan, received one of the first Academy Awards for a feature documentary in 1942. Lung’s film, Finding Kukan, asks why we haven’t heard of Li Ling-Ai, and why all copies of her film Kukan seem to have disappeared.

This program was recorded on May 6, 2017, when she was in Southern California, right after Finding Kukan received the Audience Award at the 2017 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.

The book that Robin Lung recommends is also a movie: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly.

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In this, part two of our series on near term human extinction, we continue our conversation with Dr. Guy R. McPherson, Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. Dr. McPherson is co-author with Carolyn Baker of Extinction Dialogs: How to Live with Death in Mind. McPherson presents what appears to be overwhelming scientific evidence that our environment is headed for a swift apocalyptic collapse.

This interview was recorded on September 14th, 2015, but has become hauntingly prescient as Dr. McPherson’s warnings and predictions about the devastating effects of climate change come to pass.

As you listen, consider the following: Is what McPherson predicted occurring? Has climate change affected your life? What have you done, or what are doing differently, as a consequence? What are your future plans regarding climate change?

In part one, Dr. Guy McPherson discussed the rise of global temperature by more than 1 degree centigrade, the likelihood of a continued global warming trend in the future and some of its effects on our planet. In this, our second visit with Dr. McPherson, he explains how this small rise in global temperature is leading to a large-scale mass extinction on earth.

The book Dr. Guy McPherson recommends is Ms. Lady Bug and Mr. Honeybee: A Love Story at the End of Time, by Pauline Panagiotou-Schneider and Guy McPherson. He also recommends the books by Edward Abbey.

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