CLUMSY COMMUNISM LOSING BADLY IN BEIJING: 2/8: To the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism by Sean McMeekin (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-World-Rise-Fall-Communism/dp/1541601963
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia may no longer be Communist, Communism and sympathy for Communist ideas have proliferated across the globe.
In To Overthrow the World, Sean McMeekin investigates the evolution of Communism from a seductive ideal of a classless society into the ruling doctrine of tyrannical regimes. Tracing Communism’s ascent from theory to practice, McMeekin ranges from Karl Marx’s writings to the rise and fall of the USSR under Stalin to Mao’s rise to power in China to the acceleration of Communist or Communist-inspired policies around the world in the twenty-first century. McMeekin argues, however, that despite the endurance of Communism, it remains deeply unpopular as a political form. Where it has arisen, it has always arisen by force.
Blending historical narrative with cutting-edge scholarship, To Overthrow the World revolutionizes our understanding of the evolution of Communism—an idea that seemingly cannot die.
1960 MAO
Transcript
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| 0:28.6 | I'm John Dachan with Professor Sean McMeakin. The new book is to overthrow the world, the rise and fall and rise of communism. |
| 0:36.6 | Professor has done us the favor of putting together in a continual narrative |
| 0:41.1 | how the idea of communism, the Communist Manifesto, |
| 0:47.7 | penned by Karl Marx with Friedrich Engels, his co-pilot, |
| 0:52.3 | how that has influenced different cultures where it never was native. |
| 0:57.0 | Travel that book, those phrases have traveled around the world and continue to reverberate. |
| 1:03.0 | But I learned from the professor that communism, Marxist-Leninism or just Marxism, |
| 1:10.0 | prospers only in conjunction with extreme violence. |
| 1:14.8 | As the professor says again and again, |
| 1:17.3 | no communist dictatorship has ever come to power through the ballot box. |
| 1:21.2 | It's extreme violence and the disintegration of norms, |
| 1:25.6 | that's the modern word we're using, |
| 1:30.9 | around the governance that creates conditions for this fiction of the dictatorship, let's say, the old-fashioned way, conspiracy of equals. |
| 1:41.8 | We need to touch on a man named Babouf. Gracchus Babouf was his nom de guerre, a Frenchman who was executed for being a troublemaker. |
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