Episode 164

This week the British satirical magazine Private Eye revealed that the Henry Jackson Society, which is named after a US congressman who was a cold warrior in the 1970s, had been paid £10,000 ($12,500) a month to place unflattering stories about China in the British media. It also emerged that the embassy of Japan has been paying a right-wing “charity” in London to dish out dirt on China. To make some sense of this strange sushi diplomacy, we welcome back to the Sputnik studio our China expert, Keith Bennett.

And, it has long been contended that the liberalization of the left, which seems to date back to the rise of so-called “Euro-communism” in the early 1980s, has been making a long retreat into impotence and irrelevance. The rise of the far-right in France, the US, and, indeed, in Britain is a direct consequence of that retreat. A new book exploring this thesis is gaining considerable traction, so we invited its co-author, Professor Steve Hall of the University of Teeside, onto the Sputnik sofa to tell us more.

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