Dancing on Bones
History and Power in China, Russia and North Korea
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Dancing on Bones
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Narrated by:
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Elizabeth Sastre
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By:
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Katie Stallard
About this listen
History didn't end. Democracy didn't triumph. America’s leading role in the world is no longer assured. Instead, authoritarian rule is on the rise, and the global order established after 1945 is under attack. This is the phenomenon Katie Stallard tackles in Dancing on Bones as she examines how the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea manipulate the past to serve the present and secure the future of authoritarian rule.
Russia has annexed Crimea, started a war in eastern Ukraine, and repeatedly massed troops on its borders. China has stepped up war games near Taiwan and militarized the South China Sea, while North Korea has resumed missile testing and blood-curdling threats against the United States. These three states consistently top lists of threats to US and European security, and yet the leaders of all three insist that it is their country that is threatened, rewriting history and exploiting the memory of the wars of the last century to justify their actions and shore up popular support. Since coming to power, Xi Jinping has almost doubled the length of China’s World War II, Vladimir Putin has elevated the memory of the Great Patriotic War to the status of a national religion, and Kim Jong Un has invested vast sums in rebuilding war museums in his impoverished state, while those who try to challenge the official version of history are silenced and jailed. But this didn’t start with Putin, Xi, and Kim, and it won’t end with them.
Drawing on first-hand, on-the-ground reporting, Dancing on Bones argues that if we want to understand where these three nuclear powers are heading, we must understand the stories they are telling their citizens about the past.
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What listeners say about Dancing on Bones
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- S. Morris
- 13-02-24
So Relevant in Today's Climate
This book intrigued me. I've often heard how history is the first casualty of the truth when it comes to weaving your own narrative. Dictators manipulate the world around them in order to control their populations. Katie Stallard has written an excellent book on how history has been distorted by the three most threatning regimes in geopolitics today.
Readers will understand how Putin, for example, is so easily able to generate such patriotic ferver to support his war in Ukraine. How China's premier has reworked the second World war to push a stronger victimhood narrative to drive the populous toward military expansion, and how the Kim dynasty in the world's most closed society, North Korea, has done something similar, even elevating his family role in the defeat of Japan in the second World war. Further, North Korea's intense anti Am,erican propaganda sees school children brainwashed with horrific stories and imagery in order to create the next generation of soldiers, willing to throw their lives away in the cause of fighting the demon, the United States.
What makes this book so useful, is how it prophetically explains the current behaviour of the likes of Putin and China's leadership. When you discover the extent that history has been rewritten by these regimes, you will better understand why their populations believe what they do.
This is the first audio book I've heard narrated by Elizabeth Sastre and I must say that her voice and delivery are both easy on the ear and competently handled. There was some difficult foreign names and places and she dealt with them with aplomb.
if you want to get a better grasp of how the manipulation of history can be used to shape the attitudes and beliefs of people, then this is a great place to start.
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