Trapped History

From Paris To The Philippines: Making Sense of Murder | Episode 25

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Episode notes

It's October 1961. The Beatles are in Hamburg, JFK in the White House, Yuri Gagarin has just shot into space. And a state-sponsored killing spree is going down on the streets of a capital city. But this isn't Rio, Washington or Johannesburg. This isn't Moscow or Port-au-Prince or Saigon. This is Paris, the City of LIght, and by the month's end, over 200 north Africans will have been murdered by the city police.

Rewind a further 60 years and the same thing is playing out in the hills and forests of the Philippines, as the Moro resistance is being wiped out by the American army in the infamous Bud Dajo massacre.

Does history teach us anything? Looking around the world today, can we say that we have learnt from the past? This is a tough and harrowing episode of Trapped History, but it is an important one too.

So join Oswin and Carla as we try to make sense of atrocity in the company of one of the great historians of our times, Kim Wagner.