Ideas Folgen

Fascism has been called “the aestheti-cization of politics.” Nazis and Italian Fascists both made visual culture, art, even fashion part of their destructive programs. Now the far-right in the U.S. is taking lessons from history, selling its ideas through memes, and hate-filled videos.

How do authoritarian leaders use threats, illusions and force to seize and maintain power? And what does it take for truth and justice to prevail? IDEAS explores the rise and fall of pivotal authoritarians and their regimes from recent world history, and asks what we can learn from their eventual downfall. We start our series with the legacy of Italian fascism and its relevance today.Listen to other episodes in this series:How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Augusto Pinochet's ChileHow to Defeat Authoritarianism | Idi Amin's UgandaHow to Defeat Authoritarianism | Bashar al-Assad's SyriaHow to Defeat Authoritarianism | Today's AuthoritariansGuests in this podcast:Joshua Arthurs is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto.Robert Ventresca is the president of King's University College at Western University and a historian of 20th century Europe.Aitana Guia is the Mackenzie Papineau Memorial Chair in Modern Spanish History at York University, Toronto, Canada. 

Acclaimed author Gabor Maté joins the conversation in part two of our series exploring Wilhelm von Humboldt’s public education system. Maté is a former English teacher. In this episode we ask: Is Humboldt's 200-year-old system equipped to meet the challenging demands of the 21st century? And does it still reflect his ideals, especially at the university level? *This episode concludes our two-part series. It originally aired on April 16, 2024.