Recursion theory and the ‘death tax’

Since the 2016 US federal election, political actors have weaponized online fake news as a means of gaining electoral advantage (Egelhofer and Lecheler 2019). To advance understandings of the actors and methods involved in perpetuating fake news, this article focuses on an Australian story that circulated on and offline through different discourses during the 2019 federal election. We use content analyses of 100,000 media articles and eight million Facebook posts to trace false claims that the centre-left Labor party would introduce an inheritance tax dubbed a ‘death tax’ if it won office. To understand this evolution of ‘death tax’ discourse on and offline – and its weaponization by various actors – we draw from existing theorems of agenda setting, backfire effects, and propose our own recursion theory.

Israel

This chapter focuses on a case of nationwide proportional representation. In Israel, all members of the 120-seat Knesset are elected in a single nationwide district under closed party lists. Due to this electoral system design, the geographic location of votes does not matter for a party’s overall seat total, and candidates have almost no incentive to develop a personal vote. The chapter finds strong support for the expertise model in how the Labor Party assigns members to legislative committees, but relatively little support in the Likud Party. Both parties exhibit strong issue ownership tendencies.

Labor, the External Affairs Power and the Rights of Aborigines

The Australian Constitution gave the Commonwealth not a “treaty power” but a vague power over “external affairs,” the precise meaning of which was elusive for most of the twentieth century. From the 1930s, Labor judges and politicians such as H. V. Evatt saw its potential to extend Commonwealth power by legislating international agreements throughout Australia. The non-Labor parties rejected the idea of using the “external affairs” power to legislate in areas formerly the responsibility of the states but the federal Labor Party continued in the Evatt tradition. After significant uncertainties, the Whitlam government used the external affairs power to pass the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the first significant human rights legislation in the country, which in turn had a profound effect on the law of the land in the country by making the second Mabo Case possible.

“Brick Dust and Ashes”: Liberation and Reconstruction

As the Red Army fought its way back west, it discovered a devastated land: thousands of villages burnt to the ground; Jewish civilians, along with those accused of partisan activity or Soviet sympathies, lying dead; and millions of young people sent to Germany as slave labor. Party activists were faced with reintegrating survivors and rebuilding the economy. In western Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic states, nationalist guerrillas continued to fight against Soviet power. NKVD officials carried out “filtration” to identify active collaborators, and the Party and unions reviewed all members who sought reinstatement. The newly freed inhabitants were incorporated into the ration system and subject to mobilization for labor and the army. Many resisted mobilization, especially for work on distant sites, and rebuilding was complicated by nationwide shortages. The German High Command finally surrendered on May 8, 1945. People streamed into the streets to celebrate, dance, embrace, and toast the victory. Although reconstruction would continue for years, the war at last was over.

Southern Palm, Northern Pine

This chapter examines how Civil War memories anchored farmer-labor radicalism during the 1870s and 1880s. The Greenback-Labor Party in particular used wartime tropes to submit that the popular commemoration of the war, as either a North-South or Black-white axis, was fatal to class and trade organization. Instead, party members advocated a “class reconciliation” of workingmen across both sections. Although such a reconciliation was thwarted by internal contradictions and external resistance, Greenback politics offered discrete opportunities for interracial remembrance after the decline of Reconstruction, with veterans bridging out of major parties and toward reformist and revolutionary politics.

Black cat, pink frogs and ‘obituaries as a memento’: Alexander Bogdanov’s Vologda exile

The purpose of this article is to collect together separate pieces of information about A. Bogdanov’s exile in Vologda and retrace the conditions under which his formation as a politician and a thinker was taking place in those years. An outstanding scientist, philosopher, physician and revolutionary, Alexander Bogdanov spent three years in exile in Vologda (1901–03). A. Lunacharsky, A. Remizov, N. Berdyaev, B. Kistyakovsky, P. Shchegolev, B. Savinkov and his wife V. Uspenskaya, and many of the future prominent figures of the Bolshevik Party were in exile in Vologda during that period. For a year and a half, Alexander Bogdanov lived in the village of Kuvshinovo near Vologda and worked as a doctor at a psychiatric hospital, the description of which he later used in his science fiction novel Red Star. After leaving the service and obtaining permission for private practice, he used his practice as an excuse to visit his associates. He helped the Vologda exiles by giving them medical examination certificates to be submitted to the police, which allowed the exiles to stay in the governorate city rather than be sent to the remote settlements of Vologda Governorate. In the course of numerous discussions between exiles belonging to different philosophical and political camps, Bogdanov’s skill as a philosopher and polemicist was honed. Thanks to the tremendous dedication, hard work, and concentration on his scientific activities, Alexander Bogdanov had strengthened his reputation as a famous Marxist writer by the end of the exile. Moreover, due to his illegal correspondence with the editorial board of the Iskra newspaper, he established contacts with the leading circles of the emerging Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The time Alexander Bogdanov spent in exile in Vologda paid off and produced a great effect on his formation as a researcher and a political activist.