Category: English

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Cindy McCreery, Associate Professor of History, University of Sydney

Prince Andrew will be stripped of his royal titles, meaning he will no longer be called “prince” or “His Royal Highness”.

A statement from Buckingham Palace said:

His Majesty has today initiated a formal process to remove the style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew.

Prince Andrew will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor […] These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him.

Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.

The statement also noted Andrew will have to leave his current home, Royal Lodge, and move to alternative private accommodation.

These moves follows allegations, which Andrew continues to “vigorously deny”, surrounding his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

But how can a prince – who is, after all, the son of a queen – be stripped of the title “prince”?

Here’s how it works – and what it might mean for succession.

How do you actually strip a prince of his titles?

This is within the remit of the monarch, Charles III. The monarch issues an official document called a letters patent.

They are typically used to grant a title or a right, but this is doing the opposite: withdrawing it from Andrew.

There are precedents for monarchs removing titles in this way. When Diana and Charles divorced, she lost the use of “Her Royal Highness”, as did Sarah Ferguson, the former wife of Andrew. So a royal losing their title doesn’t always have to be scandalous or unusual.

But what’s not happened yet – because it’s not within the remit of the king – is the removal of Andrew’s position as eighth in line to the throne.

That requires parliamentary legislation to do – and not just the Westminster parliament, either.

To do that, the Westminster parliament would have to introduce a bill and pass it. However, the move would also require virtually identical legislation in all of the Commonwealth parliaments (such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and so on).

That’s not beyond the realm of possibility.

A bit over a decade ago, with what came to be known as the Perth agreements, the Commonwealth parliaments agreed to change the rules around succession and gender. No longer would older princesses be leapfrogged by younger brothers to get a spot on the throne.

It happened very smoothly, so it is certainly possible for all Commonwealth parliaments to agree to coordinate on something. However, the Westminster parliament cannot instruct other parliaments to pass such legislation.

So, could all the Commonwealth parliaments coordinate to remove Andrew from the line of succession? I have not seen any mention of this in media reports so far, but I would be highly surprised if this didn’t happen in future.

It seems incompatible that Andrew would lose his title and still be in line for succession.

But is the son of the queen not always a prince?

By custom, yes, the son of a queen is known as a prince. But as we have seen, that title can be removed.

The best example is in 1936, when King Edward VIII abdicated so as to marry divorcee Wallis Simpson, and he lost the title of king.

He was thereafter no longer entitled to the title “His Royal Highness” and he got a new title: Duke of Windsor. He had some prestige, but was no longer entitled to use his royal title.

Edward VIII (who was also Andrew’s great uncle) did not have any children. But if he had, they wouldn’t have been entitled to inherit the throne.

And that was an actual reigning king, not just a prince.

Acting in a moment of crisis

Andrew has reportedly accepted the latest decision but it was made by his brother, the king.

This is a signal from Charles not just to the public but also to his heir, William, that he’s doing everything he can to smooth the path for William’s succession and to respond to public anger over the allegations against Andrew.

As an historian, this is a moment to reflect on how this is another example of the British monarch taking decisive action in a moment of crisis, to save the reputation of and public support for the monarchy.

Another example would be King George V, who acted decisively in the first world war not only to strip titles from family members who had supported Germany in the war, but to also change the name of his family.

They were known as Saxe-Coburg Gotha (a German name), but they became the house of Windsor.

Cindy McCreery has received funding from the ARC.

– ref. No longer ‘Prince Andrew’: an expert on how royals can be stripped of their titles – https://theconversation.com/no-longer-prince-andrew-an-expert-on-how-royals-can-be-stripped-of-their-titles-268766

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Kate Cantrell, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Editing and Publishing, University of Southern Queensland

Content warning: this article includes graphic details about sexual assault some readers may find distressing.

Prince Andrew will be stripped of his royal titles, including prince, and will move out of his home, Royal Lodge, to a private residence. Buckingham Palace issued a statement today that King Charles has initiated a formal process to remove the “style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew”, who “will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor”.

The decision comes in the wake of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, published this fortnight. The memoir includes an inside account of the two years Giuffre spent as a “sex slave” working for Jeffrey Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Giuffre died by suicide in April this year, aged 41, on her farm in Western Australia.

Three weeks before she died, she emailed her co-author, journalist Amy Wallace, and longtime publicist Dini von Mueffling: “In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that Nobody’s Girl is still released.”

“Today,” Giuffre’s family said, “she declares a victory. She has brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage”.

British historian and author Andrew Lownie (author of a book about Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, called Entitled), told Sky News earlier this month, “the only way the story will go away is if [Andrew] leaves Royal Lodge, goes into exile abroad with his ex-wife, and is basically stripped of all his honours, including Prince Andrew”. Sarah Ferguson will also move out of Royal Lodge.

As a trauma memoir, Nobody’s Girl forces us to bear witness to an uncomfortable truth: Giuffre’s abuse was hidden in plain sight.

“Don’t be fooled by those in Epstein’s circle who say they didn’t know what Epstein was doing,” she writes. “Anyone who spent any significant amount of time with Epstein saw him touching girls.” She continues: “They can say they didn’t know he was raping children. But they were not blind.”

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Review: Nobody’s Girl: A memoir of surviving abuse and fighting for justice – Virginia Roberts Giuffre (Doubleday)

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Four days before the memoir was published, Prince Andrew announced he would no longer use the titles conferred upon him, including Duke of York. Three days later, leaked emails from 2011 suggested he gave Giuffre’s date of birth and social security number to one of his protection officers, hours before the infamous photograph of him with her was published.

Maxwell’s brother, Ian Maxwell, published an article in the Spectator today, headlined “Don’t take Virginia Giuffre’s memoir at face value”. The memoir keeps his sister, who was convicted of charges including sex trafficking of a minor, in world headlines – at a time Donald Trump has said he will “take a look” at pardoning her. Earlier this year, Maxwell was moved to a lower security prison to continue her 20-year sentence.

Allegations of parental abuse

Giuffre writes that her father began molesting her at the age of seven. He “strenuously” denies this. While the memoir makes this public for the first time, Giuffre’s older brother Danny Wilson told ABC’s 7.30 he first heard the allegations years before the memoir was published – and confronted his father about it.

Giuffre regularly wet her pants at school – earning her the cruel nickname “Pee Girl”. She recalls: “I began to get painful urinary tract infections. My infections were so severe, I couldn’t hold my urine.”

After one (of several) medical examinations, a doctor told her mother her primary school aged daughter’s hymen was broken. Giuffre writes of this moment:

My mother didn’t hesitate. ‘Oh, she rides horses bareback,’ she explained. That was the end of that. I didn’t even know what a hymen was.

Later, she recalls her mother raising suspicions about her involvement with Epstein and “apex predator” Maxwell, questioning “what this older couple wanted with a teenage girl who had no credentials”.

Giuffre writes: “I guess I was glad she cared enough to have suspicions, but at the same time, wasn’t it a little late for that? I knew she couldn’t save me; she’d never saved me before.”

Around the time of her doctor’s visit, the memoir alleges, Giuffre’s father began “trading” his daughter to a friend – a tall, muscular man with “a military bearing” who was also abusing his own stepdaughter. In 2000, the man was convicted of molesting another girl in North Carolina. He spent 14 months in prison and a decade as a registered sex offender.

Giuffre writes that she was abused by these men for five years, from ages seven to eleven; it only stopped when she began menstruating.

Heartbreakingly, Giuffre discloses that at one point she imagined Maxwell (or “G-Max” as she wanted to be known) as her mother: “While I was hardly equipped to judge, it often seemed to me that Epstein and Maxwell behaved like actual parents.” Among other things, the pair gave Giuffre her first cell phone, whitened her teeth, and taught her how to hold a knife and fork “just so”.

‘The younger, the better’

Giuffre’s memoir is a courageous and clear-eyed account of what trauma takes – and what recovery demands.

Told in four chronological parts – “Daughter”, “Prisoner”, “Survivor” and “Warrior” – the memoir meticulously records the “sexual assaulting, battering, exploiting, and abusing” Giuffre endured throughout her life, most notably at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell.

The result is a devastating exposé of the fetishisation and abuse of girls – “the younger, the better”, Epstein said – and society’s failure to protect the most vulnerable.

It is also a damning indictment of everyone who knew and looked away.

‘Please don’t stop reading’

Giuffre was 16 and working as a locker-room attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort when Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her to “service Epstein”, under the pretence of training as a masseuse. (In October 2007, Trump – who is portrayed favourably in the memoir – reportedly banned Epstein from his resort after Epstein hit on the teenage daughter of another member.)

Over the next two years, and roughly 350 pages, Giuffre tells how she was trafficked to “a multitude of powerful men”, including Prince Andrew, French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, a prominent psychology professor and a respected United States senator.

Giuffre’s original memoir manuscript was titled “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club”.

In one of the most distressing scenes, Giuffre describes how she was trafficked to “a former minister”, who raped her so “savagely” she was left “bleeding from [her] mouth, vagina, and anus”. When Virginia told Epstein about the brutal attack, which made it hurt to breathe and swallow, he said, “You’ll get that sometimes.”

Eight weeks later, he returned Giuffre to the politician, who this time abused her on one of Epstein’s private jets. In the US version of the memoir, the politician is described not as a “former minister”, but as “a former Prime Minister”.

“I know this is a lot to take in,” Giuffre writes. “The violence. The neglect. The bad decisions. The self-harm. But please don’t stop reading.”

One of the most devastating revelations comes toward the end of the memoir. Giuffre – now in her forties – receives a phone call from a confidant claiming to have evidence that Epstein paid off her father when she was a girl. In 2000, when Epstein and Maxwell started abusing the teenager at El Brillo Way, it is alleged that her father accepted “a sum of money” from the paedophile.

According to Giuffre, when she confronted her father, there was “a brief silence” before “he started yelling at [her] for being an ungrateful daughter”.

Of all the betrayals she endured, this one stands alone: “I will never get over it”.

Girls no one cared about

“When a molester shows his face,” Giuffre writes, “many people tend to look the other way.”

In chapter 11, Giuffre describes how Epstein’s personal chef, the celebrity cook Adam Perry Lang, made her her favourite food – pizza. This, apparently, became something of a tradition – Lang feeding Giuffre, but never “ogl[ing]”, “even if I was standing naked in front of him, which was not unusual”. She wrote: “When I’d finished attending to Epstein or one of the other guests, Lang would have a cheesy hot pie waiting.”

In 2019, Lang issued a statement about working for Epstein: “My role was limited to meal preparation. I was unaware of the depraved behavior and have great sympathy and admiration for the brave women who have come forward.”

In another scene, Giuffre reveals that Epstein “never wore a condom”. After falling pregnant at the age of 17, she suffered an ectopic pregnancy.

On this day, Giuffre recalls how Epstein and Maxwell (“two halves of a wicked whole”) – with the help of Epstein’s New York butler – drove her to hospital after she woke in “a pool of blood”. Epstein lied to the doctor about her age, Giuffre alleges, and the two men seemed to enter “a gentlemen’s agreement” in which “whatever was going on between this middle-aged man and his teenage acquaintance […] would be kept quiet”.

“We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care,” Giuffre writes. “At times I think he even believed he cared.” She describes how Epstein “threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning, girls who had nothing, girls who wished to be and do better.” As a self-described “pleaser” who “survived by acquiescing”, Giuffre writes that Epstein and Maxwell “knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein” her childhood abusers had: abuse cloaked in “a fake mantle of ‘love’.”

Sex as birthright

In March 2001, at Maxwell’s upscale townhouse in London’s Belgravia – where Prince Andrew was famously pictured with his arm around the teenager – Giuffre recalls how Maxwell invited Andrew to guess her age. When the prince correctly guessed 17, he reportedly told her, “My daughters are just a little younger than you.”

Later that night, she writes, Prince Andrew bought the teenager cocktails at Tramp – an exclusive London nightclub – where she and the prince danced awkwardly and the prince “sweated profusely”. In the car, on the way home, Maxwell instructed Giuffre “to do for [Andy] what you do for Jeffrey”.

In November 2019, in his calamitous interview with BBC’s Newsnight, Prince Andrew denied any wrongdoing, claiming he had “no recollection of ever meeting this lady”. He told presenter Emily Maitlis he could not have danced sweatily at Tramp because he had “a peculiar medical condition” that prevented perspiration, caused by what he described as “an overdose of adrenaline” in the Falklands War.

In that interview, Andrew admitted his decision to stay at Epstein’s New York home in December 2010 – months after Epstein was released from jail for soliciting and procuring minors for prostitution – was “the wrong thing to do”. However, the prince claimed his decision was “probably coloured by [his] tendency to be too honourable”.

In her memoir, Giuffre describes Andrew as “friendly enough but entitled” – “as if he believed having sex with [her] was his birthright.” She alleges she had sex with the prince on two more occasions.

The last word

Publishing a book posthumously can be an ethical minefield. Critics often question whether posthumous publication is what the author would have wanted. They point to the author’s right to protect their work and their literary reputation – a right that cannot survive them.

However, Giuffre left no space for speculation. In the email she sent her co-author and publicist before her death, she made her wishes clear:

It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time. The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals.

As the memoir progresses, Giuffre’s health spirals. The physical, emotional and mental toll of trauma closes in on her. Epstein is dead. Maxwell is in prison. But Giuffre is still “trapped in an invisible cage”.

“From the start,” she says, “I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.”

Before she died, Giuffre made a promise to her husband and children that she would try with “all her might” to believe her life mattered. Her final goal was to prevent “the emotional time-bomb” inside her from detonating.

While Giuffre may at last be beyond harm, the truth remains. She – like the hundreds of girls abused by Epstein and his associates – was wronged.

Her fight, like theirs, transcends death: release the Epstein files; hold abusers and their enablers accountable; expose the systems that protect predators; abolish statutes of limitations for the sexual abuse of minors. Ensure no other child suffers. This is what Giuffre wanted.

By publishing her memoir, she ensured the fight would survive her. She made certain her voice would outlast her pain.

In this way, she got the last word.

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If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.

Kate Cantrell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Prince Andrew stripped of all titles after Virginia Giuffre’s memoir. Her family declares ‘victory’ – https://theconversation.com/prince-andrew-stripped-of-all-titles-after-virginia-giuffres-memoir-her-family-declares-victory-267751

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Lexi Eikelboom, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University

The documentary, 1,000 Men & Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, has made Tia Billinger – stage name Bonnie Blue – a household name.

Famous for her sexual stunts, including one in which she has sex with more than 1,000 men in 12 hours, Bonnie Blue fascinates us because we do not understand her.

Billinger claims to be an embodiment of feminism. She points out she is rich and independent, and says she has taken control of her sexualisation. Yet it is difficult to imagine how sleeping with 1,000 men in a day could lead someone to feel empowered rather than degraded.

Some have offered personality-based explanations for Billinger’s choices, saying she may simply be an opportunistic sociopath.

But explanations like these relegate her to the status of a social oddity, or a monster. And this discounts the social conditions that produce someone like Billinger – the same social conditions all women face.

The contradiction Bonnie Blue embodies reveals just how fraught a woman’s relationship to power and influence is. Women who seek power often encounter a double bind that leads them to use their power in a way that also curtails it.

Power through subservience

Power requires two ingredients. It involves autonomy and self-determination. It also requires being embedded in society so as to exert influence within it.

These two aspects of power work in tandem for men, and especially white men. But for women, and people with other marginalised identities, they often pull in opposite directions.

US feminist writer Andrea Dworkin described this situation in her 1978 book Right-wing Women: for women, power comes through subservience to male values.

For a woman, to be embedded in society is, by definition, to have her autonomy and self-determination restricted. As a result she is forced to choose: do what you want or have influence.

The reward for protecting men’s access to women

Billinger’s business model is striking. She makes enormous amounts of money by offering sex for free. The fact the sex itself is free enables her to turn around and sell a desirable commodity through subscription-based platforms such as Fansly – namely, the fantasy of female availability.

After her 1,000 men stunt, Billinger told her documentary film makers

I loved […] seeing how many men had wedding rings on. I just loved knowing I was doing something their wives should’ve done.

She tells men not to “feel guilty for doing something you deserved and you was, well, you was owed”. Despite appearances, then, Billinger is not autonomous at all. Her power is the result of subservience to male entitlement.

There have always been women who gain power by protecting men’s access to women. Consider, for example, US conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016). While Billinger is famous for her extreme sexual stunts, Schlafly could be considered the original tradwife.

Initially an expert in foreign policy, Schlafly was unable to gain political traction through her expertise, so she built a career opposing women’s liberation on behalf of housewives. She got the political power she wanted, but not in the field she really cared about.

Womanliness as a masquerade

Both Schlafly’s and Billinger’s personas map squarely onto one side or the other of what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called the Madonna-whore complex, in which a misogynistic society categorises women according to the kind of service they offer men – either as a saintly mother figure or as a sexual object.

Each of these roles also deflects attention by attacking the opposite side of the dichotomy.

Billinger positions herself as a rival to men’s wives, claiming her critics simply want to turn her into a housewife. Schlafly positioned herself as a housewife opposing equal rights because she considered such rights to be bound up with sexual promiscuity.

In reality, each stance relies on the other. And we’re beginning to see this manifest in the emergence of tradwife Onlyfans content.

In 1929, psychoanalyst Joan Riviere wrote about a tendency in her female patients she called “womanliness as a masquerade”.

Riviere notes how women who exhibited traits socially coded as “masculine”, or who occupied positions historically reserved for men, attempted to hide this masculinity through a performance of femininity. She wrote:

women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.

To undertake a “masculine” pursuit of power, both Schlafly and Billinger uphold a particular ideal of femininity. And both women’s careers are logical – if misguided – responses to the messages women receive about where their value lies.

A never-ending tradeoff

Our systems punish women for wanting things such as power, money, or visibility, requiring them to turn against other women, give up their expertise, or make themselves infinitely available to men.

If women were allowed to pursue power without these sacrifices, it might curtail the harms other women face as a result of the masked pursuit of power.

Women should not have to choose between power, money and visibility on one hand, and community and liberation on the other. They should not have to choose between Madonna and the whore.

Yet as political gains continue to shrink around the world, many women are starting to feel this double-bind more forcefully. There may be more Bonnie Blues and Phyllis Schlaflys on the horizon.

Lexi Eikelboom does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Sex with 1,000 men in 12 hours: why Bonnie Blue is neither a feminist nor a monster – https://theconversation.com/sex-with-1-000-men-in-12-hours-why-bonnie-blue-is-neither-a-feminist-nor-a-monster-267982

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Lisa J. Hackett, Senior Lecturer, Sociology & Criminology, University of New England

Monopoly is the best-selling licensed board game of all time, popular since its 1935 release when “the new craze” swept the world.

It has remained a staple, with over 390,000 copies sold in Australia to date.

Its transformation from an economic critique to a capitalist icon highlights its historical evolution and adaptability.

A game with a message

Monopoly’s roots trace back to The Landlord’s Game (1903), created by Elizabeth Magie to critique monopolistic land ownership.

It featured two sets of rules – one emphasising wealth accumulation, the other wealth distribution. The aim was to demonstrate how different policy levers, taxing income versus taxing land, affect economic outcomes of players.

It was based on economist Henry George’s proposition for a “land value tax” or “single tax”. Under this regime, people would keep all they earned, with public funds raised from land ownership instead.

The two sets of rules in the Landlord’s Game demonstrate how wealth is either concentrated in the hands of landlords (taxing income) or is more fairly distributed across society (taxing land).

In 1935, a man named Charles Darrow removed the game’s socialist critique (the version that taxed land), renamed it Monopoly and sold it to Parker Brothers. The game was now focused on the accumulation of real estate until one player remained, having bankrupted their fellows.

The game thrived during the Great Depression, offering an escapist fantasy of financial success.

In 1935, Parker Brothers paid Magie US$500 (US$11,800 today) for the rights to her game, ensuring their ownership of Monopoly was unchallenged. As part of the deal, they released her original game, but it failed to gain traction with players.

Not everyone welcomed its capitalist themes – Fidel Castro famously ordered all Monopoly sets in Cuba destroyed in 1959

Playability and house rules

Philip Orbanes, former vice president of research at Parker Brothers, argued a good board game must have clear rules, social interaction and an element of luck. Monopoly ticks all three boxes.

Despite this, Monopoly is notorious for causing arguments. Hasbro (who bought out Parker Brothers in 1991, acquiring Monopoly in the process) found that nearly half of Monopoly games end in disputes, often over rule interpretations. Monopoly is the game most likely to be banned, or see a particular player banned, on game nights.

Monopoly’s rules have been adjusted and manipulated as players have sought to overcome the inequities in the game. Another of Hasbro’s surveys found 68% of players admitting to not having read the rules in their entirety, and 49% said they had made up their own rules.

These “house rules” include things like cash bonuses on Free Parking or modifying auctions to make the game more engaging.

Identity and nostalgia

Monopoly’s use of real-world locations makes it adaptable to local markets.

The original version reflected Atlantic City’s socio-economic hierarchy. When Waddingtons released the English version in 1936 under license (the same version which would go on to be released in Australia in 1937), Atlantic City’s wealthy Boardwalk and working class Mediterranean Avenue became London’s Mayfair and Old Kent Road, respectively.

The game can also serve as a bridge to former geographies. The 1980s Yugoslav edition remains a link to the past for those who lived through that era, recording changing political geographies and cultural shifts.

Monopoly is a flagship brand for Hasbro, worth an estimated US$272m in 2018. Part of Monopoly’s success lies in its licensing strategy. The board layout is extremely flexible, allowing for localised adaptations to be made to suit different markets, without any substantial change to the game play.

There are believed to be over 3,400 different versions of Monopoly issued, from classic city street layouts to popular culture imaginings.

It is this aspect that attracts collectors; world record holder Neil Scanlon owns 4,379 sets of Monopoly (he is still searching for the Cronulla Sharks set).

Monopoly reflects the world’s economic systems, embodying both the dream of wealth and the realities of financial inequality.

It has been studied by economists and educators as a tool for understanding capitalism, wealth accumulation and market control.

The game originally meant to critique monopolistic practices became a celebration of them. Each player has the opportunity to accumulate vast wealth, reflecting the promise of capitalism: where anyone can enjoy riches as long as they work hard enough.

Magie’s message was leveraged by Federal MP Andrew Leigh in his 2023 critique of the growing concentration of business monopolies in Australia. Leigh noted how monopolies affected Australian families and how the Albanese government had “increased penalties for anti-competitive conduct, and banned unfair contract terms” with the aim of creating a fairer society.

Enduring popularity

In 2025, Hasbro introduced digital banking versions – though many players lament the feel of physical wads of cash.

The game continues to be a favourite, ranking as the top childhood game among Baby Boomers, Gen X and Millennials – and fourth for Gen Z. The sense of nostalgia was strong among all groups, not surprising as board games were found to be an integral part of family bonding.

Monopoly has evolved from an anti-capitalist critique into a commercial juggernaut. While it has faced criticism for erasing its socialist origins and its reliance on luck, its ability to reinvent itself has ensured its lasting appeal.

As both a cultural artefact and a competitive game, Monopoly remains firmly embedded in board game culture.

Lisa J. Hackett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. 90 years of Monopoly: how the ‘new craze’ morphed from socialist critique to capitalist dream – https://theconversation.com/90-years-of-monopoly-how-the-new-craze-morphed-from-socialist-critique-to-capitalist-dream-252738

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Tilman Ruff, Honorary Principal Fellow, School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne

US President Donald Trump has instructed the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing immediately, “on an equal basis” with other countries’ testing programs.

If Trump is referring to the resumption of explosive nuclear testing, this would be an extremely unfortunate, regrettable step by the United States.

It would almost inevitably be followed by tit-for-tat reciprocal announcements by other nuclear-armed states, particularly Russia and China, and cement an accelerating arms race that puts us all in great jeopardy.

It would also create profound risks of radioactive fallout globally. Even if such nuclear tests are conducted underground, this poses a risk in terms of the possible release and venting of radioactive materials, as well as the potential leakage into groundwater.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has been signed by 187 states – it’s one of the most widely supported disarmament treaties in the world.

The US signed the treaty decades ago, but has yet to ratify it. Nonetheless, it is actually legally bound not to violate the spirit and purpose of the treaty while it’s a signatory.

What testing is used for, and why it stopped

In earlier years, the purpose of testing was to understand the effects of nuclear weapons – for example, the blast damage at different distances, which provides confidence around destroying a given military target.

Understanding the consequences of nuclear weapons helps militaries plan their use, and to some extent, protect their own military equipment and people from the possible use of nuclear weapons by adversaries.

But since the end of the second world war, states have mostly used testing as part of the development of new weapons designs. There have been a very large number of tests, more than 2,000, mostly seeking to understand how these new weapons work.

The huge environmental and health problems caused by nuclear testing prompted nations to agree a moratorium on atmospheric testing for a couple of years in the early 1960s. In 1963, the Partial Test Ban Treaty banned nuclear tests in all environments except underground.

Since then, nuclear-armed states have stopped explosively testing at different times. The US stopped in 1992, while France stopped in 1996. China and Russia also aren’t known to have conducted any tests since the 1990s. North Korea is the only state to have openly tested a nuclear weapon this century, most recently in 2017.

These stoppages came in the 1990s for a reason: by that time, it became possible to test new nuclear weapon designs reliably through technical and computer developments, without having to actually explode them.

So, essentially, the nuclear states, particularly the more advanced ones, stopped when they no longer needed to explosively test new weapon designs to keep modernising their stocks, as they’re still doing.

Worrying levels of nuclear proliferation

There is some good news on the nuclear weapons front. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has now been signed by half the world’s nations. This is a historic treaty that, for the first time, bans nuclear weapons and provides the only internationally agreed framework for their eventual elimination.

With the exception of this significant development, however, everything else has been going badly.

All nine nuclear-armed states (the US, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel) are investing unprecedented sums in developing more accurate, stealthier, longer-range, faster, more concealable nuclear weapons.

This potentially lowers the threshold for their use. And it certainly gives no indication these powers are serious about fulfilling their legally binding obligations to disarm under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Moreover, multiple nuclear-armed states have been involved in recent conflicts in which nuclear threats have been made, most notably Russia and Israel.

Worryingly, we have also seen the numbers of nuclear weapons “available for use” actually start to climb again.

This includes those in military stockpiles, those that have been deployed (linked to delivery systems such as missiles), and those on high alert, which are the ones most prone to accidental use because they can be launched within minutes of a decision to do so. All of these categories are on the increase.

Russia, in particular, has weapons we haven’t seen before, such as a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile that President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday his country has successfully tested. China, too, is embarking on a rapid build-up of nuclear weapons.

And the US has just completed assembling a new nuclear gravity bomb.

A new START treaty also not moving forward

Nearly all of the hard-won treaties that constrained nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War have been abrogated.

There’s now just one remaining treaty constraining 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, which are in the hands of the US and Russia. This is the New START Treaty, which is set to expire in February next year.

Putin offered to extend that treaty informally for another year, and Trump has said this is a good idea. But its official end is just four months away, and no actual negotiations on a successor treaty have begun.

The US has also said China needs to be involved in the successor treaty, which would make it enormously more complicated. China has not expressed a willingness to be part of the process.

Whether anything will be negotiated to maintain these restraints beyond February is unclear. None of the nuclear-armed states are negotiating any other new treaties, either.

All of this means the Doomsday Clock – one of the most authoritative and best-known assessments of the existential threats facing the world – has moved forward this year further than it has ever done before.

It’s really an extraordinarily dangerous time in history.

Tilman Ruff is affiliated with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and the Medical Association for Prevention of War.

– ref. If the US resumes nuclear weapons testing, this would be extremely dangerous for humanity – https://theconversation.com/if-the-us-resumes-nuclear-weapons-testing-this-would-be-extremely-dangerous-for-humanity-268661