Eurozine
>First it kills one nation and then what?
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Barys Platrovich remembers Chernobyl @ Eurozine.
The dust has gone already…
There’s no dust – it’s been blown away… Great gusts of wind pick up tiny grains of sand and slash you with them, in your face, on your legs and chest: it hurts like you’re pushing your way through thorny bushes of raspberries or blackberries. And meanwhile there I am, walking round the town, Homel, amazed by the wind: where has it come from today, this wind – biting, strong, insistent, nasty… Why has it suddenly got up, blowing the sand from Ukraine into Belarus and from Belarus towards Moscow?
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I didn’t know anything yet, didn’t have the slightest idea of what had happened, but I well remember that day and that evening in Homel, 26 April 1986, I remember that I was unable to do anything because of the silent scream that, as it seemed to me, filled all the space around me. The silent scream uttered by all things animate and inanimate, even dust and sand, as they try desperately to escape from disaster. This is how elk and wild boar, wolves and deer, hares and squirrels flee from the merciless forest fire, in silence with their eyes wide open in panic. With the same terrifying scream adders and grass snakes, beetles and caterpillars try to crawl away from the fire, and with the same silent scream they die in it…
>Icon of the new
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| Justine Frischmann @ Sensitive Skin |
Petr Fischer on the paradoxical image of America for Europe @ Eurozine.
“Business–Answer–Solution” reads the advertising banner of the subsidiary of a foreign company in the centre of Prague. At first sight, the banner is not particularly interesting, in this case meaning that it is not particularly surprising. Surprising things are those that capture our attention, that shock us in their particular way. This corporate motto repeats the famous, infinitely repeated mantra of aggressive global capitalism, its focus purely pragmatic: give us a problem and we will come up with a solution that profits both you and us. “Win-win capitalism”, one could say in today’s international newspeak.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )What is interesting – in other words disconcerting – is the fact that the banner covers the window of a small shop situated directly behind the National Museum, a building that – as in every other European city – symbolizes a certain perception of historicity cultivated on the old continent at least since the nineteenth century. The National Museum preserves the history of the Czech nation, and the people who work in it analyse and reflect on Czech national existence, its peculiarity, uniqueness, difference or connectedness. This activity is not governed by the pragmatic slogan of performance, of completed things, of faits accomplis; rather, it is ruled by a different three words, directed at thinking and its incessant, uncertain movement: Discussion–Question–Searching.
>Politics of bad memories
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| Nina Katchadourian @ X-TRA/ |
Markha Valenta considers the real motives for attacks on multiculturalism in Europe @ Eurozine.
You always know something is up when the leaders of Germany, France and Britain are in happy agreement. Their most recent cheery confabulation is that multiculturalism in Europe has been a failure. In quick succession first Merkel, then Cameron, then Sarkozy seized the limelight and declared diversity’s demise. They stated this as a truism rather than as an argument. Equally striking is that these political leaders seem more relieved than troubled: as if, for a while, western Europe had lost its bearings but now is regaining them. Diversity is out, they seem to say, and common sense back in.
But of course, given the diversity of our societies, it is diversity that is common sense.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Even as I say this, it is very much to be wondered if Europe, notably Germany and France (of all places), ever gave multiculturalism a real chance. To paraphrase Gandhi’s famous quip on western civilisation, European multiculturalism would be a good idea. With the exception of the Netherlands and Sweden, there have been no serious attempts in continental Europe at implementing comprehensive policies for accommodating the new cultural and religious pluralism. So in fact what Merkel, Cameron and Sarkozy actually are saying is that western Europe’s response to immigration has been a failure. This we could perhaps discuss: but in that case as a failure of western European politicians, policies and imagination, rather than of an invented multiculturalism that Europe never tried (if by “multiculturalism” we mean a society that offers full possibilities, membership, and respect to all its members – regardless of cultural and religious differences – yet also creatively accommodating of them – in a fashion that is both morally persuasive and practically effective for the majority of society).
>Kafka’s Prague
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| Martina Steckholzer @ ArtSlant/ |
James Hawes on the secret life of Prague @ Eurozine.
It is axiomatic among artists – they declare it with particular vigour when applying for cultural subsidies – that wonderful creative acts can mythologise an entire city, propel it into the realms of the symbolic. In our postmodern world (so goes the happy theory) such apotheoses can have mighty (if vaguely defined) benefits to the general citizenry: “Joyce’s Dublin” and “Kafka’s Prague” are most often quoted as proof.
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Actually, it was the cities that helped make these writers so popularly famous, not the other way around. Joyce had no need to put his unloved home town on the map of the world. Whilst he was writingUlysses, it did so itself, in spades and to the infinite aid of Joyce’s novel, whose first readers thus found themselves introduced not to an obscure regional city, but to a new-fledged capital, site of a terrible beauty, the names of whose buildings and streets had already made themselves bloodily familiar. Franz Kafka owes the dubious privilege of his coffee-mug fame as a Middle-European Nostradamus (which so obscures the true delights of his social satires) to the fact that the city he longed all his life to escape became the fulcrum of Europe’s twentieth-century tragedy twice in the fifty years after his death – having already (in a way which Kafka himself found highly irksome) become the focus of its ill-founded hopes during his lifetime.
>Restored to reality all the world’s brutality
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| Radina Toeva @ F-Stop Magazine/ |
Ghania Mouffok on the absence of revolutionary optimism in Algeria @ Eurozine.
Ali Yahia is a lawyer and, at 90 years of age, both venerable and courageous. That all counts for nothing with the young recruits of the Algerian police, who don’t know his name and don’t recognize his face. They just brutally shove him out of the way. The “March for Change” on 12 February in Algiers turned out to be an opportunity for these police recruits to try out the new repressive techniques devised by a dictatorship that is henceforth going to have to look to its image. Obama is watching.
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The demonstrators, numbering around two or three thousand, were treated to a veritable ballet by the boys in blue, a silent opera coordinated with near-perfect precision. For an overture, there was the arrest of the most determined or audacious of the demonstrators. Five or six bruisers, having picked out their victim, threw themselves on top of him, grabbed him and forced him to run, yelling “Run, run!” until they reached the paddy wagon parked a few yards away. All of this beneath the dumbfounded gaze of the demonstrators, who parted to let them through. Then it was the turn of the girls in blue, who, conscientious policewomen that they were, meted out the same treatment to the female demonstrators. Nothing had been left to chance. Around a hundred people were arrested in this way, at the speed of light, and although they were given a rough time, they were later released. No sooner had these lightning squads done their work than human dragnets of police officers began to advance, surrounding the rest of the demonstrators, kettling them and stopping them getting away. Each human dragnet was made up of about 100 members of the CNS, the Algerian riot police, with their transparent shields at the ready, wearing helmets and boots, armed with wooden clubs. In three rows, they advanced and withdrew, shoulder to shoulder, on every side, like the body of some giant, many-headed serpent, encircling the demonstration in a black hedge of robocops. Meanwhile, other police officers maintained a watching brief, using their short-wave radios to pass on intelligence about the slightest movement by demonstrators, so that the moment it was spotted they could be prevented from breaking out of this hellish circle. It was impossible to move. Despite this, what had been a march turned into a rally between the buildings in the 1 May Square and the bus stop.
>How did Europe become a museum?
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| Carlo Stanga @ Posi+Tive Magazine |
Slavenka Drakulic on the future of European life @ Eurozine.
You have probably heard about the Skansen open-air museum in Sweden, but not about Euroskansen – The Museum of the European Way of Life. This is because it is currently under construction. In a few decades, tourists from all over the world, especially from China, will be touring Europe en masse. Their busses will stop in Brussels, Paris, Munich, Prague, Rome, Stockholm etc. Euroskansen will be offering guided tours specializing in every aspect of European life. It will provide the main source of income for the population of the Old Continent. Guides especially educated in Europeanism will tell visitors, often schoolchildren and students, how Europeans lived long ago. In AD 2050, this life will be considered a “paradise lost”. Visitors interested in printing, for example, will be able to inspect bookstores or newspaper kiosks and have the unique experience of holding books and newspapers in their hands. There will be public lectures and seminars organized in the typical manner: for free. Those interested in social services will be able to view hospitals with free medical provision, public schools and low-cost public transport. They will be introduced to the amazing concept of a universal pension system, as well as the fact that, only fifty years ago, Europeans enjoyed an annual paid vacation of up to six weeks long.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Many visitors will shake their heads in disbelief. “But how did Europe become a museum?” someone will inevitably ask. “At the beginning of the twenty-first century,” a guide will say, “the European Union experienced increasing difficulties on the global market. The EU fell behind in competing with the US and especially with the new economic powers such as China, India and Korea. In short, it collapsed economically, politically and socially because of the profit-driven economy, the weak state that could no longer control it and guarantee benefits to its citizens, as well as the expensive EU bureaucracy, which got bogged down in petty squabbles. The refusal to admit and to integrate immigrants, a workforce that because of the ageing population was much needed, was also decisive. Add to this the big picture of financial and ecological crisis and the general insecurity it created.”
>Tintin in Norway
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Morten Harper on Tintin, comics, and racism @ Eurozine.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )We have all seen the blonde-fringed Tintin wriggle his way out of one sticky situation after another. But early 2010 saw the Belgian national hero’s past catch up with him; a past most of us had forgotten he had. Congolese Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo believes the comic book Tintin in the Congo is racist and should be banned, and has taken legal action against the series’ copyright-holder Moulinsart and its publisher Casterman.
It was during his second adventure, published in 1931, that Tintin travelled to the Congo, a Belgian colony at the time. There he was mixed up in a gangster showdown when some of Al Capone’s partners tried to take over the country’s diamond production. The early Tintin books are crudely drawn and feature a coarse style of humour, such as when Tintin escapes an angry rhino by blowing it up with dynamite. Even more notorious is the sequence where he visits a school to teach geography. “Dear friends,” he says to the Congolese children, “today I’m going to tell you about our country: Belgium.” This is the colonial master talking. In another sequence, he repairs a broken-down train for the helpless locals. In the new colour version of Tintin in the Congo, published in 1946, the geography lesson has been replaced by mathematics and the Congolese speak more comprehensible French, but the tone is still condescending. The population is presented as naive and lazy; a land of childlike beings.
A not altogether unnatural immediate reaction to Tintin’s paternalistic manner is that he ought to take a trip over here [Norway] and sort out our rail system – we can chuckle about that kind of thing. However, Tintin’s trouble in his home country is no laughing matter. “J’accuse,” proclaims [the plaintiff] Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo indignantly, and denounces the album as “offensive and demeaning to all Congolese”.
>Censorship and samizdat depend on each other
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Béla Nóvé retraces the debates about censorship in Hungary in the 1980s, and the echoes of those ideas today @ Eurozine.
“The Russian word samizdat literally means self-publishing. It is meaningless in a world without censorship. But in countries where the government retains the right to control the publication of books, periodicals and articles, anything that is published and distributed without the censor’s stamp is samizdat. Censorship and samizdat depend on each other: while censorship exists, uncensored writing will always be circulated.” So wrote Ferenc Köszeg, founding editor of Beszélö (Talker), the most influential Hungarian samizdat periodical launched in late-1981.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )What I aim to do here is to provide a brief historical overview and an analysis of some of the passionate debates on censorship in Hungary during the 1980s. It was a hot topic in the dying years of the communist regime under Gorbachev, and remains widely debated today as an inherent part of the moral, political and intellectual heritage of the Hungarian democratic movement. Some of the samizdat written then has the capacity to stir people to action even now: A cenzúra esztétikája (The Aesthetics of Censorship) by a young journalist, Miklós Haraszti, has recently become popular in its Chinese translation among students and intellectuals in China.
>The edges of our awareness
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| Francesco Garieri |
Horatio Morpurgo on how the striving for affluence in Europe pushes the Roma to the margins @ Eurozine.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The campsite is dismantled within minutes of their eviction. On arrival in Petrosani, Romania, later the same day, a man describes the scene: It was as if we weren’t there, he says. The zeal and indifference of the policemen who cleared the site must have stung. But his words surely also hint at some more elemental trauma. This simultaneous eviction and demolition, in full view of the people it has made homeless, seemed to deny that they were entitled to, or even capable of, any feelings.
Words swarmed forth in response to the recent expulsions of Roma from France, few of them as memorable as that man’s summing-up. Somewhere in Europe, every few years, it becomes expedient that this Question be deemed “un-ignorable”. A dust-cloud of words and statistics arises, after a few months placing a kind of haze over the story, behind which it disappears from view for another year or two.
How to find the words for this that will not merely thicken that dust-cloud?
>The Art and Politics of Sacrifice
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| The Independent |
Vron Ware’s incisive critique of the language of war and heroism in the UK @ Eurozine.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Being prepared to die for one’s country has long been the touchstone of nationalism, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier symbolising the essence of patriotism and national identity. It constitutes the unspoken, but ultimate, sacrifice implied by John F. Kennedy’s overworked injunction most recently deployed by David Cameron when he launched the Tory election manifesto: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” But as the confused debates about Britishness have indicated over the last decade, concepts of national identity in the UK have been eroding fast and there is now an even greater uncertainty about what it means to serve one’s country, at least in every arena outside sport.
During this period war has become normalised in the political life of the UK. One consequence is that the figure of the soldier is ubiquitous throughout the media, constantly visible in news, military bulletins, films, digital games, forums, art and photography. The image of the flag-draped coffin, however, remains a site of intense struggle, not just over the meanings of military sacrifice but also the perceived value of the war in which the individual soldier “gave” their life. The homecoming parades at Wootton Bassett have demonstrated the volatile mix of political opportunism, public alarm and private grief that has resulted from the routine deaths of soldiers in Helmand Province. Paying close attention to the figure of the soldier as a particular kind of worker-citizen can expose the hidden material and financial resources that are required to commit the country to war. It can also provide a focus for tracking the ideological energy involved in securing public acquiescence, and in marginalising opposition as a form of disloyalty to the national state.
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