The Germans get too much credit. Granted, considering the scale of Hitler’s transgressions, it’s to be expected. However, Nazi crimes tend to overshadow the responsibility of the Third Reich’s main European ally, Benito Mussolini, for overseeing his own share of butchery in the Balkans. (More…)
On Friday evening, Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank House. On Saturday, the museum shared that information on its Facebook page. Along with a portrait of the nineteen-year-old singer, staff reported Bieber comparing the Holocaust heroine to one of his fans. (More…)
Danny Boyle’s Trance tells the story of a heist in order to perform one, taking advantage of moviegoers’ suggestible state of mind. When the story comes to an end, we find ourselves wondering what happened and to what degree we are responsible. The message we thought we were getting has vanished and a more troubling one has taken its place. (More…)
Downing Street took everyone by surprise. Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, it stated on April 10th, will be thematically linked to the 1982 British-Argentinian war in the Falkland Islands. British soldiers who had key roles in the conflict will play an integral part of the ceremony. Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was purposefully not invited. (More…)
Souciant is no stranger to dissent. Since it was first launched, the site has been subject to repeat hacking attempts by neo-Nazis, and furious posts from the entire spectrum of political opinion. But none of that could have prepared me for Reddit’s scrubbing of links to my meditation on the so-called celebration of Baroness Margaret Thatcher’s passing. (More…)
New York means freedom of speech. With progressive groups defending a talk at Brooklyn College by two Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists in February, and right-wingers rallying around anti-Muslim demagogue Pamela Geller this week, it’d be hard to assume otherwise. Still, the two episodes say a lot about discourse on Israel in the United States. (More…)
Almost everywhere I look, I see condemnations of the celebration of Margaret Thatcher’s death. I haven’t seen many celebrations, but then, at the moment, I am sadly even more miles from George Square than usual. But I will say for certain, I have not seen any jubilation on my Facebook or Twitter feeds. If only things were that simple. (More…)
The Shah inspired a new kind of pluralism. Nationalism, secularism, Islam and communism all fed off the resentment fostered by the Pahlavi regime. “What became the Islamic Revolution occurred because a coalition of many shades of political opinions took to the streets, demanding a share in decision-making and a better distribution of wealth,” observed Asef Bayat. (More…)
There was a time, in the 1970s and 1980s, when Germany was a welcome destination for many asylum seekers, because of the relative generosity of its Basic Law and the eagerness of its citizenry to demonstrate a break with the nation’s intolerant recent history. But that changed in the wake of reunification and the establishment of the Euro Zone. (More…)
As a composer in the post-dub era, Jerusalem-born and New York-raised Raz Mesinai has spent the past 25 years burrowing under the surface realms of genre and song format to find a reverberant sonic space of his own. With Tunnel Vision (Tzadik), his filmmaking debut, Mesinai takes that burrowing to another level by tying together the praxes of tunneling, sound composition and non-linear narrative. (More…)
It would be wonderful if real life were like a Hollywood movie, where we have the good who are pure ,and the bad who are irredeemable. In Syria, life is all too real and the combatants are complex figures. You’d hardly know that, though, from the rhetoric coming from the United States. (More…)
Tehran’s modernization continued into the Second Pahlavi period. The redesigned city, with its new pattern of streets, prepared the urban setting for the first comprehensive master plan of the capitol. In 1966, the Iranian government asked the American firm Gruen Associates to draw up a comprehensive plan for the city, together with celebrated Iranian architect Abdolaziz Farmanfarmaian. (More…)