It’s quite right for Britons to be shocked by the atrocities in France. Parisians have now felt, for a brief moment, the kind of violence deployed in Syria. Yet, in our rush to blame the attacks on refugees, we find ourselves turning on the very people fleeing such terror in Syria. As if this were not bad enough, we have lost sight of our own violent history. (More…)
The case, as the generous American communities have shown they well understand, has had no analogue in the experience of our modern generations, no matter how far back we go; it has been recognised, in surpassing practical ways, as virtually the greatest public horror of our age, or of all the preceding. (More…)
Ambivalence towards reactionary thinking in Germany today – on the one hand, strongly rejected in official, polite discourse, while at the same time very popular – is best exemplified by the immense success of the writer and former Social Democrat, Thilo Sarrazin. (More…)
Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism constitutes one of the clearest statements of what people for better or worse like to call the ‘postmodern condition’. On Fisher’s account, culture in the late capitalist world exists in a condition of stasis, having lost the impulsion to novelty that Fisher imputes to systemic competition with actually existing socialism. (More…)
Human social organising is something necessary. The philosophers expressed this fact by saying: “Man is ‘political’ by nature.” That is, he cannot do without the social organisation for which the philosophers use the technical term “town” (polis). This is what civilisation means. (More…)
“[A]gency recruiters jump at the chance to snare a Mormon,” Newsweek claimed in a 1992 story about the CIA’s post-Cold War restructuring. “Young Mormons,” the report went on, “tend to have squeaky-clean backgrounds and, thanks to their work as Third World missionaries, they often have a skill the CIA desperately needs these days: knowledge of a foreign language.” (More…)
The eldest of the three talented women from Portland that comprise The Ghost Ease might have entered kindergarten in 1991, the year that Nirvana’s mainstream breakthrough album Nevermind was released. (More…)
Last week, I was standing behind a police barricade in Leipzig. Only yards away, but impossible to hear over the deafening noise of the counter-demonstration, hundreds of fascists were holding a rally. For an hour, we had been staring at the faceless mass of people on the other side, when suddenly a figure emerged and waved in our direction, taunting us. (More…)
The Holy Land has been the scene of war since the dawn of History. Long before Belgium became the cockpit of Europe, Palestine was the cock-pit of the known world. Here, on the high road between Asia and Africa, were fought the great wars of Egyptians and Assyrians, Israelites and Canaanites, Greeks and Romans, Saracens and Crusaders. (More…)
There is something problematic about collapsing all non-cis gendered and trans people together, as a single phenomenon. Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe strongly in solidarity, people fighting alongside each other and advocating for each other. Not just splitting into groups, and fighting only for what personally affects us in our own lives. (More…)
The right is on the rise in Germany. On October 19th, 20,000 people gathered in Dresden under the banner of the far-right, anti-immigration group “PEGIDA”. They were marking a special occasion: Only one year earlier, several dozen self-proclaimed “patriots” had first met to protest the coming “Islamization of the Occident.” (More…)