“It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than the renowned.” The epigram on Walter Benjamin’s memorial in Portbou, Catalonia, leads Les Back to reflect on the fate of the African migrants found dead on the coasts of Spain today.
To Polish ears, the language of the Western revolutionaries of ’68 “carried the burden of oppression”, recalls Aleksander Smolar. Western ’68ers were often hostile to supporters of the Warsaw March revolt and indifferent towards the subsequent “anti-Zionist” purges. Yet the events were disastrous for Polish Jews at the time and are still relevant forty years later, writes Aleksander Smolar.
When Belarusian journalist and editor Aliaksandr Zdvizhkou reprinted the Danish Muhammad cartoons in the opposition newspaper “Zhoda” he was sentenced to three years imprisonment for inciting religious hatred. Purportedly acting in the interests of the 30 000 strong Belarusian Muslim population, the authorities were clearly attempting to intimidate what little remains of an independent media in Belarus. Zdvizhkou has since been released, but the affair has brought to light another disturbing phenomenon: Islamophobia amongst the Belarusian opposition. Rashed Chowdhury reports.
Well-funded creationists are on the march in Europe, writes Peter C Kjærgaard. The Council of Europe recently issued a resolution warning against the rise of creationism, based on a report that documented not only the existence of a strong Christian creationist lobby in Europe, but also the rise of Muslim creationism.
Mykola Riabchuk recalls how the politics of the Prague Spring filtered through to the Ukraine until the crackdown on ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism’ in 1972-73; and how, during perestroika, the roles were reversed and he was able to bring banned literature to friends in Czechoslovakia.
In an interview conducted a year before his premature death, Rudi Dutschke explained to Jacques Rupnik the reasons for the German Left’s failure to understand what was at stake in Czechoslovakia in 1968. “In retrospect, the great event of ’68 in Europe was not Paris, but Prague. But we were unable to see this at the time.”
Parallels between May ’68 and the Prague Spring are largely the result of the simultaneity of the events; in important respects, the political goals of the two movements were antithetical. Nevertheless, central European dissent had a significant impact on the French anti-totalitarian Left after 1968, argues Jacques Rupnik.
The failure of the German extra-parliamentary opposition to reflect upon its gradual slide towards violence led to the leftwing terrorism of the 1970s, writes Christian Semler. It was only with the ecological movement that pacifism came back onto the agenda. For the Left today, the question of the state monopoly on the use of force remains as central as ever.
Just as Russia’s economic growth has obviated talk of democracy, the media’s financial successes leave no place for ethical debate. While market imperatives often do the censors’ work for them, counter-examples exist, reports Maria Eismont.
Should philosophy have something to say to non-philosophers? Should philosophy be pursued only by those trained in philosophy? Should academic teachers of philosophy consider themselves philosophers in virtue of the fact that they teach philosophy? And should analytic philosophers deny that continental philosophers are philosophers at all, or acknowledge that they represent different modes of philosophizing? Cogito poses some big questions to four prominent British and US philosophers.
Cultural and political life in Lithuania is marked by what Homi K. Bhabha called an “ironic compromise”, writes Rasa Balockaite. The Lithuanian is “almost a European but not quite”.
Despite the tendency of decennial commemorations to cement the “official version” of May ’68, important questions remain unanswered. What exactly was the role of the police in the escalation of the violence (including the much overlooked fatalities in June)? Why did the Renault factory workers reject the concessions obtained in the Grenelle agreements? And was de Gaulle on the point of stepping down when he went to Baden-Baden? Chris Reynolds points out some blind spots in the increasingly stereotyped interpretation of the events in France forty years ago.
“If my philosophy has been of any use to me, it’s been to situate my monstrous condition within an order of general discourse.” Catalan philosopher and former Social Democratic MEP Xavier Rubert de Ventós talks in interview about his allergy to the law, why he finds the reactionary Céline more interesting than the liberal Rawls, and what he means by the “non-Fichtean ego”.
Large-scale social movements often behave provocatively but with the aim to make more space for democracy. The latest of these is the global justice movement born in Seattle in 1999. Magnus Wennerhag’s new book is the first major Swedish study on the impact of this movement. In the extract Arena publishes here, he shows how it differs from the movements of 1968, being more political and more directed towards international institutions and globalized democracy.