Articles

A documentary about the Prague Spring created the impression that the revival of the nation in the 1960s was driven wholly by the reform communists, writes Adam Gebert. Why was no platform given to those “who were never the least bit involved with the communist ideology”?

In their efforts of marketing and conversion, both globalization and the religious are forms of total war disguised as peace. The total or global nature of this disguised war leads to what Leonard Lawlor calls “the problem of the worst”.

Russian philosopher Michail Ryklin’s new book “Communism as Religion” explores how the militant atheism of the Bolsheviks, far from rendering religion obsolete, created a new faith. Here he talks to “New Humanist” editor Caspar Melville about the religiosity inherent in western European intellectuals’ admiration for the Soviet Union, including Russell, Koestler, Benjamin, and Brecht.

Panopticism is waning; panspectrocism is the nascent social diagram that organizes our lives. Heineken and Wal-Mart use pattern recognition and computer-assisted predictions of future behaviours to secure their markets. Google, the panspectric corporation par excellence, tells us that the company wants to know what you’ll want to do tomorrow. This brings renewed poignancy to Gabriel Tarde’s contagion-centric thought, write Kullenberg and Palmås.

The reports on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction decided that the US invasion of Iraq could start. Today, we know that these weapons were fiction, an image produced to justify the war. Discussing Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war, Cathy Caruth shows that this type of political imagery has a long tradition in the US.

Faced with public funding cuts, the editors of “Esprit” write an open letter defending the role of generalist cultural journals. When the academic world can communicate only with specialists, and the daily press can provide only superficial analysis, cultural journals are needed to balance depth against accessibility. “Esprit” can find the right questions to ask, write its editors, and can help create shared culture in a world fragmented by globalization. Self-consciously “international”, it can bring French ideas into contact with those from elsewhere in Europe and beyond.

As contemporary witnesses disappear, collective memory in Russia is altering, writes the director of Memorial. The hardships of war and the Stalinist terror are being forgotten and Stalin is being remembered as the victor over the essence of evil.

In his essay “Mistaken identity”, Kenan Malik argues that multiculturalism perpetuates a racist definition of culture. Radostin Kaloianov dismisses this critique as being based on false conclusions, turning instead to what he considers to be the genuine limitation of institutionalized multiculturalism: its concentration on only a narrow spectrum of differences.

There is a light in the darkness of Belarus. A Belarusian university in exile provides future generations with internationally approved degrees and the ability to think independently. After visiting EHU I am convinced that this university constitute the best hope for the future of Belarus, writes Peter Lodenius.

Anna Loutfi reflects on the use of the nation-state as an organizing principle for central and eastern European feminist history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She detects what she calls feminism’s “imperial ironies”: feminists in central and eastern Europe acted within international feminist networks, while at the same time were confronted with emerging nationalism in territories that had been parts of former empires.

Is it to spare her emotions that Slavenka Drakulic has not returned to Belgrade since the wars? She does not think so. Instead, her reasons have to do with the silence and denial of so much of Serbian society, and with a Serbian youth that is failing to ask the right questions.

While reading different internet articles about American poetry, Milan Dezinsky chanced on a midnight blogger who could not withstand a certain professor Lehman from New York. David Lehman is a poet, but he especially arouses disputes as the editor of the most famous anthology of American poetry which bears a somewhat controversial title: The Best American Poetry. Dezinsky asked him for an interview.

The witches and werewolves of post-Soviet fantasy fiction embody the morality of a society in denial about its criminal past, writes Dina Khapaeva. “Personal loyalty towards superiors and respect for hierarchy constitute gothic society’s most important and only uncontested law.”

On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of “On The Origin of Species”, “New Humanist” editor Caspar Melville asks a selection of scientific commentators what they’d like to say to Darwin around the supper table.

Faced with the reality that renewables will be unable to replace conventional energy sources in the foreseeable future, arguments for nuclear power – that it is the cleanest and least expensive option – are causing environmentalists to reconsider, writes Angela Saini.