“There is only one way to turn signals into information, through interpretation”, wrote the computer critic Joseph Weizenbaum. As Google’s hegemony over online content increases, argues Geert Lovink, we should stop searching and start questioning.
As the fortieth anniversary of 1968 draws to a close, the focus of interest shifts to next year’s anniversaries commemorating twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. On 30 May, a debate was held at the Academy of Arts in Berlin entitled “Crossing 68/89”. The participants, leading protagonists of 1968 and 1989 in eastern and western Europe, were asked to discuss the Prague Spring and the student protest movement in the West in a European perspective – with particular reference to the cataclysmic year of 1989. First published in German in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Eurozine translates the debate into English.
“Manufacturing scarcity” is the new watchword in “Green capitalism”. James Heartfield explains how for the energy sector, it has become a license to print money. Increasing profits by cutting output was pioneered by Enron in the 1990s; now the model of restricted supply together with domestic energy generation is promoted worldwide.
Aleksander Daniel locates the birth of the dissident movement in an appeal broadcasted by western radio on 11 January 1968, protesting against the trial of Aleksandr Ginzburg and three other system-critical writers. “This represented a strike against one of the standard elements of Soviet psychology, one which had been cultivated over many decades: the concept of ‘hostile encirclement’, the complex of the ‘besieged fortress’. To appeal to world public opinion, to the ‘enemies’ – i.e. airing dirty laundry in public – was equivalent to treason, to betrayal of the homeland.”
More than four years after the failure of the UN-sponsored Annan plan, the Greek Cypriot president, Dimitris Christofias, and Turkish Cypriot leader, Mehmet Ali Talat, are to re-open negotiations on 3 September. But in spite of their declared aim to agree a bi-zonal federation by spring 2009, the political crisis in Turkey may undermine their efforts to reunify their common homeland.
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 caused the Soviet empire to lose its internal logic even for the communist faithful, writes Samuel Abrahám, who bore witness to the events. Yet today, the naivety of the reform communists of the 1960s serves as a pretext for the cynical dismissal of any vision of a better political system.
The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous region of China has seen a series of clashes between the majority Uighurs and Han Chinese settlers since the 1980s. But it was in the city of Yining that the largest protest took place on 5 February 1997. Initially written off by the Chinese authorities as an outbreak of random violence, since 9/11 it has been portrayed as the work of Islamist separatists. Nick Holdstock reports on a more nuanced reality of unemployment, religious repression, and the wish for independence.
Sports journalist Brian Glanville was sent to Mexico City in 1968 to cover the Olympics but instead found himself reporting on the anti-government demonstrations at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. Despite the ensuing massacre, he recalls, indifference reigned at the Olympic Village.
While the resistance in Tibet has drawn the most attention, two other forms of protest are making life increasingly uncomfortable for the Chinese government: dispossessed landowners and environmentalists. Popular protest is set to dominate the agenda beyond the Olympic Games, writes He Qinglian.
Is the convergence of art and sport under the pressure of pseudo-participatory spectacle undermining the utopian potential of both? Benedict Seymour goes back to the future to recover the new kind of activity which, in different ways, informs them still.
Chile’s participation in the 1974 FIFA World Cup in Germany provided an opportunity for leftwing groups to make their opposition to the Chilean government junta visible to an international public. Wolfgang Kraushaar chronicles.
Since the publication of his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy”, Nietzsche’s writings have been a source of heated controversy. For over a hundred years he had his fair share of admirers and critics. In the last few decades, however, mainly in response to Heidegger’s monumental Nietzsche study, attention has shifted from what actually Nietzsche said to the underlying philosophical themes that might have motivated, or even mitigated, what was said.
Feminist critical theorist Nancy Fraser outlines in interview her concept of “parity of participation”, or the representation of women in institutional structures. The concept, she argues, bridged the traditional leftwing theoretical dichotomy between distribution and recognition and in turn raises the question: who determines who is to be represented? Here Fraser emphasizes the centrality of the politics of interpretation in any dialogue about justice, such as that between western feminism and Islam.
The dispute over construction of a four-lane bypass through the Rospuda Valley, a pristine wetland valley in north eastern Poland subject to the highest protection under European nature law, has gained a high profile at European level. With the intervention of the European Commission and European Court of Justice, the case is breaking new ground and should serve as a precedent for other countries in applying EU nature conservation law. The proposed bypass is just one – albeit the most high-profile – of a number of major road projects on the likely route of the Trans-European “Via Baltica” road corridor that will damage valuable wildlife sites in north eastern Poland, and is therefore a symptom of a much wider problem.
Multiculturalist advocacy of collective rights has opened the door in some western nations for religious law to take precedence over civil law, argues Kenan Malik. Partly responsible is the idea that human beings are bearers of a particular culture as opposed to social and hence transformative beings.