In Moscow, authorities began to check the condition of bomb shelters at schools. No one showed the written document itself, but management reported that the order had been received to “bring the bomb shelters into working condition.” Is this just a theatrical game or a serious preparation for nuclear war?
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter: even if it is just part of psychological warfare, it can contribute to an atmosphere, in which everything is possible, since the agents can get caught in the unintended consequences of their own words. Such acts contribute to the nervous state in which we all are, so much so that sleep tourism (“traveling to destinations where people can get a good night’s sleep”) is booming! Although tourist hotels are part of our world, we tend to perceive them as somehow excluded from our mad reality, as a place where you can just relax. Take Lebanon, for instance. Decades ago, it was a place where one went to relax; now it is a place to escape from, a place where a new form of honest robbery exploded lately. People go to a bank with a gun and rob it, demanding just their own money, which they are not able to withdraw in a normal way since the financial system collapsed.
Four events centering around women have made headlines over the past month: Giorgia Meloni’s electoral victory in Italy, Queen Elizabeth II’s death and funeral, the release of the film The Woman King, and the widespread protests in Iran following the killing of Mahsa Amini by the country’s morality police. Taken together, these four stories highlight essential features of the political terrain.
With the left failing to offer an adequate response to the crisis of liberal democracy, the rise of new right-wing governments in Europe is not particularly surprising. But women’s central role in this movement has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Right-wing leaders like Meloni and Marine Le Pen in France are presenting themselves as stronger alternatives to traditional mainstream masculine technocrats. They embody both right-wing hardness and features usually associated with femininity, such as a focus on care and the family: fascism with a human face.
Now consider the televised spectacle of Elizabeth II’s funeral, which highlighted an interesting paradox: as the British state has fallen ever further from its former superpower status, the British royal family’s ability to inspire imperial reveries has only grown. We should not dismiss this as ideology masking actual power relations. Rather, monarchical fantasies are themselves a part of the process whereby power relations reproduce themselves.
In her stupendous Yesterday’s Tomorrow,[1] Bini Adamczak provides nothing less than the definitive account of what one cannot but call the ineradicable, absolutely authentic, Communist desire, the Idea of a society which fully overcomes domination:
“Unlike the slaves, who only wished to be as free as their masters, unlike the peasants, who wanted to give the lords a tenth of their crop instead of a fifth, unlike the bourgeoisie, who only wanted political freedom, not economic freedom, what the workers demanded was a classless society. What the Communists promised was the abrogation of all domination. And as long as they are remembered, their promise remains.” (80)
This desire is “eternal” in the simple sense that it is a shadow that accompanies all hitherto history which is, as Marx and Engels wrote, the history of class struggle. What makes Adamczak’s book unique is that she detects this desire through a very close analysis of the failures of the (European) Communist movement in the twentieth century, tracing them backwards from Hitler-Stalin pact to the brutal suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion. The details she describes make it clear that, say, the Hitler-Stalin pact cannot be accounted for just in the terms of brutal realpolitik (Stalin needed time to prepare for the war that loomed on the horizon). Weird excesses disturb this image, like the fact that in 1940 guards in gulags were forbidden to shout at prisoners “Fascists!¨” not to insult the Nazis:
“What remains incomprehensible, because irreducible to any calculation of power politics, is Beria’s order forbidding the guard stuff in the gulags from disparaging political prisoners – antifascists in the majority, frequently convicted of ‘Trotskyte-fascist deviations’ – with the epithet fascist”(34).
Adamczak’s focus is double, as the subtitle of her book makes it clear: “On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future.” The absolute loneliness is that of the Communists who were purged but continued to believe in the Communist Idea embodied in the Party that liquidated them, i.e., to put it in Lacan’s terms, the Party remained for them the only big Other. The deadlock they faced is that the way out for them was not to insist on the purity of the Communist dream against its betrayal by the Party: this dream of the future itself had to be “reconstructed.” Most of them (just recall Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone) failed in this task, contributed to the liberal (or even conservative) critique of Communism, and produced writings in the style of “God that failed,” rejoining the anti-Communist Cold War warriors. As Adamczak notes, the absence of the Communist desire explains why, when European Communism disintegrated around 1990,
At the end of David Fincher’s 1999 film, Fight Club, the unnamed narrator (played by Edward Norton) dispatches his alter ego, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), and then watches as the buildings around him burst into flames, fulfilling his and his alter ego’s desire to destroy modern civilization. But in the Chinese version released earlier this year, the ending was replaced with an English-language title card explaining that, “The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding. After the trial, Tyler was sent to a lunatic asylum to receive psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”
Why would Chinese authorities change the ending of a film that is highly critical of Western liberal society, disqualifying its critical political stance as an expression of madness? The reason is simple: For China’s leaders, defending established power is more important than advancing a particular ideological agenda.
Auf den ersten Blick erscheint die Einigkeit logisch, die Russland und China auf ihrem vorolympischen Gipfel in Peking demonstriert haben. Wladimir Putin und Xi Jinping treten schon seit längerem als Verbündete auf der politischen Weltbühne auf. Auch die wirtschaftlichen Verflechtungen zwischen den beiden Staaten sind in den vergangenen Jahren deutlich gewachsen. Und sie haben einen gemeinsamen Feind: die USA und ihre demokratischen Verbündeten in Europa und Asien.
Aber so natürlich ist diese Allianz nicht. Als Mao Tse-tung 1949 in Peking die Macht ergriff, war Stalin zwar sein engster Verbündeter, aber schon bald darauf entstand eine Rivalität zwischen den beiden kommunistischen Regimen, die zeitweise in militärische Auseinandersetzungen mündete. Die Handelsbeziehungen sind einseitig, China ist trotz seiner Abhängigkeit von russischem Öl und Gas der weitaus stärkere Partner.
KAIS SAIED’S birthday is not until February, but his speech on December 13th contained an early gift to himself. Tunisia has been in crisis since July, when Mr Saied, the president, suspended parliament and much of the constitution. He told his constituents that Tunisia’s democracy was broken (many of them agreed) and portrayed himself as a sort of Carthaginian Cincinnatus, called on to save the state in its hour of need.Mr Saied (pictured) promised two votes in 2022: a constitutional referendum in July and a parliamentary election in December. First, though, he will oversee changes to the national charter. A constitutional-law professor before he was president, Mr Saied has long dreamed of remaking Tunisia as an indirect democracy. Now he has arrogated to himself the power to do so.
There is no good reason to exclude children from the right to vote. Indeed, I believe there is a strong case for lowering the voting age to six, effectively extending the franchise to any child in full-time education. When I have made this case, as I have done in recent years in a variety of different forums, I am always struck by the reaction I get. It is incredulity. What possible reason could there be to do something so seemingly reckless and foolhardy? Most audiences recognise that our democracy is growing fractious, frustrated and frustrating. Our political divisions are wide and our institutions seem ill-equipped to handle them. But nothing surely could justify allowing children to join in. Wouldn’t it simply make everything worse?
It would not. In fact, it might make things better. But to understand why, we first need to understand the nature of the problems our democracy faces, and in particular, the generational divide that has become an increasingly important factor in politics over recent decades.
We have never been more divided. And yet we have never had more in common. Britain, like other western democracies, is split down the middle on most of the big political questions. Brexiteers square up against remainers. The north opposes the south. It’s the city v the countryside. Graduates confront non-graduates. But at the same time, we increasingly share a single frame of reference. We watch the same TV shows, circle round the same topics of conversation and obsess over the same celebrities. When Oprah interviewed Harry and Meghan, responses to what they said were conditioned by political tribalism. Tell me how you voted in the Brexit referendum and I’d have a good idea of whether you were team Meghan or team Kate. Still, we all tuned in together. And when it was broadcast, we were all under lockdown together.
In late January 2020, in an orbital belt around 640 kilometers above Earth, two unmanned Russian spacecrafts coasted through the sky toward USA-245, an American reconnaissance satellite.
From this elevation a traveler would have seen the earth as a rounded slope of green and brown. One could have made out the rugged edges of mountains and the contours of lakes, our white atmosphere, bowed around the planet, darkening to blue and then black. Seen from a backyard telescope, the satellites would have looked like small glimmers in the night, with light from the sun glinting off their alloyed coating as if off a distant windshield.
The Russian crafts had positioned themselves unusually close to the American, in a near-identical orbit, and they had synced their paths with USA-245—a classified, multibillion-dollar KH-11 satellite, equipped with imaging systems on par with the Hubble telescope—such that one of them came within twenty kilometers of it several times in a single day. Satellites in the same plane may on occasion pass within one hundred kilometers of one another but far less frequently. The Russians, it seemed, were stalking an American spy satellite.
The larger of the two Russian crafts, Kosmos-2542, had first entered the same orbital plane as USA-245 in late November, launched from a Soyuz rocket. This in itself was not a notable occurrence, and the two passed each other only once in eleven days. But on December 6, the Russian vessel seemed to split in two. In fact, it had spat out another, smaller craft. Speaking later, in February, General John W. “Jay” Raymond, chief of the newly established Space Force, would describe it by saying, “The way I picture it, in my mind, is like Russian nesting dolls.”
As a fourth wave of Covid-19 infections threatens to overwhelm intensive care units in hospitals from Brussels to Berlin, European governments have begun to sound exasperated as well as anxious. On Monday, the German health minister, Jens Spahn, starkly laid out the stakes of the coming winter, in terms designed to function as a wake-up call. By the spring, Mr Spahn warned, the vast majority of Germans would be “vaccinated, cured or dead”. The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, dismissed violent protesters against restrictions on the unjabbed as “idiots”, while his Belgian counterpart, Alexander De Croo, said that similar scenes in Brussels were “absolutely unacceptable”.
The comments of Mr Rutte and Mr De Croo were explicitly directed at the violent fringe that hijacked demonstrations in the Belgian capital and Rotterdam. But there is a more general sense of frustration among political leaders in western Europe: as an expected autumn surge duly comes to pass, a significant minority of citizens are deepening the crisis by refusing to be vaccinated. Dealing with this section of the population, which is far more likely to need hospital treatment after infection, has become a major policy dilemma for governments seeking to juggle civil liberties with the need to protect the interests of society as a whole.
The story of the past 500 years can be crudely summarised as follows. A handful of European nations, which had mastered both the art of violence and advanced seafaring technology, used these faculties to invade other territories and seize their land, labour and resources.
Competition for control of other people’s lands led to repeated wars between the colonising nations. New doctrines – racial categorisation, ethnic superiority and a moral duty to “rescue” other people from their “barbarism” and “depravity” – were developed to justify the violence. These doctrines led, in turn, to genocide.
The stolen labour, land and goods were used by some European nations to stoke their industrial revolutions. To handle the greatly increased scope and scale of transactions, new financial systems were established that eventually came to dominate their own economies. European elites permitted just enough of the looted wealth to trickle down to their labour forces to seek to stave off revolution – successfully in Britain, unsuccessfully elsewhere.
Idler on a hammock 