Atlas Obscura: The Misunderstood History of the Balkans’ Surreal War Memorials

The memorial house on Petrova Gora is one of many hundreds of unusual, oversized monuments that were built by the former Yugoslavia during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s across the Balkan States. These Yugoslav war memorials—often dubbed “spomeniks” by Western media—have gained a lot of online attention in recent years. However, as viral images, they are increasingly taken out of context.

The monuments are often described as “abandoned” and “forgotten,” or lumped under the catch-all title of “communist monuments.” In reality though, these abstract designs expressed more than mere political affiliations, and many still serve their communities in the same roles they were built for. Few of the spomeniks are forgotten; “orphaned” might be a better word. They stand like children of a vanished state now scattered as memory markers across a post-Yugoslav Balkan landscape. [...]

With their wild and futuristic shapes, the monuments, by design, also looked relentlessly forward to the future. Depicting rockets and towers, fists, flowers, stars and wings, these steel and concrete monoliths didn’t dwell on images of suffering, but rather symbolized broader themes of anti-fascist struggle and the victory of life over death.

Instead of focusing on individuals—a Bosnian hero, a Serb or a Croat—the monuments of multiethnic, socialist Yugoslavia were also designed to celebrate universal ideals. “Brotherhood and Unity” became the slogan of post-war Yugoslavia, and the abstraction of these monuments was a gesture of inclusivity. Often, the monuments were formed from multiple segments that rose together without touching, and yet which, from a distance, might be viewed as one single object, an allegory for Yugoslavia itself.

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LSE Blog: ‘Swallow the lot, and swallow it now’: Britain is, and was, deluded about its negotiating power with the EU

This parallel is no coincidence. The determined defence of internal unity and the protection of what has been agreed amongst the members is a defining characteristic of the EC/EU as an international negotiator. Reaching agreement within the Community/Union has always been a painstaking – even painful – process.  But once it has been attained, none of the members has any interest in seeing these hard-won bargains being reopened at the behest of an outsider, even one regarded as a friend. This became crystal clear to the British as they sought to join in the 1960s, culminating in the resigned acceptance by Sir Con O’Neill, the chief negotiator at official level in 1970-2, who commented that the only possible British approach to existing Community body of rules was ‘Swallow the lot, and swallow it now’.[1] But it was also a lesson learnt by the Americans during much the same period as they tried, and failed, to modify the emerging Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and as they tangled with the Community when seeking to redefine the terms of world trade during the so-called GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) Kennedy Round. One American diplomat of the era lamented the fact that the Community was ‘a strongly-muscled, leaden-footed beast’.[2]

All of this means that flights of fancy about the Brexit impasse being broken by a well-timed deal struck between the British government and Angela Merkel and/or Emmanuel Macron are likely to be every bit as unrealistic as Macmillan’s delusional hopes that he could sort out the painfully slow Brussels negotiation by means of direct personal diplomacy towards General de Gaulle.  Huge time and effort was put into the three de Gaulle-Macmillan summits of the 1961-2 period, including semi-serious contemplation of some type of nuclear deal involving aid to France’s putative nuclear deterrent in return for a smooth path in Brussels – but no real bargain was ever on the cards.  Nor would Harold Wilson prove any more successful in his personal charm offensive towards de Gaulle in 1966-1967.  And even Edward Heath’s seeming breakthrough with Georges Pompidou in May 1971 appears, from the latest historical research, to have been a largely stage-managed occasion, at which the two leaders made public a substantive narrowing of the gap between the French and British positions that had been largely secured by UK concessions on several key controversies on which the Heath membership talks centred.[3] No high-diplomatic shortcut is likely to allow the UK to avoid the difficult and slow negotiations in Brussels. [...]

The present situation, though, is much more uncomfortable and potentially painful than that of 1963. The implications of failure are far greater. Britain’s inability to join the EEC in 1963 was a hammer blow to Macmillan’s government and a disappointment to many on both sides of the Channel. But ultimately it meant no more than a temporary prolongation of the status quo, and the postponement rather than the end of the UK’s European ambitions.  Failure now would be much more serious, confronting the country with all the economic, legal and political consequences of a cliff-edge Brexit.  The British government urgently needs to stop repeating the mistakes of its predecessor over half a century ago.  A breakthrough in Brussels is a national necessity – even if achieving it requires awkward and painful climbdowns.

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The Atlantic: The Saudi Crown Prince Is Gambling Everything on Three Major Experiments

Call it shock and awe. Call it a purge. Call it a clean sweep. However it’s characterized, the mass arrest of some of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent royals, administrators, and tycoons last weekend has completely upended both the structure of the Saudi elite and the country’s way of doing business. It’s not exactly the Night of the Long Knives, as the luxurious Ritz-Carlton hotel in which the detainees are being held is hardly a nightmarish gulag. But it is the latest installment in an astonishingly rapid series of upheavals whereby all power is being concentrated in the hands of elderly King Salman and his 32-year-old son and heir, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MbS. [...]

It is the third front that is likely to be most challenging: the assertion and defense of Saudi interests throughout the Middle East, particularly with regard to an ever-more-powerful Iran. It’s instructive that last weekend also saw a Yemeni Houthi missile, possibly supplied by their Iranian backers, launched at Riyadh’s international airport and the Saudi-inspired resignation of Lebanon’s prime minister, Saad Hariri. Both Yemen and Lebanon are key proxy battlegrounds between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Yemen intervention, which has been heavily associated with MbS, who was serving as defense minister when it was launched, appears to have become a politically damaging and militarily unproductive quagmire. There are reports that MbS is looking for a way out, but the missile attack has been characterized by Saudi officials as an Iranian “act of war” against the Kingdom. [...]

Some critics regard all of Saudi Arabia’s bold new foreign policy initiatives, particularly as directed by MbS, as a series of spectacular failures, including the campaign to pressure Qatar into changing its foreign policy and abandoning its support for Islamist groups. However, while the Yemen war has not gone well, the outcome remains to be determined. The Qatar project was always discussed as a long-term one rather than with any expectation of a quick resolution and there’s still every reason to suspect that, in the medium-term, Doha will find no alternative but to seek a resolution largely on Riyadh’s terms. The campaign to roll back Iranian influence in the Arab world is much more complicated, and depends on many factors beyond Riyadh’s control, not least of them the role of the United States. It is on this front that MbS appears most vulnerable to a widespread conclusion that he has consolidated power without achieving the minimum necessary results. At the very least, a sense that Saudi Arabia is putting up a spirited defense of its interests in the face of creeping Iranian hegemony would be required to avoid the perception of failure.  

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The New York Review of Books: Bolshevism’s New Believers

Yuri Slezkine’s monumental new study, The House of Government, also situates the Russian Revolution within a much larger drama, but one that resists the modernization narrative and instead places the Bolsheviks among ancient Zoroastrians and Israelites, early Christians and Muslims, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Puritans, Old Believers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Rastafarians, and other millenarian sects. As sworn enemies of religion, the Bolsheviks would have hated this casting decision and demanded to be put in a different play, preferably with Jacobins, Saint-Simonians, Marxists, and Communards in supporting roles. Slezkine, however, has claimed these groups for his story as well, insisting that underneath their secular costumes they too dreamed of hastening the apocalypse and building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Bolsheviks, it seems, were condemned to repeat history—a history driven not by class struggle, as they thought, but by theology. [...]

Slezkine came to a very different conclusion: despite their insistence that class, not nationality, was the deepest source of human solidarity, the Bolsheviks had turned out to be nation-builders of the first order. Their “chronic ethnophilia” inspired “the most extravagant celebration of ethnic diversity that any state had ever financed,” and was largely responsible for the formation of the very national-territorial units that burst forth as newly independent states in the 1990s. To capture the process of socialist nation-building, Slezkine deployed a perfectly Soviet metaphor: the communal apartment, the sprawling pre-revolutionary living space partitioned after 1917 into separate rooms, each housing an entire family, with a single shared kitchen and bathroom per apartment. “Remarkably enough,” he wrote, “the communist landlords went on to reinforce many of the partitions and never stopped celebrating separateness along with communalism.” [...]

Slezkine’s version of the secularization thesis is simultaneously more specific and much broader. In their thinking and their interactions with one another, on the one hand, Bolsheviks displayed the particular form of religious fervor associated with millenarian sects, namely the desire to eradicate “private property and the family as the most powerful and mutually reinforcing sources of inequality,” thereby fashioning, once and for all, a “simple, fraternal society organized around common beliefs, possessions, and sexual partners (or sexual abstinence).” Millenarian sects with apocalyptic dreams, on the other hand, have appeared in many different religions and historical eras. Indeed, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism (to name a few) are, according to Slezkine, “institutionalized embodiments of unfulfilled millenarian prophecies,” churches that sought to routinize the teachings, if not all the practices, of the rebellious sects that gave birth to them. [...]

One aspect of the Russian Revolution for which The House of Government does offer an explicit explanation is its demise. Most histories of the Soviet Union emphasize the failure of the command economy to keep up with its capitalist rivals. Slezkine, however, is not terribly interested in economics. In his account, the Soviet experiment failed, half a century before the country’s actual collapse, because it neglected to drain the oldest, most persistent swamp of all—the family.

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Quartz: Why millions of Americans believe things that aren’t true

Many incorrect beliefs have political foundations. They promote a policy, an ideology, or one candidate over another. People are susceptible to political misinformation because they tend to believe things that favor their side–even if it isn’t grounded in data or science. There are numerous factors at play, from the influence of non-conscious emotions to the need to defend a group that the individual identifies with.

For these reasons, millions of Americans believe things that aren’t true. People reject the conclusions of scientists when they deny humans’ role in promoting climate change, question the safety of genetically modified foods, or refuse to have their children vaccinated. They reject the assessments of fact checkers, incorrectly believing that president Obama was born outside the US or that Russia successfully tampered with vote tallies in the 2016 presidential election. And certain conspiracy theories–like the belief that president Kennedy’s assassination was orchestrated by a powerful secret organization–are remarkably persistent. [...]

Our study focuses on something else that shapes beliefs: We looked at what matters the most to people when they’re deciding what’s true. We found that having faith in your intuition about the facts does make you more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. However, it doesn’t really influence your beliefs about science, such as vaccine safety or climate change. In contrast, someone who says beliefs must be supported with data is more likely both to reject conspiracy theories and to answer questions about mainstream science and political issues more accurately.

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Politico: Thanks Trump, for making Ukraine great again

Miraculously, however, Ukraine has survived — and even thrived — during the first year of your presidency. Amazing, isn’t it? Your government has remained committed to supporting Kiev in its war against Moscow and has reiterated the U.S.’s opposition to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. While you were busy bashing the “Fake News” media, both houses of Congress extended sanctions against Russia this past summer. They even tacked on additional penalties to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election, despite your vociferous denials of their involvement. It wasn’t some “400-pound man” doing the hacking, Mr. President; it was your bro Vlad’s Kremlin-paid trolls. 

You’ve shown yourself to be a better friend to Ukraine than even your Putin-hating predecessor Obama. You delighted Kiev this year by appointing a special representative for Ukraine, responsible for supporting the country’s transition to the West, and for ensuring the success of the Minsk peace accords. Your choice of Kurt Volker, a veteran diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to NATO, impressed even your harshest critics. He has been firm in labeling the conflict in the east as a “Russian-led war against Ukraine” and has repeatedly called for your government to provide Kiev with lethal defensive weapons and for Russia to withdraw its troops from the Donbas. [...]

As for you, Mr. President, I’m guessing that you personally don’t care much about Ukraine. You may have hobnobbed with more than one “Miss Ukraine” in the past, but otherwise, your knowledge of the country is “skin deep.” You probably hold a grudge against the Ukrainian government for supporting “crooked Hillary” during the campaign, and helping the FBI indict your former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for tax fraud.

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Politico: Catalan separatists to contest election separately

Puigdemont has repeatedly advocated for a joint list of secessionist parties from his current refuge in Belgium, where he is trying to avoid detention after Spain issued a European Arrest Warrant on sedition charges. The former regional president has said he would be prepared to take part in another pro-independence coalition, contradicting his previous assertions that he would not run for office again.

However, after Tuesday’s deadline came and went, it was clear that his arguments did not convince his erstwhile coalition partners from the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), which polls put in first place ahead of the ballot. Analysts say the ERC has more to lose than to win from a new alliance with Puigdemont’s center-right Catalan European Democratic Party (PDeCAT). [...]

It’s unclear if a joint separatist platform would increase the parties’ chances in any case. Although the electoral system rewards the concentration of votes, alliances can repel voters as well as attract them. For example, leftist voters may be reluctant to choose a list that includes right-wingers and vice-versa.

A poll by Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia on Saturday placed the ERC first but didn’t guarantee the separatists an absolute majority in the regional assembly. The liberal Ciudadanos and the Catalan Socialists — both parties opposed to the latest independence bid — ranked second and third respectively ahead of Puigdemont’s PDeCAT. Other polls, however, do predict a pro-independence majority as in 2015.

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Haaretz: Why Saudi Arabia Opened Another Proxy War Against Iran - in Lebanon

The resignation on Saturday of the Saudi-allied Lebanese prime minister Saad al-Hariri, announced from Riyadh and blamed on Iran and Hezbollah, is seen by many as the first step in an unprecedented Saudi intervention in Lebanese politics. [...]

Riyadh is blaming Hezbollah for the resignation of Lebanon's preeminent Sunni politician, accusing it of "hijacking" Lebanese politics. But Saudi Arabia is also widening blame to Lebanon as a whole, saying it too has declared war on the Kingdom. 

A Saudi minister has made the near impossible demand that Lebanese act against a group that is a major part of Lebanon's political fabric and far more powerful than the weak state, with a guerrilla army that out guns the national military. [...]

Hezbollah and its allies will struggle to form a government without Hariri or his blessing, leaving Lebanon in a protracted crisis that could eventually stir Sunni-Shi'ite tensions, though there is no sign of this yet as all sides urge calm. [...]

It is not clear what comes next: Saudi-backed efforts to weaken Hezbollah in Lebanon failed badly a decade ago, ending with a bout of Sunni-Shi'ite fighting on the streets of Beirut that only underlined Hezbollah's military dominance. 

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The Economist: What porn and listings sites can tell us about Britain’s gay population

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