Aeon: Phantasmic Phoenicia

To provide a proper prototype and parallel for modern Lebanon, these Lebanists insisted that the Phoenicians were always a separate, single people or even nation, united by geography, culture, religion and a common identity. As Charles Corm, a charmer and a chancer, as well as Ford Motor Company’s sole representative in Syria, bluntly put it in the July 1919 issue of his short-lived nationalist journal La Revue Phénicienne: ‘We want this nation, because it has always taken precedence in all the pages of our history.’ The argument worked: from 1920, Greater Lebanon was administered as a separate state within the French Mandate. But was it true? [...]

All of this, including Smith’s claim, would have surprised the ancient Phoenicians, a disparate set of neighbouring and often warring city-states, cut off from each other for the most part by deep river valleys. They did not see themselves as a single ethnic group or people, the kind that could provide the ‘groundwork’ for a nation. There is no known instance of a Phoenician ever calling themselves a Phoenician, or any other collective term. In their inscriptions, they describe themselves in terms of their individual families and cities. They don’t seem to have had a common culture, either: their dialects fall on a continuum that linked city states across Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine, and the individual ports developed separate civic and artistic cultures, drawing on different foreign examples and relationships: Byblos, for instance, looked more to Egyptian models; Arados to Syrian ones; Sidonian architecture drew on both Greece and Persia; while Tyre cultivated close political and commercial ties with Jerusalem. [...]

Just as British nationalists could deploy the Phoenicians to differentiate themselves from the more ‘Roman’ French, proponents of Irish nationality used a Phoenician past to distinguish the Irish from the more ‘Roman’ British. In this view, the British occupation of Ireland was cast as a great struggle between sophisticated, noble Carthage, ie the Phoenician-Irish, and the savage imperial power of Rome, ie Britain. At the same time, Vallancey’s grasp of Phoenician particularity in the ancient world was hazy, and he did not strongly distinguish them from other ancient peoples: he describes the Phoenicians as absorbing the Scythians on their travels, and he assigns the Irish round towers at different times to Phoenician and Persian construction.

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The Calvert Journal: Take me home

To start with, we look for the keys in our surroundings, in the architecture of the cities which remember further back than we do. In the course of our lives, we walk miles through vast monumental spaces and imposing tower block estates, and rest in the shadows of curved modernist buildings and megalomaniac monuments. The aesthetic of these locations has been widely commodified and exoticised, but they’re much more than a backdrop — they shape the way we think, feel, breathe and remember. They also teach us how to move on. In the new world, the city is open to interpretation, invention and change. In their project Wake Up Nights, photographers Max von Gumppenberg and Patrick Bienert document contemporary Kiev going through subtle yet incredible transformation. In following the city’s burgeoning rave movement and a tightly-knit community of local creatives, they explore disused factories and river banks, graffiti-covered skateparks and hectic streets, idyllic countryside and the intimacy of flats in the early hours of the after-party. Wake Up Nights is a tender love letter to the city. 

The study of unique architectural settings is one of the main preoccupations of the new generation of photographers from eastern Europe. At the same time, the visual narrative they construct goes much further than just documentation. It’s not about capturing the existing space, but about contributing to the ever-shifting character of the environment. In her project Disco Polo, Paulina Korobkiewicz studies the urban aesthetics of eastern Poland after 1989, focusing on the peculiar signs of its transition to global capitalism. Plastic palm trees make streets into a globalist non-place. A patchwork of colourful advertising and pastel shades over tower block architecture illustrates the contemporary collision of influences from East and West. [...]

At the same time, in these pictures the sense of locality doesn’t always dominate over broader artistic experiment. Based in Moscow, photographer Masha Demianova incorporates cinematic influences and the iconography of classical art to create a completely dislocated visual space. Through her lens we travel to dark lakes and poppy-coloured fields, places forged by ancient myths, and, most importantly, the inner space she shares with her subjects. Demianova is also one of the pioneers of female gaze photography in Russia, challenging prevailing representations of female sexuality and desire. [...]

The dimension of space, however, is not the only category the new generation of image-makers take on in their work. Time is another preoccupation, the future much more than the past. Portraiture serves as a way of understanding global history and the rise of new national identities. Hassan Kurbanbaev’s project Tashkent Youth was partly inspired by Uzbekistan’s 25th anniversary of independence — he documented the generation that has come to adulthood over the course of this past quarter century. For them, he points out, the Soviet Union is no more than distant history.  

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Broadly: Restricting Abortion Access Is Class Warfare

Abortion is subjected to much harsher restrictions than any other kind of legal medical care, despite being one of the safest surgical procedures in the world. It’s because of these restrictions that accessing abortion is becoming increasingly expensive; for obvious reasons, the rising cost disproportionately affects low-income women. Conservative legislators have enacted hundreds of medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers in the past decade—needlessly mandating that they be outfitted like a surgical center, for instance, or forcing them to enter into agreements with nearby hospitals. Laws like this have contributed to the closing of dozens of abortion clinics across the country—so much so that 87 percent of all US counties have no abortion provider, forcing women to travel incredibly long distances to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

The lack of providers also contributes to longer wait times for appointment availability, pushing some women past the legal time limit to obtain the procedure in their state. Twenty-seven states also require women to receive counseling, then wait a certain amount of time—between 24 and 72 hours—before getting an abortion. Fourteen require patients to get this counseling in-person, meaning they must make the trip to the clinic twice. This has the potential to increase travel costs by hundreds of dollars, or to necessitate an overnight stay, depending on your zip code.

Perhaps the most flagrant offense against low-income women is the Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976, which prohibits Medicaid from being used to pay for abortion services, making it prohibitively difficult for the 6.5 million American women who obtain health care through Medicaid to get a safe and legal abortion. This legislation is particularly cruel, given that 75 percent of abortion patients are poor or low-income. And it's especially harmful to women of color, who disproportionately rely on Medicaid for coverage. (According to Planned Parenthood, 30 percent of Black women and 24 percent of Hispanic women are enrolled in Medicaid, compared with just 14 percent of white women.)

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Haaretz: It's Not Netanyahu. It's the Nation

Even Netanyahu’s critics admit that he knows how to identify the wishes of the people. He recognized that the majority wants ethnic cleansing in Tel Aviv, ultra-nationalism, racism and cruelty. Netanyahu, being not quite as bad as his supporters, tried another way for a moment — a more humane and rational way. But when he got burnt and realized that he’d disregarded the desire of the people, he recovered in record time and returned to himself. The base, the electorate, the majority want evil. This is what he provided, and this is something that no election will change. The true calamity is not Netanyahu — it’s the fact that any display of humanity in Israel is political suicide.

A straight line of evil and racism runs from the Gaza border to Tel Aviv. In both cases Israelis don’t see human beings in front of them. The Gazan and Eritrean are one and the same – subhuman. They have no dreams, no rights and their lives are worthless. [...]

Opposing all this evil there are, of course, other Israelis as well. There is no reason not to label them by the right name: better, more humane, compassionate, conscientious, moral leftists. They are not a negligible minority but the war waged against them by the majority and its government has paralyzed them. Radio anchor Kobi Meidan’s apology for feeling shame indicates that this camp is defeated. If the massacre in Gaza and the deportation from south Tel Aviv doesn’t bring them to the streets enraged, just like after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, they are a species on the verge of extinction.

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Haaretz: The Dangerous Game of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince

Mohammed bin Salman won praise worldwide when he declared that he intended to allow women to drive, and at the same time reduced the powers of the Saudi religious police, one of whose jobs was to enforce the dress code in the public space, especially for women. These were unquestionably positive steps, as were his declarations that he intended to lead Saudi Arabia to practice a less fanatic and more tolerant interpretation of Islam, in terms of its attitude towards Christians and Jews, among other things. [...]

But this is a campaign that is being waged without any relation to the law or to civil rights – for one because Saudi Arabia lacks any orderly system of laws, and the arrests are not subject to any organized judicial system. The claim that this is the way to restore to the state treasury billions of dollars that were illegally looted is of course popular, but the practical meaning of these steps is the concentration of tremendous economic power in the hands of the crown prince himself, effectively turning him into a sole and autocratic ruler, which was never the case in the kingdom. [...]

Saudi Arabia’s massive intervention in the complex civil war in Yemen has proven to be a dismal failure, causing the death of thousands and triggering a humanitarian disaster, which has exposed millions of Yemenites to the danger of starvation. The Saudi boycott and the siege imposed on Qatar – a small but wealthy emirate that is unwilling to accept Saudi dictates – were unsuccessful, and even boomeranged. Meanwhile, the brutal attempt to oust Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, with methods that are reminiscent of Cesare Borgia, ended with a resounding farce.

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openDemocracy: Vladimir Putin and the rural roots of authoritarian populism in Russia

The Russian regime, however, is somewhat different to what we commonly understand as authoritarian populism. Putin’s governance is not characterised by a genuine anti-establishment and anti-corruption agenda. Moreover, while populist leaders in other countries aim to mobilise and politicise their supporters, Putin’s regime is based on the demobilisation and depoliticisation of the Russian population. [...]

Putin’s authoritarian populism has a strong rural basis in Russia. According to a recent public opinion poll by the Levada-Centre, 70% of Russian villagers express an outright positive attitude towards  Putin (62.5% of urban dwellers are of the same opinion). Rural Russians are the major supporters of key features of authoritarian populism: strongman leadership, authoritarian governance, populist unity between the leader and the ordinary people, nostalgia for past glories and confrontation with the ‘Others’ (in the Russian case – the ‘Others’ abroad). For example, 45% of villagers believe that Russia needs strongman leadership, and 61% regret the collapse of the Soviet Union (in urban areas, these figures are 35% and 56%, respectively). [...]

Rural Russians are, certainly, more traditional and less exposed to alternative political ideas, but it would be wrong to link their support for Putin with propaganda only. Propaganda does play an important role, but if propaganda messages do not fit national archetypes, they become rather inefficient and are most likely rejected. [...]

Certainly, contemporary rural Russians are not traditional peasants; however, they share some common features with peasant society – namely, conservatism, traditionalism, a subordinate position, and anti-elite and anti-capitalist sentiments. This may explain why authoritarian populism finds strong support among villagers, who are more conservative and traditional than urban dwellers.

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Jakub Marian: Most studied foreign languages in lower secondary education in Europe

The map shows a few surprising facts. Spanish is more popular among pupils in Sweden and Norway than German (which is the third most commonly studied language there). Studying Danish (or, rarely, another Scandinavian language) is mandatory for Icelandic pupils. In Finland, both Finnish and Swedish are compulsory subjects in school, with the exception of children who speak neither of the two languages as their mother tongue. Learning a second foreign language seems to be rare in Austria, where less than 9% of pupils in lower secondary education study any language other than English.

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Bloomberg: World War Still Haunts Putin as Population Decline Taxes Economy

The Soviet death toll was so devastating—almost 27 million by official count, 60 times more than America or Britain—it triggered what demographers call a “wave” of population troughs and crests that will continue to undulate for generations, amplified by the upheavals that followed the collapse of communism in 1991. [...]

After hovering near 144 million for a decade, Russia’s population is once again shrinking, threatening Putin’s economic goals for the next six years. Even the recent addition of 2.3 million Crimeans won’t be enough to offset an expected 28 percent plunge in the number of women of prime childbearing age by 2032.  [...]

While fertility rates are falling worldwide and several former communist states in Europe are facing larger population declines, no major country shares Russia’s vast discrepancy in the size of its age groups. Census data show there are about 70 percent more Russians in the oldest bracket of workers, 55 to 59, for example, than in the youngest, 15 to 19. By comparison, the gap is about 30 percent in Japan and less than 10 percent in both the U.S and the U.K. [...]

Without bold initiatives, the country may go from being one of the least indebted major economies to one of just six where age-related expenses push net debt past 250 percent of gross domestic product over the next three decades, according to S&P Global Ratings. The new monthly stipend for first-time parents may encourage procreation, but little can alter the current contraction in the workforce.

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Deutsche Welle: Going naked against homophobia

Holding hands with your partner as gay men in the streets of Warsaw, Budapest or Bucharest is likely to attract at least a few disapproving looks. In some European countries, living openly as a homosexual requires a lot of courage. About half of the population of Poland (52 percent), Romania (54 percent), Hungary (44 percent) and more than one-third of Bulgaria (36 percent) would not grant equal rights to LGBT people, according to a 2015 Eurobarometer survey on discrimination in Europe.

The Romanian photographer and LGBT activist Tiberiu Capudean believes that hatred and fear are fueled by ignorance. His new project "Naked" is meant to give more visibility to the LGBT community. The artist has taken black and white pictures of more than 200 nude gay and bisexual men from different countries around the world and from a wide range of professions: medical doctors, biochemists, shop attendants, lawyers, tailors, students and engineers. "I want to help those who are not part of the LGBT community understand us, I want to give a face to those whom the homophobes hate without even knowing them", Capudean tells DW. [...]

There is also a connection between religion and homophobia in central and southeastern Europe. In Romania, the "Coalition for the Family," a group strongly backed by the Orthodox Church, has gathered 3 million signatures seeking to change the definition of family in the country's constitution through a referendum. Romania's Civil Code bans same-sex marriages and civil partnerships, but currently the constitution defines marriage as "the union between spouses," which leaves room for interpretation. The goal of this initiative is that the constitution should define family as "the union between a man and a woman."

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