Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist who both experienced and analysed the impact of colonial violence. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961) he developed an account of politics that sought to channel violent resistance to colonialism as a force for change. It is a deliberately shocking book. David explores what Fanon’s argument says about the possibility of moving beyond the power of the modern state.
3 June 2020
WorldAffairs: Leading in a Pandemic: How New Zealand eliminated COVID-19 while the United States is leaving people behind
What does it take to avoid the worst of the pandemic and allow a country to return to some sense of normalcy? Producer Teresa Cotsirilos and Radio New Zealand’s Indira Stewart explain how Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern managed to nearly eradicate the virus from New Zealand. And New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof has been sheltering in place in his home town of Yamhill, Oregon. Already devastated by the opioid epidemic, working class communities like Yamhill are reeling as the pandemic exacerbates America’s inequities. To learn more about Yamhill, check out Kristoff and co-author Sheryl WuDunn’s book Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope.
UnHerd: Covid has exposed America as a failed state
In this coming struggle, America is starting with a great and self-inflicted handicap. Obama’s attempts to reposition US foreign policy away from its destructive and self-defeating entanglement in the Islamic world and towards the coming confrontation with China failed, distracted by the bloody chaos brought about by the Arab Spring and by the Washington foreign policy “blob’s” unwillingness to wean itself off wars it cannot win. [...]
When Trump urged the same thing for the United States, China’s autocrat Xi was treated to a standing ovation at Davos, and hailed as the new champion of the global liberal order. But now Larry Summers, the high priest of globalisation and of America’s offshoring to China, is warning us against fragile supply chains and the urgency of decoupling with no reference at all his long and glittering career midwifing this catastrophe. Here is the global system, finally stripped of all illusions. [...]
Yet when the rival superpower collapsed, exhausted, the United States took the wrong lessons from the fall of communism. American policymakers convinced themselves their global dominance was due to the success of their liberal ideology rather than of their industrial might, and that the sudden, unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union was due to the vindication of liberalism rather than of the awakened nationalism of Russia’s subject peoples. [...]
If we observe the American war on Covid, we see it is America’s Chernobyl moment as much as China’s. The United States is by far the world’s worst-affected country in terms of total numbers, and its outbreak is still far from over. The symbolism of American states forming regional blocs to counteract the incompetence and total incapacity of its central government to save lives or arrest the virus’s progress lends weight to The Atlantic’s charge that the US now resembles a failed state.
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: The Past We Can Never Return To – The Anthropocene Reviewed
In September of 1940, an 18-year-old mechanic named Marcel Ravidat was walking his dog, Robot, in the countryside of Southwestern France when the dog disappeared down a hole. Robot eventually returned but the next day, Ravidat went to the spot with three friends to explore the hole.
And after quite a bit of digging, they discovered a cave with walls covered with paintings, including over 900 paintings of animals, horses, stags, bison and also species that are now extinct, including a wooly rhinoceros. The paintings were astonishingly detailed and vivid with red, yellow and black paint made from pulverized mineral pigments that were usually blown through a narrow tube, possibly a hollowed bone, onto the walls of the cave. It would eventually be established that these artworks were at least 17,000 years old.
Meduza: Many Russians are continuing to ignore social distancing rules. A sociologist explains why.
Researchers then discuss what distances are specific to different countries. In Russia, the acceptable length of personal distance is sometimes estimated at 120 centimeters (approximately four feet), which is noticeably more than in Western European countries, and the United States. [...]
If we were to talk about some cultural differences, then we would first have to draw attention to the existing ideas of acceptable and unacceptable distances in the context of specific, day-to-day practices. Roughly speaking, both Russians and Germans stand in lines (for example, at an ATM), but they can have different understandings of what it means to “stand in line at the ATM.” Here, one of the most important differences is the notion of the borders between public and private. [...]
In Russia, it’s likely that the line between private and public is deeper than in Western Europe. One of the historical reasons for this separation can be found in the Soviet practices of pretense and hypocrisy, analyzed by sociologist Oleg Karkhordin. [...]
Accordingly, in Russia (although any generalizations should be taken with great care), public spaces are understood as impersonal — literally “without a face.” Russians don’t look at public space as a place for demonstrating one’s “I.” Therefore, in public space personal relationships are only possible in a very limited format: Russians prefer to save them for special, private or semi-private places (for example, kitchens or bars, respectively). In public space, one needs to behave as if they aren’t even there.
UnHerd: Nancy Pelosi has fallen into Trump’s trap
There is something about Nancy Pelosi that captures in vivid fashion the failure not just of the Democratic party but of many modern democratic politicians to realise the threat that — post Obama — populism posed. They thought they could carry on as normal. They thought they could keep the same rules, the same perks, the same dignity. And folks would go on voting for them. Getting out of their chairs. [...]
And it’s not about policies. Although she represents a district in lefty San Francisco, Ms Pelosi has been perfectly happy at various junctures to face down the Left of her party. She has fallen out pretty spectacularly with ‘the squad’ of ethnically diverse Left-wingers who have dominated much of the coverage of the most recent congress. She is not an extremist or a fan of unfocused dreamers: she is a doer of deals. [...]
But all of this is failure because all of it is on his terms. Tearing up speeches in public is Trumpism. She has fallen into his trap. It takes Pelosi and her party to a place where he wants them: a place where nothing is normal, everything hyper-partisan. She is wealthy and entitled and cross: all meat and drink for the populist president.
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