Jacobin Magazine: The Forgotten Massacres

Hundreds of thousands of real and suspected communists were massacred, and a new, military-dominated regime under Suharto was installed. Western powers like the US, Britain, and the Netherlands condoned and often actively supported the massacres.

Indonesia’s military junta took control of the media on October 2, using it to spread its own version of the events. In the junta’s version, the killing of the generals was the spark that ignited popular anger against a party that was hated for its violence, its disregard for religion and its lack of patriotism. Supposedly, PKI plans for a violent revolution and elimination of anyone who opposed it were stopped by a wave of spontaneous popular anger against the treacherous communists. [...]

Historical research has demolished this version of events. The failed coup was not an initiative of the PKI as a whole, but of a small number of PKI leaders working with sympathetic army officers who wanted to remove several right-wing army leaders — not take state power. The massacre that followed was systematic, organized by right-wing nationalist politicians and militia, religious organizations, and, most of all, the Indonesian army. This coalition for murder received political and material support from Western powers. [...]

It was not just the growth of the PKI that set off alarm bells in the West. In the late 1950s, the US backed right-wing rebellions against Sukarno, but this backfired when the rebels were defeated. American support for his opponents drove Sukarno further away from the Western bloc and damaged US relations with the most powerful force on the Indonesian right: the army. [...]

The killing of the generals was a boon for the army’s propaganda campaign against the PKI and, indirectly, against Sukarno. Sukarno’s refusal to condemn or ban the PKI, as the Right demanded following the failed coup, was exploited by the army to discredit him. In the following months, Sukarno was forced to hand more and more power to the army.

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Al Jazeera: Morocco election: Everything you need to know

The main battle will be hotly contested between the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) and opposition Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM).

The Istiqlal (Independence) Party, the oldest in the country founded in 1944, is also projected to do well in this election. [...]

Out of 395 members, 305 are elected in multi-seat constituencies from electoral lists put together by the parties, while 60 seats of the remaining 90 are reserved for a national list of women and the rest 30 seats are at grab by candidates under the age of 35. 

Voter turnout is generally poor. On the whole, about 50 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots both in local (municipal and regional polls) and national elections (parliament).

Voter turnout in the 2015 local elections was 53.67 percent, up from approximately 45 percent in the 2011 parliamentary vote. [...]

The multi-party system in the kingdom makes it impossible for any political party to win an absolute majority, forcing any winning party to work with other parties to form a coalition government.

At least 30 political parties are taking part in the upcoming elections, but only six major parties do enjoy strong electoral base.

Those six major parties are usually invited to form coalition governments, while some prefer to remain in the opposition.

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The Guardian: Concrete jungle: why brutalist architecture is back in style

Thus was the stage set for the resurgence of brutalism. You can’t put a brutalist building in a gold lame party dress: raw concrete is raw concrete. It’s down-to-earth, honest, unpretentious, egalitarian, and creates buildings rooted in place: Boston City Hall, New York’s Whitney Museum (now the Met Breuer), the city of Brasília.

Unlike steel and glass, concrete has terroir: the reddish concrete of Boston, for instance, looks and feels very different from the fine-grained concrete of Japan. You take the local rock, bind it with cement and water, and there you have your concrete. Its very nature is local rather than blandly international.

When they’re treated with care and respect, brutalist buildings can become treasured by a city in a way that glass-and-steel towers very rarely are. In London, for instance, locals and tourists alike swarm to the concrete cultural buildings on the south bank of the Thames at Waterloo Bridge. These masterpieces – the Royal Festival Hall, the Hayward Gallery, Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre – are a beloved part of the capital, a destination even for people with no particular reason to go there. [...]

Great brutalist buildings, it turns out, have soul, in a way that antiseptic glass curtain walls never will. And they have undeniable power, too. Consider Peter Eisenman’s haunting holocaust memorial in Berlin: it would be unthinkable in anything but concrete. [...]

It’s easy to see, then, how brutalism is flourishing in the age of Occupy. But there’s another force driving the brutalist resurgence, which is maybe less austere and selfless: photography, in general, and Instagram, in particular. [...]

Say what you like about brutalist buildings, you have to admit they look gorgeous in photographs and in coffee-table books such as This Brutal World, recently published by Phaidon. Brutalism might still be a bit austere for many people’s taste. But when you live in something that good looking, you can’t help but feel a little bit of glamor by association.

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Quartz: What if the Danes’ secret to happiness is largely about bad weather?

Romanticizing Scandinavians’ way of life is becoming a popular pastime. Sweden has the best parental leave policy in the world. Finland’s education system magically mixes low pressure and high achievement. And the Danes, the happiest people in the world, have higgle. [...]

“Hygge practices are, broadly, things that we do that our ancestors would recognise; besides lighting fires, eating, drinking, eating cake and drinking things that are hot,” she writes. “Yet there is certainly a Danish specificity in the prominence of pyromania, and principles crop up repeatedly that are highly specific to the Scandinavian climate.”

Williams looks at a few books on the hygge list, including The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking, which notes some of the downsides of hygge, namely that it is based on small groups which can be pretty exclusionary. That suggests that its comforting nature may have as much as anything to do with being in a tight-knit, familiar group of friends or family, and that the fire, hot cocoa, and artfully woven woollen blankets are more the trappings of hygge than the source of it. [...]

Perhaps, then, the craze for hygge is just a manifestation of the desire to be more connected. Westerners generally live in less cohesive communities than they did a few decades ago, and technology dominates their waking hours, which is both isolating and overwhelming.

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Salon: Yes, clowns are creepy: “The phantom clown theory” explains why we’re terrified of them

This isn’t the first time there has been a wave of clown sightings in the United States. After eerily similar events occurred in the Boston area in the 1980s, Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist who studies the folklore behind mythical beasts such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, came up with something called “The Phantom Clown Theory,” which attributes the proliferation of clown sightings to mass hysteria (usually sparked by incidents witnessed only by children).

It’s impossible to determine which of these incidents are hoaxes and which are bona fide tales of clowning around taken to the extreme. Nonetheless, the perpetrators seem to be capitalizing on our longstanding love-hate relationship with clowns, tapping into the primal dread that so many children (and more than a few adults) experience in their presence.

In fact, a 2008 study conducted in England revealed that very few children actually like clowns. It also concluded that the common practice of decorating children’s wards in hospitals with pictures of clowns may create the exact opposite of a nurturing environment. It’s no wonder so many people hate Ronald McDonald. [...]

Jesters and others persons of ridicule go back at least to ancient Egypt, and the English word “clown” first appeared sometime in the 1500s, when Shakespeare used the term to describe foolish characters in several of his plays. The now familiar circus clown – with its painted face, wig and oversized clothing – arose in the 19th century and has changed only slightly over the past 150 years. [...]

Unusual or strange physical characteristics such as bulging eyes, a peculiar smile or inordinately long fingers did not, in and of themselves, cause us to perceive someone as creepy. But the presence of weird physical traits can amplify any other creepy tendencies that the person might be exhibiting, such as persistently steering conversations toward peculiar sexual topics or failing to understand the policy about bringing reptiles into the office.

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