Political Critique: Corbyn can kick off a revolution among Europe’s political elites – an interview with Michael Hartmann

How many people make up the elite of a country? 

About 2000 people.

How accessible is the elite?

It really depends on which elite-branch and country we are talking about. For instance, in Germany, 75% of the chief economic officers who are part of the economic elite stem from the richest 4% of the population. Among German political elites, on the other hand, the figure drops down to 50%. In France the numbers are slightly different and rise to 90 and 60%, respectively. This implies, on the one hand, that the economic elite is more exclusive than the political one, generally speaking. On the other hand, it tells us that France has more “exclusive” features compared with Germany. [...]

We observed the last significant turn within elites when Thatcher took power in the UK. More specifically, at that time within the British Conservative Party the neoliberal paradigm gained traction. The transition was accompanied by a fully fledged shift in the composition of the Government’s staff. If, before Thatcher, the Labour government featured 30% of people stemming from the upper bourgeoisie, that same number reached the staggering proportion of 80%. From an ideological point of view, all other European countries subsequently followed that paradigm shift. [...]

Brexit is a symptom of the poor cohesion within the British economic elite. If compared to other economic elites in Europe, the former is the only one that has undergone a massive process of internationalisation. This dynamic created a gap between the economic elite and the conservative political ruling class. [...]

First of all, it makes no sense to talk about a crisis within Die Linke. Secondarily, the point is that the left has to live with a substantial mutation of its electorate. Leftist parties attract young people with high levels of education, not the victims of the economic system. This truth holds for anyone: Die Linke, Sanders in the US, or Corbyn in the UK. And it creates disruptions.

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Haaretz: BDS Blacklist: Sadly, Now Might Be the Time for Jews to Boycott Israel

There’s an intriguing irony here. Jewish BDS activists are now barred from visiting. But under Israel’s Law of Return, as Jews, they can still immigrate and even receive financial support from the government for doing so. Though it’s an interesting twist, these activists are unlikely to take up the opportunity, since one of their targets is in fact - the Law of Return.

Palestine solidarity activists often point to what they see as an unfair juxtaposition between an Israeli law granting immigration rights to any Jew worldwide, and the barring, by Israel, of the return of Palestinian refugees who were exiled in the 1948 war. This juxtaposition is what underlies JVP’s "Return the Birthright" campaign, whose subtitle is: "Because Palestinians can’t return to their homes." [...]

And here is the most important point about whether BDS activists deserve to be banned: At all its ports of entry, Israel does not only gate-keep for its own sovereign territory and its own citizens. Palestinian controlled-areas and the millions of Palestinians there who are not Israeli citizens are still subject to the decisions of Israeli authorities about who gets in - and who gets out. [...]

This also means that Israel continues to inch away from its self-declared commitment to being a democracy. And sadly, perhaps, it means that if ever there was a time for BDS, this may be it.  

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openDemocracy: A mass for a fascist: a troubling history haunts modern Croatia

The persistent beating of rain on a particularly gloomy winter evening in Zagreb did not stop a crowd of devout churchgoers from gathering in front of the Basilica of the Heart of Jesus in the center of the Croatian capital. For twenty years, this towering Jesuit church has been the setting for an annual mass held on the anniversary of the death of Ante Pavelic, the head of one of the most murderous regimes in Europe during the Second World War. [...]

Openly “worshipping” Pavelic is not commonplace in modern Croatian society, and the use of paraphernalia and symbols associating to the Independent State of Croatia (cro. NDH), the official name of the WWII Nazi puppet state that he headed, is also punishable by law. This did not stop some of the men seen later sitting in the front pews of the church from sporting t-shirts bearing the recognizable letter “U”, the emblem of the fiercely nationalist Ustasa organization formed by Pavelic, and others gathered in front of the church from exchanging calendars depicting the image of Pavelic and a map of Greater Croatia. [...]

“The people who organize these masses do not do so without the knowledge, and possibly even the blessing, of the greater part of the Catholic church and the Church has never distanced itself from these groups,” says Markovina. “The more mainstream centre-right movements in the country, on the other hand, see these groups and their positive opinions of the NDH and Pavelic as a vehicle for their own survival on the scene, helping them legitimize their right-leaning political visions for the future.” [...]

As recently as this summer, a dispute over a plaque bearing this chant in the vicinity of the memorial site dedicated to the Jasenovac concentration camp threatened to bring down the ruling government coalition, with HDZ and other right-leaning parties refusing to openly condemn the existence of the plaque and its placement on a building close to the former concentration camp. Representatives of the Jewish and Serbian minority communities have refused to participate in the official commemoration for the victims of the camp, citing the government’s tolerance of fascist ideologies as an affront to the victims of the camp.

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Quartz: Why is China creating utopian “art cities” in its former wastelands?

Unlike Dafen Oil Painting Village down the road, whose booming industry was born out of copying Western art, the art being made in Wutong is not from other places but from other times. Gazing at the canvases that line artists’ studios (and up and down the village streets themselves), it’s like looking at a real or imagined Chinese past, long before Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping. People in Wutong mix Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian forms of thought. National arts academies, which are schools where children learn the ancient classics rather than the math, science, and Chinese that dominate the mainstream modern education curriculum, are in every village. In fact, the media called Wutong dujincun, or “Reading Classics” Village (link in Chinese). [...]

It’s part of a broader trend—the comeback of “the hermit”—which promotes the stillness of monk-ish mountain living. Others describe the mountain and its foothills as a place to live a free life—a treatment, or zhiliao. It’s a place to go when you want to recuperate from overwork, illness, or heartbreak; a location where you can leave the world and explore a new way of living that’s slow and scattered with art—utopic, even. [...]

In recent years, Beijing has declared a push for soft power. In a departure from merely wielding their might in large-scale industrial production and political force, soft power is a way to gain influence through culture and values. Still, art is not for art’s sake, as Chairman Mao once forbid. Soft power aims to make China prominent in the public eye and attractive as a nation—though sometimes it can be lucrative too, such as the recent Hong Kong-Hollywood collaboration, The Great Wall.

The art village designations are part of this effort. They’re a branding strategy to draw domestic tourism and encourage the consumption of art objects, leisure goods, and coffee. These sites are intended as areas for cultural production and consumption and are sometimes also places where artists live full time. Unused warehouse spaces, abandoned after decades of iron and steel production, are converted into artist studios, and the designation sometimes involves the building of structures like museums, art villas, and theaters to mark the space as a site of creative industry. But the government may not stick around to fill those spaces with programs or exhibitions. In the wake, people can come in and make these designations their own, carving out little spaces for creativity.

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Slate: A Return to Yaghnob Valley

n March 10, 1970, when Kurboon Idliev was 23 years old, Soviet helicopters landed in the remote Yaghnob Valley in northwest Tajikistan and forcibly removed every person from their house. “They transferred us to the lower flatlands to work on cotton plantations. Those who resisted were killed,” he recalls now. It would be 47 years before he returned to the valley again.

Officially, the Soviet government claimed that the Yaghnobi kishlaks—the local term for rural hamlets typically consisting of three to ten families each—were unsafe due to the threat of avalanches. A more likely motivation was the growing need for manpower in the cotton fields and the forced assimilation of isolated minority groups into the Soviet cultural system. Whatever the reason, Yaghnobis were legally denied access to their homes for more than two decades. [...]

In the 4th century, Alexander the Great defeated the Achaemenids and invaded Sogdiana, taking the Sogdian princess Roxana as his bride. From the Greek invasion until the 8th-cenutry Arab conquest, Sogdiana was passed from empire to empire, a remote province of the Greco-Bactrian, Kushan, and Sasanian empires. With the arrival of Islam, the Sogdians, refusing to relinquish their Zoroastrian faith, fled to the Yaghnob Valley. Though today Yognabis are mostly Muslim, they still preserve certain traditions from their Zoroastrian past, including their unique language; the celebration of Navruz, the feast of spring; and a clutch of ancient superstitions, including prohibitions against blowing out a candle and shaking water off your hands after washing. [...]

Since independence, the Tajik government has promoted national awareness of the country’s Sogdian heritage as an essential component of their national identity. As Tajik people develop a sense of nationhood, they have, for the most part, associated themselves with the Samanid Empire, the first Tajik-ruled state, which flourished in the 9th and 10th centuries and supported the revival of the Persian language. The Yaghnobi people, with their language and culture rooted in the distant Sogdian (i.e. ancient Persian) past, have become an important symbol of that heritage.

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