Jacobin Magazine: The Fall of the Norwegian Trump

For a long time the Norwegian establishment refused to collaborate with the FrP, seeing it as too extreme. They changed their mind out of electoral expediency. Needing votes to secure a majority, right-wing parties invited the FrP into the mainstream tent and welcomed their collaboration. Since then, mainstream right parties have assured the public that the Norwegian populist right is not like it is in others parts of Europe — it’s milder and moderate, less historically noxious. While the Sweden Democrats have an outright Nazi past, the FrP’s roots are in an anti-tax liberal party. [...]

Listhaug became city commissioner (byråd) of welfare and social services in Oslo in 2006, where she pressed for more competition and more private-sector involvement in government. After working for a consulting firm, she then entered the right-wing coalition government in 2013 as minister of agriculture and food. While still largely unknown, she stirred controversy and fear among farmers for her statements in 2010 that Norway’s agricultural policy was a “communist system.” [...]

Then that December, Listhaug was appointed to a newly created cabinet position: minister of immigration and integration. It was both shocking and expected. Shocking because the conservative right, who claimed to be moderate, chose the most prominent anti-immigrant voice as minister of immigration. And expected because the FrP’s had netted 16 percent of the votes when they joined the coalition. They were strong enough to get what they wanted, and they wanted Listhaug in charge of immigration and a platform to spread the party’s views. Listhaug quickly made the best of it. Shortly after she stepped into the new position, in late December 2015, Listhaug vowed to make Norway’s asylum policies “one of the strictest in Europe.”

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Political Critique: Poland’s child-like state

Whereas Western European countries are mature enough to handle and even learn from past sins – including those committed by the Nazis – Eastern Europe apparently is not. As the Russian intellectual historian Nikolay Koposov recently observed, the “memory laws” being enacted there “differ fundamentally from memory laws in Western Europe, because they actively protect the memory of the perpetrators, rather than the victims, of state-sponsored crimes.”

The PiS’s politicization of history is similar to that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose regime has taken to glorifying medieval autocrats such as Ivan the Terrible. But Poland was supposed to be different. Russia’s authoritarianism and political culture are rooted in its imperial past. By contrast, when Poland was liberated from the Soviet version of the Russian imperial yoke, it was seemingly eager to put as much cultural distance between itself and Russia as possible. That meant embracing liberal democracy and the rule of law, and joining the West and its institutions – namely, NATO and the European Union – as quickly as possible. [...]

Joanna Tokarska-Bakir of the Polish Academy of Sciences goes even further: “In a psychoanalytical sense, [PiS] policies – running away from shame and responsibility – are dragging us back into childhood, even into the womb, in which the child is indistinguishably entwined with its host – the nation.” She notes that children are “uncritical and innocent,” and that “shame only comes with socialization.” A national “pedagogy of pride,” on the other hand, “amounts to reversing socialization back to a fetal state.” The result is the “sinless nation” envisioned by the PiS.

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CityLab: Dead Brutalist Buildings

Over the last few years, Grimley noticed that an increasing number of Brutalist buildings around the country were being demolished and photographers were there to document them. “Eventually—unfortunately—there were enough of them to cull together into the show,” he said. Some of the photographers featured in “Brutalist Destruction” had worked with Grimley before, while others he reached out to after finding their work online. [...]

Such structures are seen by some as “monstrosities” but, Grimley noted, regardless of style, they are simply products of and testaments to their time. He pointed out that 50 years after the rise of Victorian architecture there was a wave of “venomous dislike” for such buildings, which led to many of them being destroyed. “Now, we’d be like, ‘that’s so short-sighted and narrow-minded,’” said Grimley. And yet, he added, critics of Brutalism and those who call for their demolition are following the same course. [...]

Girmley said he hopes that visitors to the exhibit will confront their own biases about the polarizing architectural style as more and more of these buildings face the wrecking ball.  

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Quartz: What will Cuba’s revolution look like without a Castro in charge?

The National Assembly on Thursday confirmed the only candidate for the post, Miguel Díaz-Canel, the country’s first vice president and a Communist Party loyalist. He replaces Raúl Castro, who took over the country’s leadership from his brother Fidel in 2006. [...]

Still, in many ways, Cuba’s presidential transition is far from revolutionary. It’s part of the periodic updating the Castro brothers have carried out to maintain Cuba’s socialist regime, whether it be by opening up the economy or dialing back state repression. Like his predecessors, Cuba’s new president will have to rejigger the definition of the Castro revolution to handle the island’s economic and political reality—currently in a precarious state. [...]

The latest iteration of the revolution, as shaped by Raúl, is still in dire need of revision, observers point out. It remains hobbled by its two-currency system—one for locals, another pegged to the dollar for tourists and international business—that stalls economic growth. Cuba must also deal with the collapse of Venezuela, which it relied upon for cheap oil.

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The Guardian: Don’t be fooled by Emmanuel Macron the ‘moderate’

Macron is far more popular internationally than in France, where dissatisfaction with his presidency has surged to 58% less than a year after his election. Here is a man who owes his power to good luck rather than any vindication of his political philosophy. In the first round of the French presidential election, he scored less than a quarter of the vote, and not dramatically more than three other candidates including the far-right Marine Le Pen and radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Macron’s thumping second-round victory was less an endorsement and more a rejection of fascism.

French scepticism towards Macron contrasts sharply with his own lack of self-doubt. He refused to be questioned by journalists because his “complex thought processes” were ill-suited for such a setting. His denunciations of his opponents would not be out of place on Donald Trump’s Twitter feed: they are “slackers” and “do-nothings”, while workers protesting over job losses should stop “wreaking havoc” and look for a job elsewhere. Macron is a pound-shop Margaret Thatcher, redistributing wealth to those with too much of it, while assaulting workers’ rights and France’s hard-won social model. His tax changes have gifted the hundred wealthiest households more than half a million euros a year: the top 1% captured 44% of his new tax breaks. [...]

So-called centrists are supposed to be socially liberal. Macron exposes this pernicious myth for what it is. A man who courted left-leaning voters by promising a humane policy towards migrants and refugees now has them firmly in his sights. The number of days a person without papers can be imprisoned in a detention centre is to be doubled; the consideration time period for asylum has been halved, meaning fewer refugees will be accepted. Charities warn that refugees fleeing war will be deported. Macron’s interior minister, Gérard Collomb, claims that communities are “breaking up because they are overwhelmed by the inflow of asylum seekers”. No wonder the far-right Front National has described his policies as a “political victory”.

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