REVOLUTION: Are all radical upheavals in the social, economic and political order destined to fail? Laurie Taylor talks to Daniel Chirot, Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington, about his study into why so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times have ended in bloody tragedies. Does radical idealism inevitably have tragic consequences? Also, the Rojava Revolution, how a region in Northwestern Syria, has become the site of extraordinary transformation. The writer and activist, Rahila Gupta, describes an experiment in direct democracy, inter-ethnic co-operation and women's liberation which has taken place against a backdrop of civil war.
19 October 2020
Pindex: Coronavirus & The Greatest Catch In History, w Stephen Fry
The world's greatest catch, the funniest Trump fan, and the deadliest illusions of the pandemic and the US election.
18 October 2020
VICE: The Next Generation of the French Far Right
All of the major political parties in France have youth wings, but the National Rally remains particularly concentrated on attracting young people, training them, promoting them to leadership positions, and encouraging them to run for office. It does this with an eye towards expanding its base and recruiting youth like Ferreira and her ambitious, well-educated peers in and around Paris—a population usually thought more likely to sympathize with the students of 1968 or the people who took to the streets to protest systemic racism this summer than with a party best known for anti-Semitism, nationalism, and xenophobia. But the next generation of the French radical right lives outside of the stereotype of National Rally voters as rural, less educated, older, and male. Instead, many of its dedicated organizers and future leaders reside in universities at the center of a city widely associated with protests, strikes, and revolution, antagonizing that centuries-long history from the inside. [...]
Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, the National Rally has historically attracted men, both very young and very old, and been most notorious for the elder Le Pen’s Holocaust denial, hate crime accusations, and flirtations with Nazism. When Marine Le Pen took control of the party in 2011, she sought to change that image and professionalize the party. With her “de-demonization” strategy, she saw results fairly quickly: In 2014, the party began experiencing gains in municipal, regional, and European Parliament elections. Last year, the National Rally beat Macron’s party in elections for the European Parliament, riding a wave of anti-elite sentiment embodied by the Yellow Vest protest movement that rocked the country for months. The party’s 2018 name change was part of Le Pen’s larger strategy to distance herself from her father, whose reputation is seen as beyond salvageable. The presence of well-groomed students from elite universities, too, fits nicely into that strategy.
Everyone I interviewed differentiated Marine Le Pen’s party from the party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, accepting the National Rally’s former iteration as racist and anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, they also expressed blatantly nationalistic and Islamophobic views, remnants of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party that remain hallmarks of the National Rally today. Just two years ago, the youth wing marked International Women’s Day by tweeting a meme that read, “Defending women’s rights is fighting against Islamism: The French woman is neither veiled nor submissive!” And last month, the National Rally launched a new campaign titled, “French, wake up!,” calling for security and justice in the face of “savagery” and promising to, among other things, increase prison capacity, apply zero tolerance, end “mass immigration,” reinstate mandatory minimums, and end social services for families of repeat juvenile offenders. [...]
But Rooduijn sees radical right parties gaining broader acceptance, gradually chipping away at the stigma surrounding them. “I think that the National Rally is a good example because you can really see when Marine Le Pen took over the leadership, she really changed the image of the party, trying to present the party as a party that you could vote for, a party that's there for everyone,” he explained. “At the same time, when it comes to policy positions, to the actual ideas and the ideological base of the National Rally, nothing really changed. The party is still very radical when it comes to immigration. It's still very radical on the European Union. It's still very strict on law and order. It's still very populist, meaning that it's still very negative about all kinds of elites, most importantly the political elites.... So these parties have become more generally accepted. However, they have not really become less radical.”
New Statesman: Britain at the end of history
While the prime minister was firefighting at home, her position was deteriorating abroad. In January 1989, one of the great love affairs of modern diplomacy came to an end, as US president Ronald Reagan left the White House. His successor, George HW Bush, did not share Reagan’s affection for Thatcher, calling her a “very difficult” woman who “talks all the time when you’re in a conversation”. Bush saw West Germany, not Britain, as America’s “partner in leadership”, making it harder for Thatcher to amplify her influence through the “special relationship”.
Relations were also poor with West Germany. The federal chancellor, Helmut Kohl, thought Thatcher “ice-cold” and “dangerous”, while Thatcher herself made no secret of their “acrimonious discussions”. She got on better with the French president, François Mitterrand, who credited her with “the eyes of Caligula, and the lips of Marilyn Monroe”. Yet the two had little in common politically, and Thatcher had spent much of the summer belittling the bicentenary of the French Revolution of 1789. [...]
Over the winter of 1989-90, Thatcher gave a series of inflammatory press interviews, warning of a resurgence of German nationalism. “What is reunification all about?” she asked rhetorically. “One people, one fatherland.” She underlined references to the two World Wars in documents, and astonished George Bush and François Mitterrand by pulling out wartime maps from her handbag. Notes for one speech were scribbled on the back of a newspaper cutting on the 1938 Munich Agreement: an indication, perhaps, of what she was requesting from the archives. [...]
Powell was at the centre of one of the most damaging incidents of this period: the Chequers seminar of March 1990. Thatcher had invited a group of historians – including Gordon Craig, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Norman Stone and Timothy Garton Ash – to discuss Germany, and Powell produced a hair- raising summary of the talks. An account of the German “national character” included “angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying” and “egotism” in a veritable alphabet of insults. There were still questions to be asked as to “how a cultured and cultivated nation had allowed itself to be brainwashed into barbarism”; and the “way in which the Germans currently used their elbows… suggested that a lot had still not changed”. The document was leaked to the Independent, causing outrage in Bonn and dismay in other capitals.
CityLab: Prague’s Communist-Era Apartments Get a Second Life
Prague’s paneláks may stand in stark contrast to the city’s historic core, but they fit in with local architecture traditions more than you might assume. Interwar Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic’s predecessor state, was a hive of modernist innovation in architecture, and many architects working on major projects after the Communists took power in 1948 had been part of the country’s aesthetic debate for some time. [...]
The real push for fully industrial building methods came from a speech by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, who specifically called for the use of concrete panel construction as an efficiency measure in a bloc-wide drive for more and better housing. Despite the Soviet incentive, the housing produced to meet this call was nonetheless not fundamentally different from much being constructed in the West at the time. The internal layouts of paneláks, and their arrangement into planned, self-contained neighborhoods, had clear contemporary counterparts in Western Europe , where Sweden, France, West Germany and Britain were also building mass housing projects on a grand scale. In keeping with this exchange of ideas across the Iron Curtain, the name given to this 1950s new wave of Czech architecture and design was “Brussels Style,” after Czechoslovakian architects gained international attention for their designs at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. [...]
For their new tenants, these panelák homes often represented an improvement. Coming from tenements heated with coal stoves and often lacking hot water or reliable plumbing, many residents were relieved to move in. These new units offered central heating, balconies and much more light than you might have gotten in Prague’s existing courtyard buildings (akin to Berlin’s Mietkasernen). They also had more modern conveniences than the cramped cottages previously occupied by migrants from the countryside.[...]
That is not what happened next. Following the ousting of the communist government, panelák apartments were transferred to tenants’ ownership at rock-bottom prices, turning from something allotted by the state into free market goods. And, in a surprising twist, their reputation was steadily rehabilitated in the years after the division of Czechoslovakia into two states, along with the buildings themselves. Panelák apartments have appreciated in value significantly more than ones in brick buildings, according to housing researcher Martin Lux.
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