Culture
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The double-edged sword | Eurozine
One of the most important stories of the last decade is the influence of identity politics on the Western world. This form of politics exists at the theoretical level, as well as in public policy, but also less subtly in popular culture. The popular, or populist, expression of some of these ideas is often referred to as ‘woke’. In fact,…
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Setting the stage for genocide
Over the past few weeks, Israel marked twenty years since the “Gaza Disengagement”: the 2005 operation that uprooted 8,500 settlers and pulled out its troops. Presented as a way to ease Israel’s military burden and redraw its borders, the move bypassed the Palestinian Authority and left Israel in control of Gaza’s borders, airspace, and resources. Abroad, however, the withdrawal was…
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No reason to panic | Eurozine
Writer, journalist and trained sociologist Marcin Ogdowski speaks from in-depth experience as a war correspondent to Michał Sutowski from Krytyka Polityczna on the Polish perspective to Russian aggression. Michał Sutowski: In the morning, after the drones entered Poland, the prime minister said, ‘There is no reason to panic; life will go on as normal’. Was he right? Marcin Ogdowski: After…
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Russia is not the sea
‘Will the Slavic streams flow into the Russian sea? Or will it dry out? This is the question,’ wrote Alexander Pushkin in 1831. The line is from ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, a triumphal ‘ode’ to Russia’s crushing of the Polish uprising of 1830–1831. The poem is a defiant statement of a tenet of Russian geopolitical thinking that continues to…
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A political class gasping for breath
In June 2024, after European elections that were a clear rejection of his party Renaissance, French president Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly in an act that only cemented his defeat. The centrist coalition Ensemble, in which Renaissance is the biggest party, had previously formed the largest faction with 250 seats; now it had only 166. The leftwing coalition New…
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My testament | Eurozine
Growing up as a naive schoolboy in the 1990s, I was surrounded by the Belarusian language and Belarusian culture. My generation had been saturated by a wave of hasty Belarusification, and like many I saw this as something quite normal. We read in our history textbooks and were told in literature lessons about how the Belarusian people had lived and…
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On starlings and the thermodynamics of life
A murmuration of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of starlings, flying in such perfect synchrony that they look like a single, billowing, pulsing organism against the night sky: this is one of nature’s most striking sights. The biggest evolutionary benefit of moving in concert is obvious. A coherent collective serves as a deterrent, since it’s far more difficult…
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The unstoppable solipsist | Eurozine
It is safe to predict that the second Trump presidency will go down in American history as the most divisive ever. Everything to say about its first six months has already been said: all we can do is keep track of the carnage. The most visible damage has been to the institutional infrastructure of the US itself. The devastation to…
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The president who preached revolution
… ever since 1789, there has been one magic word which contains within itself all imaginable futures, and is never so full of hope as in desperate situations – that word is revolution. Simone Weil Ever since he took office on 7 August 2022, the Colombian president Gustavo Petro has been trying to install a new revolutionary epic narrative into…
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Writing on the wall, writing on the water
Cofiwch Dryweryn (remember Tryweryn). The walls exhort us in bright red and white, from Llanrhystud in West Wales to Chicago. And the writing’s not only on the wall: it’s on a sticker on a lamppost outside Camden Market in North London, on posters and mugs and car bumpers and T-shirts, all the material media you can imagine. Beyond its original…
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