From our Democracy Seminar colleague inside Ukraine During a regular meeting of Democracy Seminar, the worldwide committee of democratic correspondence, last Thursday morning, (February 24th), we discussed the unfolding crisis in Ukraine and agreed to write up and share our quick responses from our different locations. At the same time, we received this message from our colleague in Ukraine. On February 24, thousands of Ukrainians woke up at …
Waging war against a developed industrial nation with substantial and sophisticated armed forces is always a perilous business. If said nation is also rather large (say, the second largest European country), substantially inhabited (say over 43 million citizens), had ample warning and quite some time to prepare for an enemy attack, things get even more complicated. If the will to fight is also present within the famous trinity …
Photo by kremlin.ru I have to admit that I’ve been suffering from fatigue and depression about the state of our polity, and finding it difficult to write. However, the combination of the terrible prospect that the 1914 Guns of August have now become the bombs and tanks of February 2022, and might yet become the Nuclear Weapons of the 21st Century. This fearful prospect, together with the unfathomable …
Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a 44-year-old man who until a few years ago was a professional actor and comedian. In 2019 he was catapulted to the Presidency of Ukraine, in an election in which he stood against corruption and ran as the leader of a party, “Servant of the People,” named after the television series in which he had starred. An unlikely politician, and an even less likely statesman, …
Putin on Ukraine Photo by Ad Meskens It was the most terrifying speech I heard in my adult life. These twenty-eight minutes activated my inherited memory of war’s destructiveness. The calm with which Putin spoke was leaden. Even the fact that he was sitting behind a desk, with white low-tech phones on his left showed his determination. I don’t need to show off, to raise my voice, he …
On November 4, 1956, Soviet tanks entered Budapest to perform the “fraternal task” of suppressing a short-lived popular revolt against the Soviet-installed Communist government and ending the shorter-lived reform government of Prime Minister Imre Nagy, who had committed the ultimate political sin: he had declared that Hungary would exit the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet “peacekeeping forces” spent the next week organizing a full-scale military assault against the Hungarian …
Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe Vladimir Putin’s speech this week focused on the history of the Ukraine as a justification for Russian aggression argued that Ukraine was created by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution as an administrative convenience and that it never was a “real” nation with a deep history of its own. Other heads of state in Europe and elsewhere panned the speech. Ingrida Simonyte, the …
Notes from the Polish Border with Belarus The heavily policed Eastern borderlands of Poland, Podlachia, saw significant changes in the latter half of December. The number of police personnel and road checkpoints began dwindling away. Previously, one could hardly drive ten kilometers without being stopped and being subject to inspection. Each car trunk, no matter how big the vehicle, was checked multiple times. In theory, judging from the …
In mainland China today, Hannah Arendt has an important presence in both the academic and the public sphere. CNKI—China’s main academic database—records more than a thousand pieces of scholarly writings that have “Arendt” in their titles, dating back to the 1990s. Arendt is also among a small group of contemporary Western thinkers whose influence is beyond the boundaries of academic research. Concepts coined by Arendt, such as the …
Reflections on the Democracy Seminar Launch We “zoomed” our launch event for the Democracy Seminar in December. We discussed the relationships between collaboration and democracy. The discussion featured Obaidullah Baheer from Afghanistan, Daniel Peres from Brazil, Karolina Wigura from Poland, Shireen Hassim from South Africa, and Jeffrey C. Isaac from the U.S.A., and a few dozen others joined us from around the world: watching, listening, and questioning the …
