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 …
France’s presidential election will be held in April. Emmanuel Macron will seek re-election. Will he be able to overcome the failures of his two predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, and restore the tradition of the long presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac? His biggest rivals are on the right, the most unpredictable of whom is Éric Zemmour. Éric Zemmour, the far-right candidate for the presidency of …
“The time,” once again, is “out of joint,” but the spirit of Ágnes Heller defies Hamlet’s bitter prediction about how quickly people forget. “[A] man’s memory may outlive him by six months. But he’s got to build churches for that to happen, or else he’ll have to put up with being forgotten…, like the hobby horse in the popular song” (Act III,2). While no builder of churches she, …
The Case of Osman Kavala It’s been more than four years since Osman Kavala’s detention. On October 18, 2017, the day he was taken into custody, we all thought that “they probably won’t arrest him” and on November 1, when he was arrested we said to each other “they probably won’t keep him for long.” Today, 10 December 2021, marks the 1501st day of Osman Kavala’s detention and …
