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Pulitzer Prize-Winning author Nathan Thrall will discuss his book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.”

About the Book Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem.

Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy.

Immersive and gripping, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine that offers a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth...

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The term "neoliberalism" gets thrown a lot in intellectual and political discourse, yet with seldom clarity to what it entails. Some may loosely relate it to the de-politicisation of the economy, the weakening of the State in favor of private corporations, or even the revival of laissez-faire capitalism. While one cand find some truth in those assumptions, they inevitably stray from the ideology as conceived by the neoliberal intellectuals of the past century.

Besides narrating the marriage of neoliberalism and human rights (which we will cover later), this book sheds a light on what actually neoliberalism stood for. Whyte contends that what the neoliberals envisaged through their numerous gatherings following the second world war, was a new, global economic order premised on what they have termed the “morals of the market.”

[T]he ‘morals of the market’ were a set of individualistic, commercial values that prioritised the pursuit of self-interest above the development of common purposes. A market society required a moral framework that sanctioned wealth accumulation and inequality, promoted individual and familial responsibility, and fostered submission to the impersonal results of the market process at the expense of the deliberate pursuit of collectively formulated ends. It also required that moral obligations are limited to the requirement that we refrain from harming others, and do not require positive obligations to others. (Intro.)

Far from the early liberal concept of the "invisible hand" or the criticisms by opponents of “amoral economics,” what the neoliberals proposed was state interference for the sake of maintaining individualistic freedom in the market. Neoliberalism is what it is: it is not a return to the old fin de siècle liberal economy, but a solution to the problems that the latter faced.

In developing their moral order, neoliberal intellectuals played with notions of "civilisation" and "anti-totalitarianism." The Mont Pèlerin Society of 1947 met in the context of two fatidical events: the decolonisation movement in the Third World, and the drafting of an international human rights charter. The neoliberal discourse evolved in relation to colonialism and human rights throughout the decades. For instance, while neoliberal intellectuals were critical of the British administration of the colonies for obstructing the competitive market, they saw the decolonial movements as a turn towards "communist totalitarianism" which must be stopped in order to secure global free trade and the extraction of natural resources, in other words "neocolonialism".

Similarly, the intellectuals at Mont Pèlerin Society invoked many critical remarks regarding the UDHR. In particular, they sought to undermine the "superfluous" rights and prerogatives which it included, namely social, economic and cultural rights that, in the eyes of MPS, was a stepping stone for totalitarianism: welfare policies lead to socialism, socialism to communism and finally towards totalitarianism. Their criticism for human rights accrued in degree with the drafting of the human rights covenants which accentuated social and economic rights. However, the neoliberal criticism was not directed towards human rights per se, but the scope of said human rights. These intellectuals adopted a Lockean conception of human rights that limited itself to the protection of individualistic freedom and private property.

The theoretical doctrines of the neoliberals contended with the real-life events in an intriguing manner. Neoliberals supported several undemocratic regimes, namely in Pinochet's Chile where they enacted economic reforms and even defended the political crackdown of the Pinichet regime. This weird stance did not invalidate their defense of human rights and freedom:

Friedman’s argument in Chile was not that political freedom and economic freedom were ‘entirely unrelated’, as Letelier and Klein both argue.40 Rather, he argued that they were intimately related: property rights are the essential foundation of all other human rights, he contended, and a free market is necessary for realising the ‘equal right to freedom’. (Ch. 4)

In addition, the showdown between the neoliberals and human rights NGOs' investigating Pinochet's violations wa sless radical than what it seemed. NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Liberté Sans Frontières originated from a similar human rights discourse to that of the neoliberals, which limited the scope of human rights that are worth protecting.

Their [humanitarian NGOs] special contribution was to pioneer a distinctly neoliberal human rights discourse, for which a competitive market order accompanied by a liberal institutional structure was truly the last utopia. (Ch.5)

Whyte's critique of human rights and neoliberalism is very essential in this day and age, especially in a Third World inflitrated by humanitarian NGOs whose agenda serves the interests of global capital and reproduces the injustices of the past century's colonialism and coercive interventions in the affairs of postcolonial polities. Whyte's reference to postcolonial intellectuals such as Fanon and Nkrumah is also very much cherished.

I heard a lot of praise for Bulgakov's oeuvre in the past, so I decided to give it a go.

I have read Russian literature in the past by recommendation of family and friends who always showed much interest in it; be it Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov or Pushkin.

But recently I noticed that knowledge of Russian literature virtually stops at the onset of the revolution. When it comes to the Soviet era, there is a sort of intentional silence regarding the literature of that time, at least in the West and its colonized peripheries. Anecdotally, I once had a conversation with my mother during which she claimed that the Soviet period was a dark time to be living in Russia. When I asked her what's the basis of her statement, she said this is based on the novels she read, citing Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The awkward smile on her face after telling her that these authors died decades before the revolution was priceless; bless her heart, but I am digressing.

When a few exceptions of Soviet literature emerge out of the iron curtain, it turns out to be some anticommunist rambling, just like Bulgakov's Master and Margarita.

Considering the critical acclaim, it feels wrong to say that I found it to be average. Was I supposed to cheer for the devil and his retinue as they terrorize Moscow? Maybe it's my ideological orientation which prevents me from fully engaging with the novel, and I'm alright with that. Though I did enjoy the chapters narrating Pontius Pilate's encounter with Yeshua Ha-Nozri.

Anyhow, was Soviet literature ever popular? Did it die out after the collapse of the union? Or has it always been curtailed in the West?

When I asked my friend how she found the book to be, she described it as “a jumble of thoughts that felt familiar.”

As Orientals, they indeed feel familiar to us. Although I never picked up the book before now, I couldn't say I have not read it. I read it on the faces of Western "political experts". I read it in laws of counterterrorism and anti-immigration. I read it in the newspapers, listen to it on the radio, and watch it on the TV. But most crucially, I read it when I look into the mirror, this self perception of being an “Oriental”, an inferiority complex transfused throughout the years from teachers and professors, intellectuals and celebrities, family and friends, and especially strangers.

“Oriental students (and Oriental professors) still want to come and sit at the feet of American Orientalists, and later to repeat to their local audiences the clichés I have been characterizing as Orientalist dogmas.” (Ch.3, IV).

Orientalism, according to Said, is not merely a scientific, objective field as it has always been characterised by the Orientalist himself. Rather, it is a subjectivity: that is, the Orientalist does not study the Orient, but he “comes to terms” with an Orient “that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.” Though the same may be said about the Occident which does not just exist as an inert fact of nature, for such divide is a social construct first and foremost, and does not translate smoothly into a physical or geographical classification.

Orientalism reflects a history of colonial exploitation. By scrutinising, interpreting and classifying the Orient, the Orientalist justified (in advance and after the fact) the West's right to dominate, restructure and have authority over the Orient.

Although the otherisation of the Oriental has already existed for millenia, Said traces back the changing point of Orientalism to the onset of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. It is at this point in time that Orientalism was institutionalised and 'scientisized'. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the majority of Orientalists were philologists and anthropologists. Yet, the core values of the scientific method—objectivity, disinterest, mutability—notwithstanding, Orientalism preserved, see “secularized,” the mythic discourses of premodernity.

“the scientific categories informing late-nineteenth-century Orientalism are static: there is no recourse beyond “the Semites” or “the Oriental mind”; these are final terminals holding every variety of Oriental behavior within a general view of the whole field. As a discipline, as a profession, as specialized language or discourse, Orientalism is staked upon the permanence of the whole Orient, for without “the Orient” there can be no consistent, intelligible, and articulated knowledge called “Orientalism.”” (Ch.3, II).

Although Science, as an ideal of truth should theoretically be prone to change, admits proof and counterproof; the scientist still holds on his shoulders the overwhelming weight of his predecessors and their values. He is impelled to follow their path, avoid uncertainty and existentiality, to reproduce mythic discourses. And this is especially relevant to Orientalism.

From an existential standpoint, the gaze of the White Man makes of the Oriental man “first an Oriental [essence] and only second a man [existence].” Dehumanised, otherised and silenced; the Oriental is a piece of mold that can be shaped by the Orientalist according to the zeitgeist of his epoch on the one hand, and to the eccentric tendencies of his personality.

In the second half of the twentieth century, which coincides with the decolonisation movement and the zenith of American hegemony, Orientalism went through major transformations. European focus on philology was superseded by a jejune, American obsession in “Social Sciences”. The Orient became then the experimental laboratory of the American social scientist.

“No longer does an Orientalist try first to master the esoteric languages of the Orient; he begins instead as a trained social scientist and “applies” his science to the Orient, or anywhere else.” (Ch.3, IV).

Late (read: American) Orientalism was shaped by government and corporate interests in the non-Western world, and fueled by the Cold War and competition with the Soviet Union. This is why very perverse and polemical "studies" of Islam were mass-published (especially by Zionists). Islam, according to the modern Orientalist, is a volatile and purely political religion, a force “contending with the American idea for acceptance by the Near East” along with communism. All this whilst maintaining the early myths of “Oriental despotism.”

“The legendary Arabists in the State Department warn of Arab plans to take over the world. ... the passive Muslims are described as vultures for “our” largesse and are damned when “we lose them” to communism, or to their unregenerate Oriental instincts: the difference is scarcely significant.” (Ch.3, IV).

Edward Said's magnum opus is a seminal and well-acclaimed work. Yet it had its fair share of critics. Apart from the Zionists and Orientalists themselves (which we shall dusregard), some scholars criticised Said's dealing with the Middle East as a monolithic category consisting of pure Muslim Arabs. It is not entirely incorrect to say that Said did not leave much space to the other constituents of the region; however, Said is very well aware of the cultural and ethnic diversity characterising West Asia and North Africa. Rather, their virtual absence from the big picture is a better reflection of the Orientalist's vision of what the Near East is, in which non-Arabs and non-Muslims hold a peripheral, if not silent, role. Britain and France, Said contends, viewed themselves as the protectors of Christian minorities from the evils of Islamic "barbarism."

Moreover, Islam is equally simplified by Orientalists and reduced to Islamic Orthodoxy. In the Islamic Orient, everything cannot but be perceived as Islamic, even modernisation and the adoption of European technologies and institutions is itself Islamic. To reiterate a previous thought, the essence precedes existence.

It is important to note that this book was released decades before the 9/11 attacks which spurred another Orientalist wave. Although today the formal, academic field is almost nonexistent, its essentialist doctrines are still being disseminated into the masses, both in the West and the East. The face of Western progressivism has shown a grim, and not entirely unfamiliar face, especially amid the genocide in Gaza. The struggle against dehumanisation and exploitation is not over yet.

P.S. Take a shot every time you read the word Orient.

Disclaimer: there is no English translation of this book

The setting is 14th century Syria witnessing a stand-off between the usurping Mameluke Sultanate, and the Mongol Ilkhan whose forefathers invaded from the East, and who, having converted to Islam, is seeking to govern the holy sites of Mecca and Medina.

However, amid the grusomeness of the scenes delicately described and narrated, there is an overarching theme which the author fixated on: that is History.

The author does not accept history at face value. There are political ramifications at play that go largely unnoticed by positivist scholarship in the field. For the production of history is neither an objective nor symmetrical process: not everyone has the privilege of writing history, not even one's own history for that matter. The historian's discretionary power in selectively choosing what to convey and what to silence from the past precludes him from being a disinterested observer. History does not merely transmit events and happenings, but rather imposes lessons, ideologies, philosophies and entire worldviews. More precisely, the production of history translates, depending on the context, into the reproduction of the status quo.

The Mongol invasion is exemplary of this particularity of History. This event went down in history as the most horrific massacre in the premodern age; indeed, some historians go as far as to equate it with the Holocaust. This evaluation has been widely accepted and deemed uncontroversial by the scholarship of the last few decades, both in the East and the West.

However, since the twenty-first century, there have been efforts by some scholars to dissect those ramifications of history mentioned earlier within the widely-accepted narrative of “Mongol genocide.” Anja Pistor-Hatam for instance argues that the collective memory of the societies which experienced the invasion has to a certain extent exaggerated the degree of violence commited by the Mongols. What the premodern historians have transmitted secondhand in their books do not conform to archaeological evidence. Though if the extent of the destruction brought by the Mongols is not as significant as it was thought to be, “the trauma was very real” (Lane, 2008). The idea of foreign invasion was more fatal than the act itself, sending the affacted civilisations into existential crisis. The paranoia of the Foreign, the Other, is very well evinced by Al-Zahabi when the novel's characters who pondered on many occasions about the nature of the Monhol soldiers, concluding every time that they were not humans but mythical animals.

While endless literature is dedicated to the Mongol invasion itself, its aftermath and the cultural legacy of the Mongols in Iran and Iraq is rarely acknowledged. The Ilkhanids in fact contributed a lot to the enrichment of art and architecture, one of the perks of the cosmopolitan and diverse constituencies of the Mongol courts. Among the rulers' servants and elite were not only Muslims, but also Christians, Zoroastrians and Buddhists; for the Mongol rulers were more concerned about one's loyalty to the empire rather than religious or ethnic affiliation. Yet, especially in the Muslim world, this perspective remains ignored.

Reviving the bygone past, Al-Zahaby vividly shows the Ilkhan's fear of history, or more accurately his concern over the image that will be left of him by the chroniclers to the later generations:

History is an invincible enemy, for when life creeps into it one would be buried in the ground, stripped of awe and undesired.

The Mameluke Sultan knew of the Ilkhan's weakness and thus surrounded himself with historians and chroniclers, his strongest soldiers against the imminent invasion. He gasps and declares:

O God, may History be my friend and not my enemy.

Bibliography / Further Reading

Al-Zahaby, Khairy. “The Trap of Names” (2009).

Lane, George. “The Mongols in Iran” (2008).

Pistor-Hatam, Anja. “History and its meaning in the Islamic Republic of Iran: The case of the Mongol invasion(s) and rule” (2012).

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Silencing the Past:Power nd the Production of History” (1995).

An Iranian film directed by Bahram Beyzai. A dramatic retelling of the death of the Persian king Yazdgerd III amid the Muslim invasion of Iran.

This post contains spoilers from the finale.

I have completed the series. It prompted thousands of thoughts in my head and so I must spill them.

The series initially appears to be situated in a post-apocalyptic world where humanity was driven to near extinction by a mysterious, giant species called titans. For a century, walls taller than any titan protected the last bastion of humanity... Until they didn't.

But as political circumstances, enemies and allies change, this narrative sooner or later is superseded by another one, and another... And so forth. The authors make clear their stance towards history: a tangible string of myths arranged by the human mind to justify or condemn a given thing. To Marleyans, the founder Ymir made a deal with the devil; to Eldian restorationists, her titan powers were granted by God.

One will grasp to a narrative or myth to justify their existence in this mysterious world. However, the truth is no more than a myth devoid of intrinsic value. One then would ask why live if all is futile, if there's no right or wrong, if there is no exit from the vicious cycle of pain. It is those disquietudes that the authors, like the exiztential philosophers of the past century, tackle and battle with.

The curse of the titans resembles in someway the myth of Sisyphus. Just like Sisyphus was condemned to an eternity of rolling the boulder up the mountain; the nine titans were inherited from generation to generation, fueling endless conflicts and massacres throughout centuries. A few foresighted characters were conscious of this, but they sought different paths towards ending the curse, reaching the top of Sisyphus' mountain. On the one hand, we are faced with the nihilist: Zeke sought the powers of the founding titan to sterilise his own race and put an end to the eternal suffering. On the other hand, we encounter the romanticist, though no less existential: Eren goes on to massacre the greatest part of humanity in the name of freedom, because simply he was born into this world. The latter, with the knowledge of the distant future, breaks the curse of the titans by sacrificing himself and thus unifying humanity. Or so he thought.

The post-credits scenes show us the evolution of the tree under which Eren was buried across countless millenia during which humanity grows and expands, but fighting and destruction accompany it all. Civilisation is built and destroyed over and over. The tree finally grows incomprehensibly long as it starts to resemble the tree from which the curse of the titans emerged, and we see a young boy entering its trunk just like founder Ymir did millenia ago.

The message of the authors is disquieting and dreadful: are we humans (and by extension the beings who preceded or will succeed us) insignificant in the grand scheme of things? Deemed to repeat history over and over again?

The existential dread is indeed unbearable. However, life is not a prison; indeed, it's the complete opposite: it is freedom. Eren bent moral principles and committed mass genocide by stomping over eighty percent of humanity because... because he “just wanted to do it.” The vagueness of Eren's answer is eerily similar to the ruminations of one of Camus' fictional characters:

I don’t know what to do today, help me decide. Should I cut myself open and pour my heart on these pages? Or should I sit here and do nothing, nobody’s asking anything of me after all? Should I jump off the cliff that has my heart beating so and develop my wings on the way down? Or should I step back from the edge, and let the others deal with this thing called courage? Should I stare back at the existential abyss that haunts me so and try desperately to grab from it a sense of self? Or should I keep walking half-asleep, only half-looking at it every now and then in times in which I can’t help doing anything but? Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?

Eren admits that he is “a slave to freedom,” or as Sartre declared once, “condemned to be free.” It is a paradox that Man contends with throughout his numbered days: every act is a choice and not acting is equally choosing.

I do not think the authors of the manga/series are nihilists. In a conversation between Zeke and Armin, the latter recalls distant memories of childhood where he used to run behind Eren and Mikasa up the hill. While insignificant these moments were, he concedes, he still cherished them the most. Similarly, Zeke ruminates over the mundane hours spent playing baseball with his mentor. Zeke's confession which follows is insightful: he wouldn't mind being born again if it means he can play with his mentor again.

There may not be intrinsic thruth or meaning to life. There may not be an all-encompassing myth that tells things as they are. However, “the realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning” (Albert Camus). In one of the final scenes, we see Armin holding a seashell as they swam in a sea of blood. “What's that?” Eren asks. He replies:

“So you finally noticed it. It was at our feet the whole time, but you were always looking off into the distance.”

Instead of endlessly tormenting ourselves with the absurdity of life, we should embrace it. We should cherish those “insignificant” moments in the midst of all the chaos and futility, and spend our time in the wealth of the here and now. We should imagine Sisyphus smiling while pushing the boulder.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10484701

The best way I could describe Uruguayan Journalist Eduardo Galeano's book is that it's a poetical obituary of the art of soccer. As the author writes in the first lines, “the history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots. In this fin de siècle world, professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless means not profitable.”

Galeano recounts the development of the sport from its ancient roots, its bourgeois upbringings in the modern age, through its proletarisation and to its eventual commercialisation by the global market. The history of soccer is one of those few instances whose origins are less grim than their present actuality.

The fact is that professional players offer their labor power to the factories of spectacle in exchange for a wage. The price depends on performance, and the more they get paid the more they are expected to produce. Trained to win or to win, squeezed to the last calorie, they are treated worse than racehorses.

Soccer in the chaotic 20th century turned from an innocent sport into a profitable and equally shady industry milked to its last bit by bureaucrats, merchants and corporations. Players are owned and sold and disposed of like slaves in plantations. The profession being shaped by the entertainment industry, the common man fails to regard the soccer player (or of any other mainstream sport for that matter) as a worker with labour rights, and the international bureaucracy tries its best to maintain the status quo.

The machinery of spectacle grinds up everything in its path, nothing lasts very long, and the manager is as disposable as any other product of consumer society.

But, despite the chronological narration, this is no history book, far from it. The passion and vividness in which the author describes some of most iconic plays from around the world, old amd new, capture a beaty that no camera or TV screen can ever catch.

To Galeano, soccer is an art; the players are performers; and the stadium is a theatre. He denounces the mechanical vocabulary employed by the critics and commentators: the players of the Argentine club River Plate couldn't be a "Machine" when they had so much fun they'd forget to shoot at the goal; the 1974 world cup Dutch team nicknamed "Clockwork Orange" was more of a jazz band.

The reader throughout the book ceases to be simply a spectator. No, he is now bonding with the fatigued striker, the goalkeeper criminalised by the fans, the distressed referee, the suicidal star and so on.

Galeano remains very much aware that sport cannot be detached from the politics of our age. To some fans, especially in South America,

The club is the only identity card [they] believe in. And in many cases the shirt, the anthem, and the flag embody deeply felt traditions that may find expression on the playing field but spring from the depths of a community’s history.

”Soccer and fatherland are always connected, and politicians and dictators frequently exploit those links of identity.” The championship is a national pride, countries host the world cup to bleach the regime's record of oppression, wins are offrances to the monarch or the tyrant.

Being a Uruguayan, the author shifts the spectacle of soccer from the European pitches to the South American turf, breaking the mythological narrative of European dominance and superiority in a sport that had no meaning before the Brazilian Mulattoes Friedenrich and Pelé, the Argentine Di Stéfano, the grandsons of slaves Gradín and Delgado, all dabbled with the ball.

The game of soccer was and still is the source of happiness and glimmer of hope for the youth of the world. As for the professional sport, we must mourn its beautiful past and cry on the cold body that is shamelessly called “soccer.”

The centrality of archaeology in articulating and espousing the politics of nation states as also erstwhile empires is today undeniable. The history of archaeological research and practice is replete with cases where material culture has been used to produce origin myths, shared imaginaries of communities simultaneous with consolidating an image of the ‘other’...

... it was important to weave together a narrative of the nation and its people using archaeological objects and combining “scientific truths” about these objects with elements of fiction ...

The creation of the two new nation states of India and Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of the Partition of 1947 provided an immediate impetus to these concerns of narrativization. The irony of the situation was of course the fact that both the nation states were creations of the politics of 1947, with their newly drawn geographical boundaries. Yet, there were interesting ways in which this irony was worked around. Even more interesting were the ways in which archaeology came to be employed in such constructions ...