By Tomasz Kitlinski, September 17th, 2012 
The Pussy Riot trial will go down in the history of injustices as the Oscar Wilde trial of the 21st century. Against the evil powers that be, the Moscow artists acknowledged their inspirers, fellow outcasts: Socrates (this connection to the martyr of philosophy has been noticed by David Remnick in The New Yorker), early feminist, transgender George Sand, and banished by Stalin, carnival researcher, Mikhail Bakhtin. Pussy Riot performs human rights. These women artists attack authoritarianism, misogyny, homophobia In their punk prayer, they protested Putin, the system, discrimination against the second sex, and as they sang, “gay pride exiled in chains to Siberia.” And still many hate them — and because of that they hate them. Why? In Eastern Europe the political class is anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-secular, because our countries have transitioned from false Communism to false Christianity: women, minorities, gays, artists to hell!
A formidable oppositionist movement is gaining strength: the supporters of Pussy Riot who don’t want prejudices to rule their life, demonstrations and shows of solidarity in the region and glocally, indignation of PEN Russia, PEN International, rock stars and the media, petitions (spearheaded in Poland’s leading broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza by art critic Dorota Jarecka and signed by filmmakers Andrzej Wajda and Agnieszka Holland, curator Anda Rottenberg, Ethical Art professor Krzysztof Wodiczko ). Slovenian and cosmopolitan Slavoj Zizek wrote a letter to Pussy Riot with his characteristic wit: “It may sound crazy, but although I am an atheist, you are in my prayers.”
The brutal sentence on Pussy Riot encapsulates — beyond the headlines — the predicament which women face in Eastern Europe. Women curators in Hungary have been fired, and the world-renowned New School philosopher, Agnes Heller, has also been subject to a witch-hunt. Female artists and cultural operators in Poland have been humiliated. These prejudices are a major stumbling block in the democratic transition — in fact, phobias are destroying our societies. In Russia, women rebels . . .
Read more: Performing Human Rights: Pussy Riot vs. the Pseudo Religious, Homophobic, Misogynists of Eastern Europe
By Andrea Hajek, September 14th, 2012 
As the world is closely following the election campaign in the US, a small country in the North of Europe is making a new, political start. Only two years after Geert Wilders’ right-wing Freedom Party (PVV) burst into the Dutch House of Representatives (the third largest party to come out of the elections), the nation was called to the polls again after Wilders withdrew his support to the minority government of Mark Rutte’s centre-right liberal party (VVD) and the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), due to divergences over austerity. Perhaps Wilders was counting on Dutch Euroscepticism, which showed its face so clearly in the 2005 vote against the EU constitution. Indeed, Wilders argued – as Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell explain in Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy – that the Netherlands should retain its independence and reduce its contributions to the European Union.
Renowned, for centuries, for its (religious) tolerance, cultural and religious tensions have grown fast with the advent of many Arab immigrants over the past few decades. Critical events such as 9/11 have not helped the situation: when Moroccan youth set out to celebrate the attacks publicly, discussions about respect followed. Respect for the Muslim community, that is, which simply interprets similar events in a different way, so sociologists claimed. This sounds excessively tolerant, but is it not merely political correctness? Politicians in particular are fearful of touching delicate issues and being accused of political incorrectness, and so prefer to ignore the immigration issue altogether.
The first politician (though not in the common sense of the word) to break this “taboo” was Pim Fortuyn, spokesman of an explicit anti-immigration policy. Fortuyn turned Dutch politics upside down with his flamboyant character and down-to-earth vocabulary. His critique of Islam – a “retarded culture,” in his words – provoked many debates about tolerance and freedom of speech. His assassination, just before the elections in 2002, was nevertheless a shock for both adversaries and supporters, and left a deep wound in Dutch society.
. . .
Read more: Holland Playing Safe: Pro-EU Parties Win the Dutch Elections
By Daryl Glaser, September 13th, 2012 
Was it a ‘tragedy’ or was it a ‘massacre’? Were the police, shocked by the killing of cops and security guards a few days before, entitled to feel threatened by an advancing column of panga-wielding strikers fortified with traditional medicine to immunise them from bullets? Or were the cops guilty of penning the strikers in, making an unnecessary attempt to disarm them by force, employing unconscionable firepower to block their escape and killing stragglers in cold blood? Who fired the first round of live ammunition?
What we do know is that on August 16th 34 striking miners were gunned down by police at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine in South Africa’s Northwest Province, and that there was at a minimum an unforgivable failure of police crowd control.
With luck, a government-appointed judicial commission will tell us who did what to whom and in what order. In the meantime South Africans nurse their bewilderment. Theirs is a violent land in which fifty people are slain daily in ‘ordinary’ criminal murder, and strikes are often enforced with deadly brutality, but a special shame attaches to a slaughter by state forces so redolent of apartheid-era massacres.
There are layers to this story. It’s about wage grievances, but also a battle between unions. Black platinum miners have until now been organised by the National Union of Mineworkers, a member of the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions. Critics claim that NUM, a stalwart of the anti-apartheid struggle, is now a status quo union. Comfortable as management’s recognised bargaining partner, NUM resists calls for mine nationalisation. The union increasingly represents upwardly mobile above-ground workers rather than the rock drillers who do the most arduous work. The fact that NUM negotiated a better wage deal for the former than for the latter appears to have been a spark for the unrest.
Rock drillers have it hard. Platinum companies have invested little in surrounding communities. Those of its employees who do not wish to live in hostels are given living-out allowances to find their own accommodation nearby, where they are left . . .
Read more: The Marikana Strike Killings, South Africa
By Anna Lisa Tota, September 10th, 2012 
There are stories that must be told. These are stories which change the world: they have the rare and precious power to change the lives of those who tell them and those who listen to them. The stories of Irena Sendler and Giorgio Perlasca are magical in this regard. They sound like fairy tales in their beauty, although they are true. What they have in common is their power to recount the choices and actions of a woman and a man who consciously chose to put their creative intelligence into action to the service of destiny. They decided to make up an entirely new destiny, saving the lives of thousands of Polish children and Hungarian families during one of the darkest times of European history. They show us that, when creativity bonds with fate, unthinkable things happen: the order of the real world opens up to a higher spiritual space where the impossible meets the possible.
The stories of Irena Sendler and Giorgio Perlasca are similar to that of Oskar Schindler: they must be recounted because they radically change our representation of the Holocaust. They help us remember that, even when the “utmost evil” seems to prevail, humane possibilities virtually bloom at the same time, such are the cases of this beautiful young Polish woman and this Italian diplomat who choose to transform himself into a fake Spanish consul in Budapest in 1944.
Irena was born in 1910 in Warsaw, Poland. When World War II broke out in 1939, she worked in social services. She worked to protect her Jewish friends in Warsaw from the very beginning. In 1940, the Ghetto was erected and Irena began to walk into it with various excuses: including inspections to check out potential typhoid fever symptoms and water pipes checks. The excuses varied, but not her actual intent: Irena moved dozens of children of all ages out of the Ghetto, sparing them from certain death. She hid newborns in trucks’ boxes and older kids into iuta bags. She trained her dog to . . .
Read more: Irena Sendler and Giorgio Perlasca: Saving 2500 Children and Thousands of Families from the Holocaust
By Shireen Hassim, September 7th, 2012 
Tony Blair came to Johannesburg last week. He was part of the Discovery Leadership Summit, hosted by Discovery Invest, and as you might expect he was the headline act. Tony Blair on leadership: now that would be an interesting lecture, if you could afford the high fee to attend (just over a quarter of the monthly take-home pay of your average South African academic).
As it happens in South Africa’s thickly political society, Archbishop Tutu, scheduled to appear at the summit as well, pulled out dramatically and at the last minute. He was unable to share a platform, he said, with the former UK Prime Minister given his ‘morally indefensible’ invasion of Iraq. Tutu’s moral stand also had the strategic political objective of refocusing attention on a war that many in South Africa have forgotten in our parochial obsession with our tangled society.
On the day of Blair’s speech, protestors demonstrated outside the Sandton Convention Centre and grabbed headlines to the chagrin of the conference organisers (who, it must be said, remained graceful throughout). Some of those protestors hoped to make a citizen’s arrest of Blair on the grounds that he was a war criminal. They did not get close, as security was amped up. And although I sat two feet behind Blair at the taping of a BBC debate on poverty, I did not feel moved to put my hand on his shoulder as the viral email explaining how to effect a citizen’s arrest advised; see http://www.arrestblair.org/. Neither the bounty of over 500 GBP, nor the reassurance that my motives for the arrest did not matter, tempted me. I like the politics of outrage as much as the next leftist, but I prefer thoughtful debate, when all is said and done.
I agree with Tutu that Blair’s war was based on slender evidence, driven by misinformation and an almost blind obsession with “following through” on his conviction (not to mention his commitment to President Bush) that the war should proceed. I would even confess to a visceral dislike . . .
Read more: Archbishop Tutu v. Tony Blair
By Tomasz Kitlinski, September 4th, 2012 
The performance of Pussy Riot and its repression represent the deep political challenge of post communist authoritarianism and its progressive – transgressive alternatives. This is the first of two posts by Kitlinski that have great significance for Eastern Europe and beyond. -Jeff
Don’t let Putin fool you. Banishing Pussy Riot to a penal colony allowed the Russian leader to reassert his rule. Democracy be damned. Civil rights, religious freedom, and gender equality from herein would be subject to his purview. The ex-KGB officer’s message wasn’t just aimed at Russia. It was directed at all of Eastern Europe, too.
For anyone familiar with the history of regional politics, Putin’s positioning was thick with signifiers. Pussy Riot’s sentencing would please fellow reactionaries, obviously, as well as help serve as a salve for social distress. It also confirmed that the post-Communist period was formally over. Authoritarian capitalism is the rule of the day. There’s no alternative.
The political transition in post-Communist countries has turned majoritarian, as ex-Soviet bloc states start to formalize discrimination against pro-democracy forces. Curiously, this reaction, of what can only be described as the ancien regime, both Stalinist, and its antecedents, focuses on sexual dissidence, to broadcast its worldview. In the Ukraine, it’s Femen. In my own home, Poland, it’s Dorota Nieznalska, an artist who was convicted of blasphemy.
It’s a familiar story, one that Pussy Riot’s Nadia Tolokonnikova was quick to point out, when, in her closing statement, she compared her band’s fate to the trial of Socrates, and the kenosis of Christ. Jesus was “raving mad,” she reminded her religiously observant tormentors. “If the authorities, tsars, presidents, prime ministers, the people and judges understood what ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ meant, they would not put the innocent on trial.” Tolokonnikov also cited the prophet Hosea, in the Hebrew Bible: “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice.” Surely, the authorities were not thrilled.
Pussy Riot’s choice of Jewish scripture is of course telling, as well as calculated. The prophets argue for forgiveness (Hosea forgave . . .
Read more: Pussy Riot vs. The Pseudo Religious of Eastern Europe
 The recently ended 18th Woodstock Station (Przystanek Woodstock) music festival, held in Poland just across the German border, is an extraordinary event. Organized on over 120 hectares under the banner of peace, love and rock & roll by the country’s possibly most popular charity activist, Jurek Owsiak, the free, open-air festival is a draw for over 500 000 people who come from all over Poland and increasingly from Germany to enjoy the unique event.
In terms of music, there are better festivals to be found. Woodstock Station showcases mostly rock, folk and industrial music bands, which are either still before or already after their prime; but this is only part of what makes the event special. The other is Owsiak himself and his charisma, which constantly attracts different types of people unhappy with “the system,” the political order, social norms and conventional careers. Woodstock Station provides them with a space without checkpoints or metal barriers, but instead offers one where they feel at ease and where they can do whatever they want. And indeed, the place has the feel of youth, punk rock and anarchy.
Yet, what you do find in the chaos is a quite surprising sense of mutual responsibility and a sympathetic awareness of others. During a concert you might need to elbow your way to get close to the stage, but if you feel gloomy, someone will ask if you are OK. The crime rate is ridiculously low: about thirty thefts in three days for half a million people.
Apart from two main stages and tent fields, which make the huge space look something of a favela, you can also find the so-called villages, spaces with big tents organized according to a particular theme. Apart from those organized by the sponsors—a mobile phone service provider, an international beer company and an on-line auction service—where you can buy drinks, exchange plastic bottles for water and charge your phone, there are others such as the religious Hare Krishna, and Catholic Church’s Jesus Station, another one created by the Polish National Bank, and the “Academy of Beautiful Arts,” a space for . . .
Read more: Woodstock in Poland, 2012
By Hana Cervinkova, August 29th, 2012 
Milan Petrusek, a pillar of integrity and a major figure in Czech social science, died last week. In this post, Hana Cervinkova pays tribute to him and to Alena Miltová, his wife. Together, they have been quiet heroes of Czech social science, culture and public life. I have long appreciated their work and benefited from it. It has been a privilege to know them personally. I publish this remembrance with sadness and appreciation. -Jeff
The world of Czech social science is a rather small community concentrated in several academic and research institutions in this country of ten million people. Today’s quality institutions in Prague and Brno are results of the complex process of the post-1989 (re)construction of various disciplines (including sociology, political science, anthropology, philosophy and economics), following their almost total destruction during the Communist rule. While in Poland, for example, a distinct tradition of critical social thought developed despite official restrictions prior to 1989, Czechoslovak social science was subject to all-encompassing censorship that concerned not only indigenous production, but also the prohibition on translations of Western theoretical texts. Leading Czech and Slovak scholars who dared to express critical and independent views were quickly removed from academic and research positions. As a result, the struggle for the (re)construction of the Czech and Slovak social science that began in 1989 was a difficult and somewhat solitary task wrought with many predicaments that characterized academic and scholarly work in this small post-traumatic professional community. Once the borders opened, some (including me) decided to temporarily or permanently emigrate to countries with larger and better established professional milieus. The task of shaping the local tradition was taken up by a few exceptional personalities who dedicated their professional lives to the building of institutions that allowed for the Czech social sciences to grow.
The professional wisdom, patience and resoluteness involved . . .
Read more: Miloslav (Milan) Petrusek (1936 – 2012)
By Piki Ish-Shalom, August 27th, 2012 
Carl Schmitt (11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) is alive and well. Thank you for asking. As a matter of fact, he is walking the streets of Jerusalem nowadays, taking notes that confirm his understanding of politics as the realm in which the friend-foe distinction rules. If he were really alive today, he would notice that his distinction permeates everyday life as a series of racial confrontations. Last week, this culminated in an attempted lynching by a mob of Jewish Israeli teenagers of a few Palestinian youth.
On the Friday night of August the 17th, four Palestinian young people from East Jerusalem strolled the city center, trying to enjoy its night life, relaxing after a day of Ramadan fasting. They were attacked by the mob shouting racial slogans, beating them, and leaving one of the Palestinians unconscious and seriously wounded. The attack took place in the open public, viewed passively by hundreds of people. Only a few intervened, saving the lives of the Palestinians. The rest of the crowd feared for their own life, or worse, supported the mob.
The attack is the latest example of escalating racial violence conducted by both sides. In April this year, another mob, fans of the Jerusalem football club Beitar Jerusalem, violently confronted Palestinian workers in a Jerusalem shopping mall. And on November 2010, a group of Jewish students who mistakenly entered the streets of Al-Issawiya, a Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood, were stoned almost to death, narrowly escaping with the help of the police.
The latest attack aroused a public uproar in Israel. Chief of the Israel Police, Yohanan Danino, acted decisively, denouncing the attack, establishing a special investigating team that soon arrested the suspects, who confessed participating, justifying themselves with a racist agenda. Many of them were seen as teenage drop-outs. Also politicians joined in the denunciations, first among them: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres, and the Speaker of Parliament Rubi Rivlinwho visited the wounded Palestinian teenager in the hospital.
It seems that the alarming lessons of what happened in Tel Aviv on May 22th, which I analyzed in my last . . .
Read more: Carl Schmitt in Jerusalem: Reflecting on the Mob Violence of August 17th
By Andrea Hajek, August 23rd, 2012 
Ever since former PM Silvio Berlusconi was forced to make way for Mario Monti’s politics of rigor and sacrifice, Italy has been confronted with major cuts, radical changes in legislation, and a complete reversal of mind-set with regards to life-styles and consumption habits. Whether “Rigor Montis” (from the Latin expression “rigor mortis,” i.e. stiffening caused by death) – as Monti is mockingly called on occasions – will manage to turn Italy into a real European country is still a big question. What I fear will not change easily is the disgraceful condition of women in Italian society. My anxiety was confirmed on a daily basis throughout the summer of 2012, as I followed a contest to elect two new showgirls for a popular show on Channel 5, one of Berlusconi’s TV channels. But what is the big deal with women, boobs and bums in Italy anyway?
Since classical antiquity, female beauty occupies a central place in Italian culture. Not by chance, the nation has often been represented through allegorical female figures. The connection of the “fatherland” with female mother figures or erotic ideals was to encourage men to a “passionate attachment to the nation,” as Stephen Gundle puts it in his Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy. In other words, beauty was used as a form of (political) persuasion. This is also because Italians have never really had a commonly held, national sense of identity. Therefore, special importance was given to factors relating to the informal culture that Italians did share, i.e. the sexual fixation of men on women, the physical element apparently being more important for Latin males.
Berlusconi’s application of the stereotypical image of women as erotic objects of desire for men is part of both his success at home and his negative image abroad. His sexist and degrading jokes – most notably his vulgar remark about Angela Merkel’s bottom – are sadly famous across the world. Homosexuals weren’t spared either, like when he publicly justified his erotic escapades with . . .
Read more: Sexism Italian Style: Why Sacking Berlusconi Isn’t Enough
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