By Jim Kulk · Monday, February 2, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
As a reader of Telos for over 35 years, I’ve admired Paul Piccone’s courage in investigating areas considered verboten on the Left, specifically: Telos‘s critique of Soviet power and the prediction of its demise, Telos‘s ongoing examination of custom, tradition, and religion in political thinking, and Telos‘s re-assessment of populism, decentralization, federalism, and the New Class.[1]
My presentation this morning looks at political divisions and the financial crisis. The underlying hypothesis is that the financial crisis cannot be genuinely solved by the traditional workings of the market and the state because the prominence of the logic of both sectors has now overwhelmed the process of internalization and a new balance must be reasserted.[2]
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By Fred Siegel · Tuesday, January 20, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
When my wife and I arrived in Israel a few days before the Gaza war began, we were taken aback by the focus on the increase in rocket attacks from Gaza after Hamas had decided to end the “truce.” Friends from across the political spectrum were incensed. During the truce, Hamas used the Arabic world for lull as a dozen rockets and mortars a day came into Southern Israel, but the count had jumped to 70 to 80 a day, and Southern Israel was forced to live in constant fear. The attacks were barely mentioned in the Western press.
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By Jean-Claude Paye · Sunday, January 11, 2009 On November 11, 2008, within the framework of Operation “TAIGA” [1], one hundred and fifty police encircled the small village of Tarnac, in Corrèze (southwest France). Simultaneously, evidence was seized in Rouen, Paris, Limoges, and Metz. An arrest of young people was made, above all as a spectacle to incite fear. Their arrest was said to be in connection with the sabotage of the train lines of the SNCF [2], which on November 8 caused delays for certain TGVs on the Paris-Lille line [3]. These malevolent acts, which knocked down several overhead wires, were characterized as terrorist in nature, despite the fact that they never, at any moment, put human lives in danger. The prosecution, which says it possesses several clues, recognizes that it has no material evidence or proof.
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By Ernest Sternberg · Wednesday, January 7, 2009 Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism. Trans. Benjamin Moser. New York: Random House, 2008. Pp. xviii + 233.
It’s certain that its only real function [of the concept of Empire] is to annihilate whole chapters of contemporary history, killing, one more time, millions of men and women, whose whole crime was being born and whose second was dying the wrong way. (p. 145)
Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book is annoying as a memoir but, when carefully read and pieced together, devastating as an indictment. Getting there will require the reader’s determination. Take the time to get past stylistic self-indulgence, forgive some hyperbole, patch up a few logical gaps, and what’s left is still essential reading. It uncloaks the most disturbing political trend of our time: the rise of a new absolutist ideology, one that is global, anti-liberal, anti-American, anti-Semitic, and pro-Islamofascist, and despite being irreligious is also—and this will require explanation—anti-secular.
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By Nozipho Maseko · Thursday, January 1, 2009 This report appeared in Help Zimbabwe Magazine and is reposted here with permission, continuing our discussion of repression in Zimbabwe.
ZIMBABWE—HARARE—Lawyers have been told that Superintendent Makedenge and his Harare central police station law and order department henchmen assaulted a two-year-old baby using cruel torture techniques that were meant to induce a confession from the mother.
A two-year-old baby is among political detainees held in the filthy Chikurubi female remand prison.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, December 15, 2008  “Community” has long been a companion of Critical Theory, but it has always pointed in two diametrically opposed directions. One path leads us to communitarian dreams of a genuine sociability and a full life. Romantic sensibility, anxious about the modern experience of cold rationality and mechanical organization, elaborates counter-models of authentic living, embedded in organic communities deemed genuine. While the Enlightenment legacy appears to abandon us to alienated isolation—no matter how much it proclaims the importance of public discourse—the romantic community provides an existential alternative, an opportunity to reclaim a human authenticity. Ferdinand Tönnies’s famous conceptual binary named this drama: the opposite of the impersonality of the modern Gesellschaft is the communal warmth of the Gemeinschaft. At stake is a choice between formal rationality and emotive solidarity, between organization and affection, between logic and love. In the envisioned community, distance can melt away, to be replaced by forms of living that are genuinely worthy of human beings.
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