With this issue, Telos marks forty years as an independent journal of critical thought. Founded amidst the events of 1968, Telos has remained true to its origins, maintaining a tradition of independent thinking, while also evolving through the change of four decades. What began as an effort to think philosophically about the political questions of the day continues with the same agenda: our reflections on various thinkers—to take examples from this issue: Alasdair MacIntyre, Walter Benjamin, Gillian Rose, or G. K. Chesterton—are not driven by antiquarianism or academic intellectual history. Rather, we have culled through philosophical traditions, modern and ancient, in order to address the changing character of society and the protean cultural expressions that have emerged from it. This constant redefinition of the critical project informs the teleology, a constant orientation toward the North Star of emancipation, as we navigate the shifting currents of circumstance.
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Zvisinei C. Sandi is a writer from Zimbabwe, where she was active in the democratic movement. She is currently a Scholar Rescue Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. In an interview with Russell Berman, she addressed political violence and repression in Zimbabwe in the wake of the March 29 elections; the response of the South African political leadership to the Mugabe regime; the role of prominent public figures like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela; and the broader political relationship between Zimbabwe and South Africa, especially violence against Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa. We won! Telos Press Publishing was awarded the First Prize Gold Medal in the Religion category for Jihad and Jew-Hatred, by Matthias Küntzel, in the prestigious Independent Publisher Book Awards. This award is conducted annually to honor the year’s best independently published titles that exhibit the courage, innovation, and creativity to bring about change in the world of publishing. Telos Press Publishing is very proud of this recognition for an enormously important book. Nearly all of the credit goes to the author, Matthias Küntzel, for his excellent volume, as well as to Jeffrey Herf, who provided a superb introduction. Thanks also to Colin Meade, who provided the translation, and to the staff at Telos for a job well done. As in the case of the agreement between the European Union and the United States on screening European passengers, signed in June 2007, this new agreement on screening financial transactions gives legitimacy to a de facto situation that the US created. In both cases, the US administration illegally seized European citizens’ personal data before the EU sanctioned this right of intrusion and changed the law accordingly. You should have seen me during the first week of April, glued to my computer or scrolling down cable channels to catch video and sound bites on Zimbabwe. I was ready to see real change and to join the subsequent nation-rebuilding dialogue. And I was already brainstorming on what my national-scale contribution would be. But all hopes crumbled when it became apparent that nothing would change that fast, that it would take some time before we knew the results of the elections. Then, when the results finally came, a strong fog of uncertainty was already hanging over the troubled country. But see, I am out of the country and my anxiety has also been exacerbated by not being on the ground to witness the reality attending to the people. I have become more aware of the uselessness of the media sources that I have relied on to raise my hopes for change. I have, however, noticed that the world has many questions about the Zimbabwean situation, questions leading to more questions, questions that seem to defy answers. Zimbabwe’s March 29 elections were held in an atmosphere that everybody saw as impossible for the opposition. There was virtually no media freedom, no campaign time for the opposition, and so much violence that being merely associated with the opposition MDC could very well mean death, and the Zimbabwe electoral commission, run by the fanatical Mugabe loyalist, Tobaiwa Mudede, was handpicked by the ZANU PF administration and is heavily in favor of ZANU and Mugabe. In addition, it can easily be argued that much of the election was rigged long before the election itself took place. Election observers found that the numbers on the voter’s roll were far greater than the numbers of the voters on the ground. Many of the names were simply created to inflate the numbers in the constituencies that supported Mugabe, while another big number was comprised of the deceased. Plucky Zimbabwean humor suggested in the run up to the election that Mugabe had recruited the dead since the living had no more time for him. |
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