March 2, 2008, marked the most uneventful event in Russian and, indeed, world politics—the election of Dmitry Medvedev to the post of the President of Russia. Having reached a cathartic pitch in the period immediately preceding the naming of Medvedev as the “successor” (preyemnik) to Putin, the speculation and suspense have been exhausted long before the elections. Yet, despite its profoundly anticlimactic quality, which left the Russian public absolutely cold and apathetic to a pre-fixed outcome, March 2 was a culmination of sorts. It functioned as a conclusion to a particularly insidious aspect of “Putin’s Plan,” the most ambitious aim of which was to drain the political sphere of uncertainty and risk that render it political in the first place. Smacking of the Soviet bureaucratic regulation of economy, the formal utopian core of the plan was the creation, by the year 2020, of a completely administered society devoid of antagonisms or disagreements within the chain of command, all the way down to local and municipal authorities.

Continue reading →

“In a leading article entitled ‘Industry of Death,’ which was to become famous, Hassan al-Banna [founder of the Muslim Brotherhood] explained to a wider public his concept of jihad—a concept in which the term Industry of Death denotes not something horrible but an ideal. He wrote, ‘to a nation that perfects the industry of death and which knows how to die nobly, God gives proud life in this world and eternal grace in the life to come.'”

—Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred (New York: Telos Press, 2007), p. 14.

Continue reading →

In recent public debates, no label has carried more denunciatory power than “neo-con,” and no discussion has been more confused. In a recent essay, Peter Berkowitz has shed some welcome light on the misunderstandings around the term, reminding us of the principles of neo-conservatism and their origins in the thinking of Daniel Moynihan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. But that was a long time ago, and, as the saying goes, what have you done for me lately? Critics of the Iraq War regularly blame it on mysterious neo-cons, hiding in the wings, working their conspiracies, although none of the political leaders—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell—has any neo-con credentials. Why then the direction of ire against neo-conservatives, rather than against conservatives? Why is “neo-con” such an attractive epithet for those who enjoy slinging mud?

Continue reading →