 The fifth webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s yearlong series reckoning with the response to October 7 will take place on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Time.
Click here to register for the event.
All subsequent panels are likewise scheduled for noon Eastern Time on the seventh day of each month. Panels will run between 90 to 120 minutes, followed by a colloquy among the panelists and audience Q&A.
Our fifth webinar is titled “Our Troubled Institutions: The End(s) of Higher Education, Post-Journalism, and Antisemitism after October 7.” The panelists are Russell A. Berman, who will speak on “Higher Ed after October 7: Drain the Swamp,” and Gadi Taub, who will address the topic of “Post-Journalism: How the Press Replaced an Ethos of Honest Reporting with an Ethos of Political Activism, and How This Colors Public Debate about October 7.” Our respondent is Paulina Neuding.
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By Norbert Bolz · Monday, September 14, 2020 The rage about corona and its consequences has evidently elicited a mental disturbance with global reach. Every insanity has now become acceptable—on the condition that the insanity claims to be of the “left,” i.e., anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, etc. Whoever wants to keep it at a distance will be silenced. This has come to be called “cancel culture.” While the loudspeakers still boom about the political correctness of variety, diversity, and multiculturalism, we are living in fact in a radically illiberal period that no longer permits discussions. Germany has become incapable of debates—this is the result of the fanatic moralization of all life questions.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, August 26, 2020 The following essay comments on the interview with Hans-Georg Maaßen conducted by Moritz Schwarz and published in Junge Freiheit on August 14, 2020. An English translation of the interview appears here.
In the wake of the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it appeared that liberal democracy was on an inexorable victory march around the world. The Soviet satellite states threw off their Communist shackles, and the occupied Baltics regained their independence. Even Russia seemed briefly to be lurching toward modern governance structures, and the Central Asian states, the “stans,” claimed their own sovereignty (if only, often as not, to revert to indigenous forms of authoritarianism). The age of Latin American dictatorships belonged to the past, certainly in the southern cone and in Brazil, although not in Venezuela and Cuba. The last aftershocks of that democratic optimism informed the hope that toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq would set off a similar democracy wave in the Middle East; no doubt the demonstration of the vulnerability of the dictator in Baghdad set the stage for the Arab Spring of 2011, another burst of hope.
That Arab Spring of hope gave way to a new winter in the Middle East and not only there. The wave of democracy has been followed by a wave of repression. Perhaps one should have paid more attention in 1989, which not only witnessed the November celebration in Berlin but also the bloody June in Beijing, where the democracy movement at Tiananmen was murdered by the Communist Party and its tanks. It was wrong to assume that the formal end of the Soviet Union meant the end of Communism altogether or that Communist agitation would cease to undermine free societies. That old mole continues to burrow.
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