By Jake Davis · Wednesday, February 18, 2009 Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn, which is now playing at the Film Forum in Manhattan, examines the issues that are the central concern of Victor Zaslavsky’s Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn, published by Telos Press. In stark, and sometimes brutal, manner, Wajda depicts the situation in Poland that led up to the massacre of Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, as well as the subsequent deception employed by the Stalinist police state, which attempted to paint the event as an act of the Nazis. Reviewing Wajda’s film, A.O. Scott writes:
With elegant concision, the film explores both the events leading up to the massacre and its aftermath, following a group of officers and their families through the agonies of war and the miseries of peacetime under Communism, circling back to end with an unsparing reconstruction of some of the killings.
The movie should be of interest to anyone who has read Zaslavsky’s book, and will increase public awareness of the violence done to Poles and the history at Katyn. And, of course, the book, available here, is crucial background for an informed understanding of both the movie and the history of Communist violence.
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By David Pan · Friday, February 13, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
As we consider U.S. foreign policy for the next several years, there seems to be a growing consensus that the United States will have to adjust to a less unilateral role in maintaining world order and that we will be living in a more multipolar world. This is the conclusion of Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, recently published by the National Intelligence Council. But this report’s view that such a multipolar world will lead to both an end of ideology and a return to the kind of balance of power politics of the nineteenth century overlooks major ideological differences between different cultures that will likely become more prominent in global politics. To understand why, we should consider both the motivations of recent U.S. engagements with the rest of the world and the ideological implications of shifting power constellations in the future.
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By Abraham Lincoln · Thursday, February 12, 2009 On Sept. 24, 1862, President Lincoln issued the following proclamation suspending the right to writs of habeas corpus nationwide.
By The President of the United States of America:
A Proclamation
Whereas, it has become necessary to call into service not only volunteers but also portions of the militia of the States by draft in order to suppress the insurrection existing in the United States, and disloyal persons are not adequately restrained by the ordinary processes of law from hindering this measure and from giving aid and comfort in various ways to the insurrection…
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By Michael Marder · Wednesday, February 4, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
A conflation of legality and legitimacy, brilliantly explored by Carl Schmitt, is the first of three essential confusions I term “the metonymic abuses of modernity.” In a nutshell, I argue that, when it comes to the modern political order, one of its privileged parts always stands for the whole: bourgeois legality metonymically signifies legitimacy in general, constitutional law and the Rechtsstaat constitution denote the constitutional regime as such, and the state appears as the incarnation of the political. The rampant abuses of metonymy and synechdoche in modern political thought polemically raise a particular kind of legitimacy, a specific type of the constitution, and one of the loci of the political to the status and the dignity of the genus, in a way that de-legitimizes their rivals. Furthermore, in aligning the three metonymic abuses of modernity, I reconstruct the multi-layered edifice of contemporary politics and, at the same time, show how Schmitt chisels away its fixed and ossified building blocks. If legality, which usurps the place of legitimacy, is the most superficial, depersonalized, “dead” stratum, then the political (metonymized by a centralized state) is the most profound and animating source, defaced by everything that is predicated upon it. Finally, the metonymy of the constitution and constitutional law is the intermediate step between the state that does not merely have but is its constitution and the legitimacy assumed in keeping with the existing constitutional order.
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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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