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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By Maria Piccone and Jake Davis · Saturday, December 6, 2008 Congratulations to Victor Zaslavsky, who on December 5th was awarded the 2008 Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought by the Heinrich Böll Foundation for the German edition of Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn.
Class Cleansing explores the truth and cover-up of the murder of 25,000 Poles in the Katyn Forest.
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By Timothy W. Luke · Monday, December 1, 2008 Telos Press Publishing is proud to announce the newest addition to our book list: Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn by Victor Zaslavsky. Available for the first time in English translation, this shocking analysis of the mass murder of thousands of Polish officers and civilians in 1940 is a significant contribution to our understanding of European history.
Revisiting the events of the 1940 Katyn Massacre, in which some 25,000 Polish prisoners of war were shot by the Soviet secret police on Stalin’s orders, Zaslavsky explores a paradigmatic and terrifying example of the policy of class cleansing practiced in the Soviet Union and its occupied territories during World War II. By blaming the Katyn Massacre on the Nazis, the Soviets constructed one of the greatest historiographical falsifications of the twentieth century.
Based on secret documents that only became available after the collapse of the Soviet regime, Zaslavsky unearths the methods used to create and maintain the “official version” of what happened at Katyn, a process involving the complicity of Western governments and left-leaning historians, which resulted in the upholding of this falsification until the fall of the Soviet Union.
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By Anetta Kahane · Sunday, November 30, 2008 Perhaps we just were lucky and simply picked the right moment. Perhaps it was the logical consequence of many years of work, gaining experience, and reflecting on many conflicts, including personal ones. Some things need their time and then, perhaps, if we are lucky, we catch hold of the one end of the thread just at the right moment and that leads to the untangling of the web that hides things. At least partially we were successful in this respect with the exhibition “‘We just didn’t have that’: Anti-Semitism in the GDR.” Working with 76 youths from 8 cities in Eastern Germany, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation began to research local history in 2006. The Foundation had the results of this research vetted by historians and presented the findings to the public in an exhibition in May of 2007. Most of the participants in the process come from the former GDR. Some of them are also Jewish. Since re-unification we had been trying to encourage a public discussion about anti-Semitism in the GDR: while there had been some interesting scholarly research on the topic, there had been no public engagement with it. The exhibition has unleashed wide ranging discussion on the issue at different events, conferences, and in the media. And the discussion is not only about the former East Germany. It is a debate about a heritage that affects all of Germany, a debate about ideologies, repression and new anti-Semitism.
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