Articles

If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag – generally taken to be adequate or even final symbols of the evil of mass slaughter – we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.

By adopting the language of human rights, a new UN proposal condemning “defamation of religion” cements oppressive governments’ control of free speech while still sounding compatible with the advanced multiculturalism of liberal democracies, writes Miklós Haraszti.

Despite the horror-stories circulating in the world press, Hungary’s budget deficit at 3 per cent of GDP and its public debt at just above 70 per cent do not fare too badly in a global comparison. “So what’s our problem?”, asks Zoltán Farkas.

After his return from the Homo Alibi festival in Riga, one of the participants in the Mobile laboratory of theatre and communication, an initiative of the F.I.T. – European theatre festivals network (Exodos Ljubljana is one of its members) – stated in The Guardian that British theatre has a serious problem.

“The Right is culpable. Reactionary. Slightly ridiculous”, writes Romanian philosopher Andrei Plesu in “Dilema veche”. “The Left, in contrast, is impudent, cheeky. It can’t remember the bad things. It hides the Gulag behind a veil of intelligence, nuance, and ‘historical necessity’.” A provocative statement that has prompted a response from Plesu’s leftwing counterpart, the Hungarian political scientist Gáspár Miklós Tamás.

“Undoubtedly, leftwingers exist who can find excuses for the Soviet penal universe. But I don’t regularly discuss matters with them”. The Hungarian political scientist Gáspár Miklós Tamás responds to Romanian philosopher Andrei Plesu’s assertion in “Dilema veche” 243 (2008) that “The Left […] hides the Gulag behind a veil of intelligence, nuance, and ‘historical necessity’.”

“Undoubtedly, leftwingers exist who can find excuses for the Soviet penal universe. But I don’t regularly discuss matters with them”. Thus responded Hungarian political scientist Gáspár Miklós Tamás to Romanian philosopher Andrei Plesu’s assertion in “Dilema veche” 243 (2008) that “The Left […] hides the Gulag behind a veil of intelligence, nuance, and ‘historical necessity’.” “Quite honestly, you are too equidistant for my liking”, writes Plesu in his concluding comment.

In the 70s and 80s, many women found the female in literature inspiring but then Nathalie Sarraute snarled in an interview: “When I write I am neither man nor woman nor dog nor cat.” To her, the notion of female or male writing – écriture féminine ou masculine – was totally void of meaning. Moi finds that since then the discussion has gone nowhere. “To make women second rate citizens of the world of literature is to say that the female experience of the world carries less value than the male.”

Interviewed in “Host”, the Israeli novelist Avraham B. Yehoshua echoes Barack Obama’s Cairo speech on the necessity for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. “I am hopeful that Barack Obama will say to Israel: enough, enough with the settlements,” he says with foresight. “The settlements are the problem.”

The unwillingness of the Lithuanian embassy in Ankara to issue a visa to “Varlik” representative Sila Okur prevented the journal from participating in the Eurozine conference in Vilnius last month. Okur was finally defeated by bureaucratic obstacles erected by an embassy clerk, starting with demands for ever more documents and ending with a summons to the embassy 450 kilometres from “Varlik”‘s offices in Istanbul. In response, “Varlik” dedicates part of its June 2009 issue to “Cultural relations in visa territory”. In an introduction to the themed section, publisher Osman Deniztekin explains why.

“Whether you’re a Scot, of Scottish descent, or simply love Scotland”, Homecoming 2009 is for you (or so the advertising goes). Yet scotophiles should make no mistake: the reinvented Highland culture that emerged in the nineteenth century was but a “tame accessory to British unionism”.

Twenty years ago, the velvet revolutions swept communism from eastern Europe. On the other side of the globe, the Chinese government was cracking down on anyone who dared to speak out against the regime, with reprisals culminating in the Tiananmen Square Massacre on 4 June. In the twenty years since Tiananmen, writes Martin Hala, China has risen from the ashes by engaging the West economically and by manufacturing domestic, “patriotic” consent. But as the economic crisis deepens, writes Hala, these achievements might not be sufficient to make the “rising dragon” immune to history.

The dissident generation of the 1970s and 1980s produced a body of work unprecedented in Czech history, says Martin Simecka. Yet it is precisely the monumentality of this generation’s legacy that prevents the interpretation of the communist past going beyond self-diagnosis.

During communism, metaphoric language was the only way to negotiate censorship, recalls the poet and editor Kornelijus Platelis. Yet this experience left Lithuanians cut off from the common European culture of rationality, tolerance and self-irony. Regaining this “European attitude” is the task of cultural journals today.

Six decades after the end of World War II, it is evident that history based on falsification is no history, said Valdas Adamkus, President of the Republic of Lithuania, at Opening address the 22nd European Meeting of Cultural Journals. “We cannot allow politically coloured revenge policies to re-enter historical science and replace our cherished values with technologies.”

In Romania, the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives has been rendered toothless by political interference and its moral authority drained, writes Mircea Vasilescu. Meanwhile, former communist functionaries, in new democratic guise, still purport to be protecting “national interest”.