The Conservative victory in the UK election was driven by hatred of a broken political process inflamed by disinformation and media cynicism, argues Adam Ramsay of openDemocracy. Britain’s prime minister made politics awful, then asked people to vote it away.
In response to political pressure, digital platforms are abandoning their laissez-faire approach to content and allying with legacy media to provide ‘reliable’ news and information. But this is the wrong way to create the conditions in which disinformation becomes vulnerable to challenge.
A vaudeville figure has been reinstated to lead Britain through Brexit, while in the US a reality-tv star is being impeached for trying to blackmail a comedian in Ukraine. Comedy seems to have taken over the wheel in political leadership. But the quality of this entertainment varies greatly.
Russia as the liberal unconscious, source of all that the West finds abject and unsettling? There is something to be said for this theory, says Peter Pomerantsev in conversation with his father Igor, the émigré dissident and poet. But where does it put the myth of central Europe as ‘kidnapped West’, not to mention contemporary Ukrainian occidentalism?
Vast regimes of cultural practice serve to transcend one’s physical existence and ensure living on symbolically through language, culture, and nationhood. While some fear the eradication of minority languages, others dread losing their group’s hegemony. But all run into trouble when faced with the apocalyptic rhetoric of climate activists.
Volodymyr Zelensky’s rise to power in Ukraine has left many observers confused. An influential cultural operative for decades, he has been written off as a clown, despite strong popular support and his rapid first reforms suggesting otherwise. Now the task for the Zelensky team is to deliver on the high hopes they have built their campaign on.
In eastern Europe, neoliberalism’s loss of legitimacy after 2008 benefits coalitions of rightwing populists, whose promise of stability addresses the psychological impact of the crisis on younger voters. These are citizens who have never experienced a shortage economy and who still aspire to a western quality of life.
Feminist historian Christelle Taraud talks about the patriarchal system for regulating prostitution in France’s colonial empire, a system made by men for men to reserve indigenous women for their own use and control the ‘unruly’ sexuality of men from honour cultures. These issues are covered in ‘Sexe, race, et colonies’ (2018), co-edited by Taraud, which has proved controversial in France for its unsettling imagery.
‘Sweatshops’ are usually associated with labour outsourced to east- and south-east Asia, but they exist inside the EU too. Gruelling working conditions in Romania’s low-pay garment industry, which supplies clothes for mid-market and luxury retailers alike, force many people to go abroad in search of a real living wage.
Brexit is the price Britain is paying for the failure to hold an honest discussion about immigration, multiculturalism and Empire. But it would be a mistake to think that the UK’s problems are without equivalent elsewhere, writes Gary Younge.
The description of the European Union as a ‘peace project’ recalls an important aspect of the genesis of post-war Europe. But a defence of Europe based on anti-fascism runs into dead ends – both conceptually and politically – if it sees European integration as a ‘post-national’ movement.
A ‘kulturkampf’ is visible in new authoritarians’ power struggles, from rewriting history curricula in Russia, through the politics of Islamization in Turkey, to the total offensive on museums and theatres in Hungary. The consistent misrepresentation of cultures is a less spectacular but equally important means of silencing certain voices. A selection of reads on how political powers hijack culture through its institutions.
Dialogue between western European peace movements and human rights groups in the East made a crucial contribution to overcoming the division of the continent and laid the foundations for a global language of transnational civil society and humanitarianism. The argument that ’89 was all about ‘catching up’ with the West overlooks this history.
The Ukrainian government has announced a scheme to use AI to fight corruption in the Verkhovna Rada, the country’s parliament. The technology, dubbed ‘Big Brother’, is supposed to detect MPs’ voting patterns and to flag anomalies. AI is used worldwide for a variety of anti-corruption purposes. So will it work here?
On the Cape of Tarkhankut on the western shores of Crimea lies an underwater ‘graveyard’ of statues from the Soviet past. The museum is a metaphor for how cultural memories are formed in a shared unconscious traumatized by loss and unable to adjust to the new order of things, writes Ilya Kalinin.
After moving from Johannesburg (Jo’burg) to Gothenburg (Go’burg), filmmaker Jyoti Mistry struck up a friendship with someone who went the other way: Katarina Hedrén, who was adopted by a white Swedish family, and moved to South Africa as an adult. This deeply personal take on race shows how ‘colour-blindness’ denies that racial prejudice exists but robs people of colour of words to talk about the discrimination they face.