UKRAINE: It seems that the United States deliberately did everything to trigger a Russian invasion. Ukraine is a victim of this brutal game. For Russia, there are five very limited requirements.
In this issue, as MODERN TIMES's editor, I publish a selection of articles that may reflect different opinions most people have about the war in Ukraine.
Journalist Anna Politkovskaya warned us against playing with fire. Now we can ask ourselves the question: Are we in the Third World War – or in the Second Cold War? In his study of "not an inch to the east" statements after the fall of the wall, history professor Mary E. Sarotte shows how Ukraine and Europe ended up in war again.
SPIN DICTATOR: After dictators left their mark on the 20th century with indescribable crimes, it can be difficult to understand how the authoritarian forms of government have made an apparent return in our time.
PRE-FASCISM: Timothy Snyder's little textbook on tyranny – written for society "between Hitler and Stalin" – lies between patriotic obedience and political disobedience. The book is still current.
UKRAINE: What is the influence of the philosopher Ivan Ilyin on Putin's politics? Today, information warfare is at least as important as military warfare.
MESSIAN THOUGHT OF VIOLENCE: From Jewish identity in New York to messianic racism in the West Bank: The controversial rabbi Meir Kahane, whose thoughts live on with certain radical settlers in the West Bank, is the subject of a new and thorough biography.
ECOLOGY:With technological measures in all directions, researchers are faced with sky-high challenges. One of them is human ignorance linked to indifference.
ECOLOGY: We need such voices as Holly Jean Buck, who criticizes wishful thinking – precisely to help bring forward a hopeful, serious and long-lasting climate fight, beyond all easy optimism.
COVID19: SARS in 2003, bird flu in 2005, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014, combined with the financial crisis, massive refugee flows, and revolutions in the Middle East and Greta Thunberg's shrill doomsday voice, had largely immunized the population against something as abstract as Covid19.
WORK: Precarious working life is perhaps alluring with its freedom and flexibility. But with the precarious also comes the uncontrollable, the unpredictability and the lack of rights. Precarious work has become widespread in a subject such as journalism. Nevertheless, I am still tempted by the flexible tasks, by the sense of variability, freedom almost.
INSULATION: Acute loneliness affects both winners and losers. Daniel Schreiber visits a wealth of hermit literature – such as Thoreau's Walden and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. But what does social withdrawal mean today – whether it is the occupational or pandemic condition?
CAPITALISM: Is not the struggle now about the right not to be exploited, but the right to be allowed to participate? There is much that is valuable in Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen's short book about the possible return of fascism in today's world – but it is weak in terms of empirical documentation.
FASCISM: This does not necessarily manifest itself through mass spectacles and revolutionary fractures, and it is not a primarily European phenomenon. But like a product of political crises in the modern capitalist states.
CAPITALISM: The West's 'thin' fascism, which Bolt analyzes, is there especially because there is currently nothing else. Which does not rule out that it will one day grow as "thick" as Russian and Chinese fascism.
ECOLOGY: Penguins' newly launched green series presents old and new books that change the way we think and talk about the living earth. You are in the age of mass extinction, but the philosopher Martin Heidegger brings us here on the trail of what we need.
CANADA: With the discovery of children's graves in Canada, the Canadians are arguably making the Irish rank as "the world's best Catholics". Children from First Nations were outright stolen, imprisoned in isolation, forced into a foreign culture, a foreign language, subjected to sexual abuse and general neglect.
CARBON FASCISM: Climate change facilitates economic speculation and political positioning. Against corruption, we must prepare not only for a state of emergency, but for a climate war against declared enemies, writes Marc Alizart.
TECHNOLOGY: What can we say about the ever-increasing technological and state-of-the-art sphere we live in? Animations and simulations appear more and more as "living organisms", while biological life has increasingly become "artificial".
LATIN AMERICA: Mexican Sabina Berman's novel, HDP, is self-experienced from the interior of a mega-group. In a Latin America with 9 percent of the world's population, and 32 percent of the world's covid 19 dead.
GLOBALIZATION: When the concept of «globalization› took over the academic and political language, and since everyday language, it was not primarily a description of reality that fit into a post-Cold War capitalism, argues new book.
Under the heat of the Israel lobby, The Bay Area Book Festival humiliated one of the most gifted and courageous writers in the United States, Alice Walker. Do you remember her writing The Color Purple, for which she received the prestigious Pulitzer Prize?
In the archives of the Swedish security police there is a secret folder from 1943 marked «Memorandum regarding: Nazi». In 1994, this file was opened by journalists in the newspaper ...
You might know Bob Dylan's The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll? About the black maid who was killed by the rich man's son Zanzinger? For every injustice, ...
"Neutral" countries such as Sweden and Switzerland boasted of huge stolen gold revenues used by Hitler's Germany during World War II. The gold financed, among other things, the concentration camps' factories.
Israel's oppression of the Palestinians has engaged me for a long time, both as a newspaper editor and filmmaker. When John Y. Jones in our editorial board therefore suggested that a ...
It crackles and crackles in the ear of the general secretary, he wakes up dazed and lost after a disturbing dream and shaves carefully and tightens his grip on himself ...
The Russian thinkers Aleksandr Dugin, Ivan Iljin and Lev Gumilyov shape the spiritual-political climate in Russia in different ways. Dugin is often claimed to be one of the ideologues behind Russia's attack on Ukraine. Is that an exaggeration?
Updated by the "war in Europe" (Ukraine), European countries today are forced to accelerate the development of renewable energy – as with solar heating and wind turbines.
Sangin – during twenty years of war, this area has been the bloodiest battlefield. It is reminiscent of Roman ruins. In 2001, one in three Afghans was starving – now one in two is starving.
Norway has received a new NATO base paid for by the US Navy. This time it is Bratland, Lurøy on the Helgeland coast, which is being built in NATO's service.
According to Yanis Varoufakis, his DiEM25 was the first to present a green new agreement – one that was comprehensive, radical and realistic at the same time.
MODERN TIMES recently visited the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and met one of the founders of the Conference on the Future of Europe – where the following topics have been discussed: democratic values, climate change, social justice and job security, human rights, European defense and digital transformation. This is the basis for ORIENTERING this time, as we on the following pages have asked a number of Norwegian opinion leaders about much of the same. And here with Daniel Freund, who is a member of the party Die Grünen in Germany, we could not help but talk about climate.
Bruce Weber: The Treasure of his Youth: the photographs of Paolo di Paolo ' It would be almost fifty years before Paolo di Paolo's daughter found the pictures his father had taken, and confronted him with his hitherto unknown past as a (Italian) celebrity photographer.
Peter Lindbergh's photographs of Alberto Giacometti's small, secret sculptures – put together in an exhibition: Showing intimacy is a challenge. You come as a visitor, an intruder…
Stuart Husband: bookstores We do not need bookstores just to buy books… Photographer Horst Friedrichs has photographed places that are filled with books.
Hany Abu-Assad, Mounia Akl: Huda's Salon / Costa Brava, Lebanon The thriller Huda's Salon takes a feminist look at the position of women in the Israeli – occupied West Bank, while the distinctive family drama Costa Brava, Lebanon deals with Lebanon's ongoing waste crisis.
Jennifer Ngo: Faceless By following four young demonstrators, the documentary Faceless comes very close to the protest demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019.