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The end of the European peace

COMMENT Hans Olav Brendberg -
Ukraine: In the past year, probably 140 have died too early. What are we waiting for now?
ESSAY
PICTURE ART:

Munch, decadence – and Jæger

Edvard Munch described man's basic existential conditions: loneliness, fusion fantasies and an ecstasy that ends in vampirism and screams. But was Hans Jæger the source of inspiration for "Scream"? This essay looks at both love entanglements, naturalism and decadence – from Kristiania and Berlin.
avatar photos Eivind Tjønneland -
literature
UKRAINE:

Hellestveit's method


Cecilie Hellestveit: Bad news from the Eastern Front – the war that changed everything
Everyone is affected by the war in Ukraine: both family finances and official budgets, aid cuts, military rearmament, global energy policy, nuclear policy and, not least, bloc politics, and it also creates increased tension around the globe. So where is the overview, or a deeper understanding? Researcher Cecilie Hellestveit has her new book Bad news from the Eastern Front unfortunately carried out a serious 'cherry-picking' of sources and arguments where she conveniently develops backwards what confirms the generally acceptable.
avatar photos John Y. Jones -
COMMENT
NEO-FASCISM:

Fascinating fascism and seductive drivers

Do many still have fascist longings today, or can one always blame seductive leaders? A closer dive into the 100-year-old Italian fascism and its descendants says something about the dangers we are now likely to face.
avatar photos Truls Lie -

BOOK REVIEWS (click here for more)

Role models: In public Latin America, independence heroes Bolívar and San Martin or Che Guevara and Evita are either idolized or satanized through paintings and photographs. This book takes a closer look at why.

Iconic paintings and photographs

AFRICA: What can a book say about Boko Haram or the porous border between today's Cameroon and today's Chad? Or about the pre-colonial kingdom of Kanem-Bornu?

Muslim elites, exercise of power and terror

FUTURE: Environmental disasters, global warming, crisis of civilization and planetary apocalypse have given rise to ideas about the doom of the earth and the end of time. Through a radical anthropology, a couple of authors make an attempt to restore our faith in the world.

The limits of our way of life

PHILOSOPHY: Italian Giorgio Agamben describes and envisions different courses for our thinking than today's more technologically nihilistic will-driven production paradigm. Two books delve into other possibilities than the 'fire' he believes we find ourselves in. In this essay, Astrid Nordang tries to bring out some of this complicated material.

Agamben: A burning house

PHILOSOPHY: While postmodernism involved an explosion, today's posthumous condition, according to Marina Garcés, involves a liquidation of all possibilities – an implosion. Yes, are the hopes we cling to today just market-adapted needs for hope?

End Times Thoughts

WOMEN: Art done by men is simply given more attention: in collections, in exhibition programs, in art literature, in the art market. But what about the large number of female artists over the past 500 years?

Camille, Hannah, Lisa, Pauline and Flora

AUTHORITARIAN: What happened after the height of freedom ideals, the fall of the Iron Curtain and Bill Clinton's fusion of liberal politics with market forces? Today, the Chinese's mastery of original Western technology and surveillance seems limitless.

The adaptive autocrats

USA / CHINA: Is the current systemic divide between the US and China insurmountable? According to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken: "Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should, cooperative when it can, and hostile when it has to." On the other hand, China is now led by a man who, according to book author Kevin Rudd, has considerable intellectual resources . Under his leadership, China has grown into a superpower.

The Chinese dream: "Our time has come."

ISRAEL: Ami Ayalon has been at the forefront of Israel's military actions. As naval commander and as head of the country's internal security service he had a creeping sense that the country he so passionately defended was maneuvering into a strategic impasse.

When two people have ended up sharing the fear of each other

WAR: Christopher Blattman's long-term project has been to explore the reasons why conflict between groups and nations erupts into war.

Why do we resort to bombs and guns?

MODERNIZATION: The Nigerian professor Olùfèmi Táíwò looks at power relations between the formerly colonized and colonialists. All states strive to adapt modern institutions to their own history, cultural context and ideological climate. But can the demand to decolonize the language become absurd?

Politically correct decolonization ideology?

PSYCHOLOGY: Love is not a project of isolation, but a project of freedom, according to Seyda Kurt: The freedom to be able to choose for oneself is about radical tenderness, about justice.

Why is love political?

DEMOCRACY: MODERN TIMES has chosen two angles on the same book. What about community-led initiatives as a contribution to the European Green Deal?

To reclaim democracy

DIRECT DEMOCRACY: We need a new social system with commons and decline. And it is possible to achieve it. We have enough experience and knowledge from previous times. It's just a matter of getting started, writes Yavor Tarinski in a recent debate book.

A political manifesto

ABUSE: Three men in their forties informed their former school, the Jesuit Canisius College in Berlin, about how two priests had sexually abused them decades ago. This led to countless disclosures – not only of the abuse itself, but of the church's consistent secrecy.

Concealment, secrecy, intimidation

Environmental campaign: The productivity of nature itself must be taken into account – other species, ecosystems, soil, the atmosphere and the sea.

The organic class

NATURE: Afforestation is the cozy climate solution everyone likes. Fred Pearce believes it is far more important to fight logging and rather let the forest grow back on its own. He points out that with 25 per cent more trees, these would be able to pull as much as 200 billion tonnes of CO000 out of the atmosphere – enough in itself to keep us below the target of a 2 degree temperature rise by 1,5.

Can the forests come crawling back?

PSYCHOLOGY: Is narcissism a social demand on the individual – that we must become more than what we are?

A voluntary forced relationship

WOMEN: Over the course of ten years, Cesilie Tanderø has traveled to Venice, Rome and Sicily. There will be three books of this. We mention here some selected women from the first city.

Venice and the women

CHINA: About China, it is important to be curious and willing to learn before making judgments. But how to understand something that is so fundamentally different from the culture we ourselves come from?

An authoritarian challenge

POEM: The reader of this book is cautioned against reading too large parts consecutively. You then run the risk of a wild language machine starting up in your head, so that you start writing books yourself.

From blasted waste bunkers

Netflix: Media professor Amanda Lotz provides some interesting perspectives on the global streaming services' business models and Netflix's success.

What really characterizes NETFLIX?

BOOK: Queer icons deals with a generation that lived with the fear of AIDS, exclusion and criminalization – and not least with the pain from the lack of role models.

Weird Norwegian history: 29 thought-provoking interviews

PUBLIC: Precht and Welzer want more "well-intentioned disputes" about views – not social media's definition, personorientering and arousal production. Their book has been met with everything from total rejection and hesitant acceptance to detailed criticism.

How the majority's opinions are created by the media

COMMENTS

MANAGER
HELL:

Two testaments over life

Is it possible to simultaneously touch on four major themes, such as sin and evil, the desire for knowledge and conquest, relationships and competition, or the fear of death itself? Let me try in this essay – about Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Dante.
avatar photos Truls Lie -
COMMENT
GREEN GROWTH:

A good life without more and more of everything

MODERN TIMES has chosen to print an extract from the book Grønt manifesto by our regular critic. "Quality of life rather than forced growth": Three small but powerful words, which provide a key to changing the direction of social development, where our eternal pursuit of 'the most possible' is rather adjusted to the appreciation of 'adequate'.
avatar photos Svein Hammer -
COMMENT

New threat images, war in Europe – and the defense of the future

Despite all hindsight – the Russian invasion hit the vast majority...
avatar photos Alexander Harang -

ANITISEMITTISM – Annex ORIENTERING summer 2022 (click for more)

NO PLATFORMING:

Alice Walker, Anti-Semitism and the Price of Conscience

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?
Chris Hedges -
MESSIANIAN THOUGHT OF VIOLENCE:

"The New Jew"


Shaul Magid: More Kahane. The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical
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.
avatar photos Hans Henrik Fafner -

IKEA, Bratteli, Jewish property…

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 ...
avatar photos Arne Ruth -

Shireen Abu Akleh: "Now is the time for your tears" 

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, ...
avatar photos John Y. Jones -
FALSE /

The gold from the victims of the Holocaust

avatar photos Arne Ruth -
FASCISM /

What happened to anti-Semitism?

avatar photos Ola Tunander -
TRANSLATED /

The Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism

avatar photos John Y. Jones -
INTERVIEW /

Accused of being a "Jew hater"

avatar photos John Y. Jones -
JOURNALISM /

Hedges in MODERN TIMES

avatar photos John Y. Jones -

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

avatar photos John Y. Jones -
RACISM /

"My country's racist construction and actions"

avatar photos John Y. Jones -
JERUSALEM /

A typical day in Sheikh Jarrah

avatar photos Francesca Borri -
NAZIS /

Ukraine, Nazism and anti-Semitism

avatar photos John Y. Jones -

The post that was denied was taken in by Vårt Land

Trygve Natvig -
NEW DECLARATION /

We look at two definitions of anti-Semitism

avatar photos John Y. Jones -
ANTISEMITTISM /

To criticize Israel

Trygve Natvig -

DOCUMENTARY PHOTO

PHOTO:

An Italian photo cavalcade


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.
TECHNOLOGY:

ASIA: "We are the ones who are far away, while they are in the center"

According to Kevin Kelly, technology writer, photographer and publicist, the best thing you can do sometimes is slow down technology.
DISPLAY:

Dialogue between sculpture and photography

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…

ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS

ESSAY:

Permanent state of emergency

The power goes out, exchange rates fluctuate, bread prices explode, fuel disappears. There are also still traces of the explosion. Yet Beirut's hard-pressed citizens time and again manage to find a foothold in chaos. And the chaos is contributing to Beirut never becoming a clean-up city.
avatar photos Steffen Moestrup -
PHILOSOPHY:

The permanence and possibility of the crisis

Agamben's sketches for a theory of civil war are thus perhaps also a contribution to a new theory of revolution. Revolution beyond politics. Where the revolution is finally thought beyond any notion of a state and standing upright like a soldier who salutes. MODERN TIMES has chosen to print the afterword to Agamben's book about the civil war.
avatar photos Mikkel Bolt -
INTELLECTUAL /

The 'Russian World'

Ihar Babka -
PHILOSOPHY /

We lack faith, not faith in God, but faith in the world

avatar photos Alexander Carnera -
ESSAY /

Books that become waves

avatar photos Steffen Moestrup -
VENICE /

Why there is something and not just nothing

avatar photos Alexander Carnera -
OSLO /

Sustainability is no longer sustainable

Kim Plohn -
URBAN PLANNING /

Five urbanists – urban developers

avatar photos Eric Berg -
UKRAINE /

Biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine?

avatar photos Ola Tunander -
RUSSIA / UKRAINE /

The war on our understanding of reality

avatar photos Dag Herbjørnsrud -

FILM (Click here for our supplement MODERN TIMES REVIEW)

FILM FROM THE SOUTH:

Actual and imagined boundaries


Jafar Panahi: No Bears
Jafar Panahi's No Bears is a strong film in itself, but gains even greater impact in light of the situation the now imprisoned Iranian filmmaker is in.

MODERN TIMES: The ecocentric human being

Orientering (50 years ago)

SPEAKING OF STATE LEADERS:

Salute to murderers

Here are some of the darkest chapters in Norwegian press history in the intimate flirtation with fascism in the thirties – where Adolf Hitler's rise to power was welcomed. Moreover, later, a Norwegian prime minister paid tribute to Nixon, while the United States was behind abuse after abuse.
IDEOLOGY:

The peculiar forms of repression in the Soviet Union

MODERN TIMES brings, due to today's attention to Russia, a look at the Soviet Union 50 years ago. In the book from 1972, Herbert Marcuse describes and assesses the conditions, condition and possibilities of the Soviet Union – and Soviet Marxism as an ideology.

Full 100-page MODERN TIMES including the appendix Orientering and Modern Times Review comes out quarterly in early March, June, September and December) with international book reviews (non-fiction) and comments / essays. According to the physical newspaper (and PDF), the articles are published regularly online (see the newsletters).

© MODERN TIMES & Orientering AS. PO Box 3113 Elisenberg, 0207 Oslo. Chief editor: Truls Lie

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