A mirror image of the Cuba crisis
WEAPON SUPPORT: If the West gives more weapons to Ukraine, it only means that Russia's will continue to escalate the war. The consequence of the arms support is clear: It will not lead to Ukrainian victory, but to the destruction of Ukraine with hundreds of thousands of young Russians and Ukrainians killed.
Should we send weapons to Ukraine, and to Israel?
SCENARIO: MODERN TIMES here tries out an imaginary scenario to compare two irreconcilable conflicts. It is up to the reader to make up their own mind as to what this might mean.
Iconic paintings and photographs
Role models: In public Latin America, the addiction 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.
Permanent state of emergency
ESSAY: 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.
The limits of our way of life
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.
Agamben: A burning house
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.
End Times Thoughts
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?
Why is love political?
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.
Concealment, secrecy, intimidation
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.
With hope for Africa
ENVIRONMENT: "It's about changing people's mindset," says Volker Schlöndorff (83) to MODERN TIMES. The veteran German director himself describes his film about agronomist Tony Rinaudo's reconstruction of forests in Africa as propaganda.
Can the forests come crawling back?
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.
A voluntary forced relationship
PSYCHOLOGY: Is narcissism a social demand on the individual – that we must become more than what we are?
The permanence and possibility of the crisis
PHILOSOPHY: 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.
What really characterizes NETFLIX?
Netflix: Media professor Amanda Lotz provides some interesting perspectives on the global streaming services' business models and Netflix's success.
How the majority's opinions are created by the media
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.
We lack faith, not faith in God, but faith in the world
PHILOSOPHY: The immune democracy. According to the Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cwesare, there exists today a political culture ruled by the fear of the foreigner and the future, a sham democracy in favor of security, control and short-term competitive considerations. And those who consider themselves "liberal" today have suffered greatly in standing up to the irrational impulses and decisions that govern the market and the pursuit of short-term profit.
Who was behind the explosion of Nord Stream 1 and 2?
SABOTAGE: Earlier this summer, the US Navy participated in an exercise with underwater vessels in the area off Bornholm – where the explosions of Nord Stream 1 and 2 took place in September. What were they doing there? For Russia, the purpose of the gas pipelines was to intertwine Russia with Europe. Could the USA's motivation have been to break up this cooperation and start an economic war against Europe – as, for example, Germany has now become dependent on their LNG gas?
The guardianless faces
IRAN: This is a political film that has chosen the thriller genre to exercise sharp social criticism against Iran. Like many of today's protesters in the country, the people behind the film were met with death threats and hate messages from the Iranian regime.
Books that become waves
Essay: What happens when we listen to a book while we are also doing something completely different?
When conservatism becomes radicalized
In Radikalisierter Konservatismus ("radicalized conservatism") by the Austrian political scientist and journalist Natascha Strobl, we get a well-written analysis of how conservatism can become radicalized....
Mutual solidarity
Reciprocity: Competition and cooperation are like nature's yin and yang, claim two French biologists. Today, recent biological and psychological research on reciprocity is based on both biochemistry, game theory, empirical examination of symbiotic relationships and the new sociobiology's theories of group selection.
The topsoil and the soil
With a renewed will to go deeper, Monbiot digs in this new book down to the roots, the very foundation of our modern...
The allurements of space
The architect and writer Fred Scharmen has written a well-thought-out book about living in space – which so far we only do on...
Biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine?
UKRAINE: The Russians have now presented a large number of documents that show exactly which bacteria and viruses have been developed, and which spreading mechanisms would be used. Ukraine experimented with insects and drones for the spread of various diseases.
The role model who fell
Stories about scammers, preferably from reality, are easy to be fascinated by. We are currently in an ever so small wave ...