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Articles by Simon Garnett
Too busy surviving
At one point in his 1984 essay ‘Permission to narrate’, Edward Said described urging family and friends in Beirut to record what was happening during the Israeli siege, in order to tell the world ‘what it was like to be at the receiving end of Israeli “anti-terrorism”’. They paid little attention, Said recalled.
Carbs and culture
If we define culture as a set of values and practices around which communities identify and cohere, then few things are more cultural than food. Where else is the narcissism of small differences greater than in matters gastronomic? Among ourselves we may differ on how to prepare this or that delicacy, but we can agree that the way the others do it is strange, if not simply wrong. That doesn’t make us food nationalists, although when it comes to what we eat, most of us are conservatives deep down.
Dupes of violence
A month after Hamas’s terrorist attacks on 7 October, in which 1400 Israeli civilians were brutally murdered, the world’s worst fears have been confirmed about the response they would provoke: an estimated 10 thousand Palestinians killed by Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip, nearly half of whom are children. The numbers speak for themselves. On both sides of this war, any standards of bellum justum are not worth the paper they are written on.
Black box democracies
Two new articles in Eurozine’s series on democracies in the east of Europe focus on countries particularly susceptible to Russian influence: Serbia and Moldova. In its domestic politics, Serbia tends to be a ‘black box’. There has been plenty of coverage of the latest conflict over Kosovo (cue eye-roll about the ‘number plate controversy’) and we know all too well about Serbian vacillation on Russian sanctions (echoes of non-alignment).
Humouring imperialism
Following Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine in early 2022, the novel term ‘rashism’ (рашизм) rapidly coalesced for referring to and negatively assessing the mixed-bag fascist-inflected ideology of neo-imperialism that the Kremlin deploys for justifying and promoting its actions. Yet, in the West too little attention is paid to the Russian language’s role in this ideology. In English-speaking countries, governments leave language use to citizens and their choices.
Ukrainian culture in times of war
Osteuropa is unique in the German language cultural journals landscape (and beyond) in providing in-depth information and analysis about eastern Europe for a generalist readership. Edited by Manfred Sapper and Volker Weichsel, the journal has consistently provided criticism of developments in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, long before 24 February and to a considerable extent against the grain of opinion in Germany.
Source of resistance
This is the translation of the editorial of Osteuropa 6–8/2022 (original here). It features in a Eurozine editorial. Can we discuss Ukrainian literature when the country is at war, when men and women are risking their lives to defend their freedom? Is it not tasteless to concern ourselves with Ukrainian film when forensic scientists are discovering mass graves in the regions formerly occupied by Putin’s marauders?
Europe 1948/2022
Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, Poland, on February 28, 2022. Photo Credit: Grand Warszawski / Shutterstock.com Europe is facing a vast humanitarian crisis and it is not entirely clear that western European governments have fully grasped the implications of that fact. More than 3.5 million Ukrainian refugees have entered the EU and Moldova so far: 1 million per week and 150 thousand people daily. Half of them are children. Around five million refugees are expected to have entered by the end of March.
Europe 1948/2022
Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, Poland, on February 28, 2022. Photo Credit: Grand Warszawski / Shutterstock.com Europe is facing a vast humanitarian crisis and it is not entirely clear that western European governments have fully grasped the implications of that fact. Around 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees have entered the EU and Moldova so far: 1 million per week and 150 thousand people daily. Half of them are children. Around five million refugees are expected to have entered by the end of March.
Powerless Ukraine
No, she doesn’t have a go bag, Angelina Kariakina tells the foreign TV producer before going on to speak about the prospects of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s not that the editor-in-chief of the independent media project Hromadske TV is complacent. It is just that, as she puts it: ‘Ukrainians have learned to live with an ongoing war’. As the rest of the world discusses Ukraine’s fate, the country itself lacks a sense of agency, says Kariakina.
Pluralizing the mainstream
By the time reports of the protests in Kazakhstan hit the headlines in the second weekend of January, Almaty had been in a state of anarchy for days. As Anastassiya Schacht writes in her article, it was only when Russian troops began moving, that, in Pavlovian fashion, the international media reacted. Very soon, appeals were appearing on Twitter from Kazakh journalists and commentators.
Everybody knows…
After the Bundestag elections, German politics has entered conspiratorial mode. Each of the parties has ‘sounded out’ the others, bar Die Linke and the AfD – the former a rump, the latter a pariah. Apart from titbits offered to Bild from inside the CDU, presumably to undermine the leadership, little has got out – quite an achievement in the notoriously leaky Berlin Republic. The process now enters a new phase, with the SPD, Green Party and FDP negotiating zu dritt.
The New Essentialism
Photo Credit: Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Carlos M. Vazquez II/Wikimedia Commons _____ If we share the assumption that every culture is necessarily incomplete in itself and that there is no such thing as a self-contained, homogeneous culture, then the very definition of a given culture has to include what I would call inter-translatability. In other words, being-in-translation is an essential defining feature of the concept of culture itself.
The new essentialism?
‘If we share the assumption that every culture is necessarily incomplete in itself and that there is no such thing as a self-contained, homogeneous culture, then the very definition of a given culture has to include what I would call inter-translatability. In other words, being-in-translation is an essential defining feature of the concept of culture itself.’ Read more from our 05/2021 newsletter Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.
Beyond Navalny’s arrest
In reconstructing the dynamics of Navalny’s poisoning on August 20, Bellingcat’s work played a crucial role. In collaboration with The Insider, the open source investigative collective discovered that FSB agents regularly followed Navalny’s movements, including in Tomsk last summer. Even in the face of the evidence, the Kremlin continued to deny any involvement.
Podcast: Spectres of fascism
‘Fascism’ has entered America’s political lexicon as a way to understand and oppose the rise of the far-right. Trump’s polemics against the left have also propelled the label ‘antifascism’ into the mainstream. But are we really seeing a US fascism? What baggage does the concept of ‘antifascism’ carry? And what are we doing when we invoke Weimar?
Fascism for our time?
In August, in the midst of the Democratic Convention, the party’s most prominent progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, declared on social media that this year’s Presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was about ‘stopping fascism in the United States’.
Fascism for Our Time?
Photo credit: KelseyJ / Shutterstock.com _____ In August, in the midst of the Democratic Convention, the party’s most prominent progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, declared on social media that this year’s Presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was about “stopping fascism in the United States.” Shortly afterward, in an essay for The New Republic, a trio of scholars – Federico Finchelstein, Pablo Piccato, and Jason Stanley – emphatically agreed, arguing that the f-word was in...
Ghosts of Weimar
Alexander Yanov, the emigré historian of Russia and Russian nationalism, was critical of major western approaches towards post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s. Writing in 1995, he criticized the ‘devious simplicity’ of the western logic holding that, because a non-market Russia had been the West’s sworn enemy, a free-market Russia would become its partner. We plan to help build a free-market in Russia, yet we have no plan about how to build democracy there.
Fascism for our time
A defining debate of the political moment? Or liberal hairsplitting? Eurozine talks to James Miller, editor of Public Seminar, about what we mean when we talk of fascism – and whether it makes any difference anyway. 29 October 2020 The success of the French Popular Front lay in its ability to form a broad coalition on the left and to reach strata of the population traditionally ignored by communist parties. This is a lesson that antifascists today could do well to learn.
For a Belarusian res publica!
Osteuropa: One of the campaign slogans of the movement against the Lukashenka regime is Žyve Belarus! – Long live Belarus! Is this a national revolution? Olga Shparaga: A revolution is indeed taking place in Belarus. But it is a post-national revolution. The key concepts of the protests are ‘constitution’ and ‘law’, not ‘nation’. It is about the removal of a dictatorial regime. People are fighting for respect for the law, for free elections, and for the possibility for a change of government.
Ghosts on the waterfront
Thomas Gordon introduced his book Principles of Naval Architecture (1784) with a sweeping statement: “As a Ship is undoubtedly the noblest, and one of the most useful machines that ever was invented, every attempt to improve it becomes a matter of importance, and merits the consideration of mankind.”1 He captured, as a naval architect should, the tall ship’s combination of grandeur and utility as he suggested the importance of its technical refinement and specialization.
‘We aren’t telling you what we think - we’re showing you what we know’
The name Bellingcat is synonymous with open source investigation in the fields of conflict, crime and human rights abuses. Set up in 2014 as a citizens’ journalism platform, the techniques for which Bellingcat is famed – particularly geolocation – have become a staple of journalistic practice.
Flooding the zone
Eurozine newsletter 8/2020 Subscribe to the Eurozine Review and Newsletter! It is now common sense that the ‘all roads lead to Putin’ narrative is a convenient distraction. Bellingcat’s recent embarrassment of the New York Times over its story on Kremlin-orchestrated disinformation on US health science felt like the nail in the coffin of this particular misconception. As a useful contribution in Foreign Policy argued, the new propaganda thrives best under democratic conditions.
On shields and death traps
Eurozine newsletter 7/2020 Subscribe to the Eurozine Review and Newsletter! The coronavirus pandemic took the spotlight from the refugee crisis on the Greek border with Turkey in early March long before a political solution could be reached. Now, the two situations have merged into a poly-crisis. Photo by European Parliament © European Union 2016 – European Parliament. Let’s cast our minds back a month and a half.
‘The future was next to you’
Simon Garnett: In The Light that Failed, your new book co-authored with the political scientist Stephen Holmes, you provide a compelling interpretation of political developments since 1989, specifically the rise of illiberalism – in central eastern Europe and Russia, but also the US and China. There is a passage in the introduction that neatly summarizes your argument.
A positive sign for climate politics
Architecture of climate change, 2018, ArtHelix, New York Photo by Östsvensk from Wikimedia Commons ‘The third industrial revolution’ often refers the shift that took place in around 1990 from electronics to micro-electronics, from analogue to digital, and from fossil fuels to renewables. But in fact, the term was coined much earlier, in a very different context.
The contemporary art of lying
The moment Donald Trump assumed the presidency of the United States, journalists began counting his lies. According to The Washington Post they numbered no less than 4229 by the end of Summer 2018. Paradoxically, however, Trump is a president with high ‘truth-capital’. He is not a liar, according to his voters, but someone who tells truths no other politician has the courage to utter. With each lie exposed, Trump’s ‘truth-capital’, rather than devaluing, seems to grow.
Agonies of pluralism
Germany’s centripetal politics won out again in the saga following the federal elections in September 2017.
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