"Knowledge is power, if you know it about the right person." - Ethel Mumford

***

My favourite periodical:

March 17th:

"The experience of Bosnia and Rwanda, where murderous hatreds resurfaced after decades of apparent symbiosis, shows that categories are resilient. That is one reason why Mr Pittinsky thinks that “mere tolerance is inherently unstable.”

He is not the only scholar to stress the limits of tolerance alone as an ideal. Robert Hayden, a social anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh, has coined the term “antagonistic tolerance” to describe the way sacred sites were shared by Christians and Muslims in the Ottoman world, and by Hindus and Muslims in British India. His point? The fact that groups accept a regime or “truce” imposed by an imperial power does not mean they will refrain from competing once they get a chance.

To ex-subjects of the Soviet imperium, talk of officially encouraged admiration for “fraternal” nations, laced with displays of embroidery, cuisine and folk-dancing, sounds cloying. Soviet allophilia finally failed because people saw it was dishonest; it hid the travails of ethnic groups who had suffered deportation and persecution under Stalin. By the end nobody believed in brotherly love.

So by all means, let allophilia be studied, measured and encouraged. Just remember: state-sponsored cultural events may not be the best way to go about it."

The obituary is also fun: [On an idiot French guy] "Whether Mr Baudrillard's world was utter nonsense, or whether it was a profound critique of a consumerist civilisation drowning in its own meaninglessness, was a matter for lively debate... [Americans] objected also to Mr Baudrillard's contention that the first Gulf war of 1991 had never taken place."


March 24th:

"Just a few years ago, Kazakhstanis were tickled by the news that two dozen freezing Sri Lankans had been detained by police in the middle of winter after wandering aimlessly across the snow-covered steppe in the north of the country for four days. They had been dumped there by traffickers and told they had arrived, as they had been promised, in Germany."

[On Amnesty International] "An organisation which devotes more pages in its annual report to human-rights abuses in Britain and America than those in Belarus and Saudi Arabia cannot expect to escape doubters' scrutiny."


March 31st:

"SIR – I believe your obituary on the “death” of “Jean Baudrillard” is in error (March 17th). Sub-Lacanian theory would presuppose that the signified “Baudrillard” is merely a neo-modernist capitalist paradox and “death” is a sub-textual patriarchalist paradigm interpolated through a post-colonialist hermeneutic.

As such, as Sontag states, “society is dead”; the signifier is merely replicated as a series of pre-cultural totalities implying post-Foucaultian absurdity. A Derridean reading would suggest that Murphy's mythopoetic reality is a more appropriate gesture to assume.

Thor Halland
Pattaya, Thailand"