Duly Noted: From Dictatorship to Democracy and Back
1. Women in Black. On July 11, this organization went on the street. Its relatives were slaughtered in Srebrenica when Yugoslavia dissolved. The action commemorated what is with some accuracy called the greatest mass murder of post-war Europe. In Belgrade, and this is the “good news”, Serbian civil rights organizations supported the march that memorialized the victims of extremists that claimed to have acted in behalf of Serbs. The onlookers cursed the marchers and the Moslem victims. Add loud approval of Mladic and Karadzic. Srebrenica’s victims should be remembered, while the sufferers of other massacres, whose memory is (PC!) suppressed, should not be forgotten. Nor shall we ignore that, until crimes can be converted into heroism and the victims into vermin not deserving to live, there will be no peace.
From the Ivory Tower: Newsweek Sees No Danger
In an article published in Newsweek this week, William Underhill tells the magazine’s readers that “fears of a Muslim takeover [in Europe] are all wrong.”
The article was published one week after Muslim youths, during consecutive nights of rioting, torched hundreds of cars and burnt the entire business district of the French town of Firminy to the ground.
Robert Edgerton’s ‘Sick Societies’ (1992) Revisited: Is Culture Adaptive?
A critique of cultural relativism by an ethnologist and anthropologist of longstanding high repute, Robert B. Edgerton’s Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony(1992) has implications not only for how one might evaluate the pre-modern, non-Western folk-societies (primitive societies) studied by professional ethnographers and anthropologists, but for how one might understand both institutions and social practices – and perhaps even political ones – more generally. Sick Societies provoked moderate controversy when it appeared, but probably few remember the book today. Nevertheless,Sick Societies deserves not to disappear into the oblivion of the library stacks. Revisiting it nearly twenty years later indeed holds promise of intellectual profit. Sick Societies might well be a meditation on culture urgently relevant to the current phase of the West’s seemingly interminable crisis at the end of the first decade of the Twenty-First Century.
The Islamofascists are the Fascists, Not Geert Wilders
Last month’s EU election results saw the press reacting with horror at the rise of “far-Right” parties. However, while some parties (such as the anti-Semitic Jobbik, which created a paramilitary wing in 2007) are indeed far-Right, some others described as such, are, as Soeren Kern has observed, among “[…] the best allies that Jews (and Israel) will find in Europe today.”
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