‘It’s gonna be great fun!’ Politics in the age of post-truth
If you’ve ever wondered what post-postmodernism might look like, 2016 gives you a pretty damn good idea.
Take-away cheeseburgers riddled with calories cannot provide proper nutrition. Consuming ever bigger quantities of information does not satisfy one’s need to know what is going on. Europe is muddling through crisis after crisis, unable to come to its senses. Media machines — too big to fail — set the rhythm and our spin-doctored politicians are happy to dance along. Infosumers are properly shocked, carefully enraged, skillfully disoriented, but also hungry for actual content, hungry for thought. What is the share of the new in the news today? Slow down, make sense.
If you’ve ever wondered what post-postmodernism might look like, 2016 gives you a pretty damn good idea.
Containing terror with security measures only goes so far.
An article with the same title as this one was published in the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s English-language daily a day after the terrorist attacks in Brussels. The author, Yossi Melman, describes the attacks as “the result of years of negligence” and “a colossal security and intelligence failure.” According to Melman, Europe missed the opportunity to profit from Israel’s security-related know-how. The author is both right and wrong.
The destructive power of terrorism lies in its capacity to blow up a hole in the fabric that keeps society together. But today’s attacks in Brussels were also, if not primarily, an attempt to jeopardize the rule of law.
Udi Aloni’s new feature film, the winner of this year’s Berlinale Panorama Audience Award, is one of two Israeli films at the festival having the word “junction” in their title. Can one see this as a sign that Israel is standing at an important crossroads in its history? Katoikos.eu spoke to the director and the Palestinian leading actor, Samar Qupty.
“May you live in interesting times,” says a Chinese curse. Yet, reaching adulthood in “interesting times” might be an even grimmer fate. Jan Gassmann’s documentary Europe, She Loves pays a tribute to European youth’s lost years.
Berlin International Film Festival kicks-off on Thursday, February 11 and will continue for ten days. Katoikos.eu will be there to cover new cinematographic developments from a pan-European perspective.
New-comers could profit from an informative crash course on their hosts’ norms and values. But the question, “What does it mean to live in a multi-ethnic society, in a meta-nation?” is one that hosts themselves should not put the aside for too.
It’s easy to dismiss the increasing drumroll of war in London and Berlin as the panic-fueled reaction of madmen who happen to be in power. Yet, the truth might be even more disturbing.
Benjamin Netanyahu might be right— the European Union indeed “singles out” Israel by its recent labelling guidelines. But maybe not exactly the way he thinks.
On Netanyahu’s use of history to deny the Israeli-Palestinian conflict its political status and history’s consequences for the European Union’s involvement in the region
If it hasn’t been clear already that the Israeli government often exploits the Shoah for political purposes, Netanyahu’s recent speech at the 37th World Zionist Congress provided additional first-hand evidence.