Save Us from the Saviours: Slavoj Žižek on Europe and the Greeks

Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying ne0-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe is defended in the spring of 2012.

The trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant threat is that the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to ‘civilisation’ than any number of Muslims. With friendly defenders like this, Europe needs no enemies. A hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton articulated the deadlock in which critics of religion find themselves: ‘Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church … The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.’ Many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they end up dispensing with freedom and democracy if only they may fight terror. If the ‘terrorists’ are ready to wreck this world for love of another, our warriors against terror are ready to wreck democracy out of hatred for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture to defend it. It’s an inversion of the process by which fanatical defenders of religion start out by attacking contemporary secular culture and end up sacrificing their own religious credentials in their eagerness to eradicate the aspects of secularism they hate.

But Greece’s anti-immigrant defenders aren’t the principal danger: they are just a by-product of the true threat, the politics of austerity that have caused Greece’s predicament. The next round of Greek elections will be held on 17 June. The European establishment warns us that these elections are crucial: not only the fate of Greece, but maybe the fate of the whole of Europe is in the balance. One outcome – the right one, they argue – would allow the painful but necessary process of recovery through austerity to continue. The alternative – if the ‘extreme leftist’ Syriza party wins – would be a vote for chaos, the end of the (European) world as we know it.

The prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. Critics of our current democratic arrangements complain that elections don’t offer a true choice: what we get instead is the choice between a centre-right and a centre-left party whose programmes are almost indistinguishable. On 17 June, there will be a real choice: the establishment (New Democracy and Pasok) on one side, Syriza on the other. And, as is usually the case when a real choice is on offer, the establishment is in a panic: chaos, poverty and violence will follow, they say, if the wrong choice is made. The mere possibility of a Syriza victory is said to have sent ripples of fear through global markets. Ideological prosopopoeia has its day: markets talk as if they were persons, expressing their ‘worry’ at what will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate to persist with the EU-IMF programme of fiscal austerity and structural reform. The citizens of Greece have no time to worry about these prospects: they have enough to worry about in their everyday lives, which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen in Europe for decades.

(via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)

History of a Kiss One of the greatest kisses in History is the one that took place between communist leaders Erich Honecker, from East Germany, and Leonid Brezhnev, from Soviet Union, during the 30th Anniversary of the German Democratic Republic in June 1979. Despite the controversy and ridicule arisen in the West, this was actually a common sign of socialist solidarity, very used since Khrushchev era. It seems, moreover, that both leaders were very keen on kissing*. However, this kiss has a greater story. Honecker had become the leader of German Socialist Party in 1971, after the fall of Walter Ulbricht in disgrace, thanks to Brezhnev support, and in 1976 had become president of the Counsel of State of the GDR, also aided by the latter. In the new 70’s spirit of the “détente”, the Soviet Union achieved, in exchange of a relaxation of weapon tensions, that the United states recognised its influence area in Eastern Europe. In this political atmosphere appeared the “Brezhnev Doctrine”, that imposed the right for Soviet military intervention in European socialist states. This happened, for instance, in the invasion of Prague by the Warsaw Pact in 1968, with the passivity of Western allies. Honecker carried out a series of economic reforms in the GDR that lead the country to a so-called “consumption socialism”, that resulted in an improvement of the population’s standards of living. Apart from that, relationship with its Soviet colleague were a true love story. GDR and the USSR needed each other, the first became the greatest ideological defender of Communism in a time when this system was more than questioned. In turn, the Soviet Union guaranteed the Red Army intervention in case of a popular revolt similar to that in Prague, which was pretty probable considering the number of opponents to Honecker’s regime. Finally, the GDR was interested in furthering all possibilities of German reunification, so the “détente” politics was very useful to follow. Nowadays, a painted version of the “Fraternal Kiss” can be seen on the eastern side of Berlin Wall’s ruins, performed by Dmitri Vrubel after the collapse. If one looks to it attentively, one can realise that this kiss is typical of a Greek tragedy, a suffocating kiss, in which lovers get too compromised on each other, despite of knowing that there is no future in that poisoned relationship. Actually, the painting is named “The Kiss of Death”, and one can read under it “God, help me to survive this deadly love”.
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History of a Kiss

One of the greatest kisses in History is the one that took place between communist leaders Erich Honecker, from East Germany, and Leonid Brezhnev, from Soviet Union, during the 30th Anniversary of the German Democratic Republic in June 1979. Despite the controversy and ridicule arisen in the West, this was actually a common sign of socialist solidarity, very used since Khrushchev era. It seems, moreover, that both leaders were very keen on kissing*. However, this kiss has a greater story.

Honecker had become the leader of German Socialist Party in 1971, after the fall of Walter Ulbricht in disgrace, thanks to Brezhnev support, and in 1976 had become president of the Counsel of State of the GDR, also aided by the latter.

In the new 70’s spirit of the “détente”, the Soviet Union achieved, in exchange of a relaxation of weapon tensions, that the United states recognised its influence area in Eastern Europe. In this political atmosphere appeared the “Brezhnev Doctrine”, that imposed the right for Soviet military intervention in European socialist states. This happened, for instance, in the invasion of Prague by the Warsaw Pact in 1968, with the passivity of Western allies.

Honecker carried out a series of economic reforms in the GDR that lead the country to a so-called “consumption socialism”, that resulted in an improvement of the population’s standards of living. Apart from that, relationship with its Soviet colleague were a true love story. GDR and the USSR needed each other, the first became the greatest ideological defender of Communism in a time when this system was more than questioned. In turn, the Soviet Union guaranteed the Red Army intervention in case of a popular revolt similar to that in Prague, which was pretty probable considering the number of opponents to Honecker’s regime. Finally, the GDR was interested in furthering all possibilities of German reunification, so the “détente” politics was very useful to follow.

Nowadays, a painted version of the “Fraternal Kiss” can be seen on the eastern side of Berlin Wall’s ruins, performed by Dmitri Vrubel after the collapse. If one looks to it attentively, one can realise that this kiss is typical of a Greek tragedy, a suffocating kiss, in which lovers get too compromised on each other, despite of knowing that there is no future in that poisoned relationship. Actually, the painting is named “The Kiss of Death”, and one can read under it “God, help me to survive this deadly love”.

The Culture of Delusion

‘We want to create a European version of al-Qaeda’, the ‘most successful revolutionary movement in the world’.  So claimed Anders Behring Breivik at his trial in Oslo last week.  In his sick, twisted, paranoid fantasy world, Breivik sees himself as warrior defending Christian Europe against a Muslim invasion.  Yet, nothing so resembles Breivik’s mindset as that of an Islamist jihadist. Not just because Breivik admires the organizational ability of al-Qaeda, but because both Breivik and jihadists draw upon the same deluded notions of culture, identity and belongingness.

In his book, The Fear of Barbarians, the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov observes that whereas during the Cold War the faultlines that divided the world were broadly ideological, today the world is structured not so much by ideology as by emotion, and in particular the emotions of fear and resentment. There is today, he suggests, a  deep-rooted fear of the ‘Other’ driven by a sense of ‘humiliation, real and imaginary’ that has bred resentments against those ‘held responsible for private misery and public powerlessness’. So it is for both jihadists and for figures like Breivik.

At the heart of the worldview of both jihadists and Breivik is the vision of a world torn apart by a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Islam and the West. An idea first popularized by the American political scientist Samuel Huntington a decade before 9/11, it has, for many, come to define the decade after. It has become a means through which to express the sense of fear and resentment of which Todorov writes, a way of understanding notions of belongingness and enmity in emotional rather than ideological terms.

This sense of fear and resentment runs much wider and deeper than simply among jihadis or far-right terrorists. The idea that ‘Christian Europe’ is under threat, for instance, that Muslim immigration amounts to an invasion, that Europe is about to be transformed into ‘Eurabia’ and that Western civilization is facing collapse finds a widespread hearing. In his much-lauded book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe Christopher Caldwell, a columnist for the Financial Times and an editor of the conservative American magazine the Weekly Standard, suggests that immigration is akin to colonization and that ‘Islam has broken’ the fundamentals of the European tradition, ‘not enhancing or validating European culture’, but ‘supplanting it.’ Christianity, the British writer Melanie Phillips claims in her book The World Turned Upside Down, ‘is under direct and unremitting cultural assault from those who want to destroy the bedrock values of Western civilization’. It is not possible, the American philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris suggests in his book The End of Faith, ‘to be a good Muslim, to have military and economic power, and to not pose an unconscionable threat to the civil societies of others’; Harris has suggested, too, that ‘the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists‘. In his polemical screed America Alone, the Canadian journalist talks of the Madrid train bombings and of 7/7 as the ‘opening shots of a European civil war’ that will lead to ‘societal collapse’, ‘fascist revivalism’ and a never-to-return journey into ‘the long Eurabian night’.

These are not marginal figures, nor simply conservative ones – Harris, for instance, is a card-carrying liberal, as are many others with similar views. I am not suggesting that they are responsible for Breivik’s deluded fantasies, still less for his homicidal frenzy. What I am suggesting is that the culture of delusion, upon which both Breivik and jihadists feed, runs deep.

Three Myths of Immigration

I am giving the Milton K Wong Lecture in Vancouver in June. Entitled ‘What’s Wrong with Multiculturalism? A European Perspective’, it will try to explain to a Canadian audience, for whom multiculturalism has a very different meaning than it does to a European one, the contours of the European debate, as well as my disagreements with both sides. In particular I want to show why both multiculturalists and many of their critics (particularly their rightwing critics) buy into the same set of myths about the history of immigration into Europe, these three in particular:  “European nations used to be homogenous but have become plural  because of mass immigration,” “contemporary immigration is different to previous waves, so much so that social structures need fundamental reorganization to accommodate it,” and “European nations have adopted multicultural policies because minorities have demanded them.”

Sex and Punishment

Eric Berkowitz’s new book Sex And Punishment, out today from Counterpoint, is a fascinating survey of how legal systems over the millenia have attempted to regulate and police sex. In this excerpt, a discussion of the once-wide acceptance of same-sex unions between men in Europe of the Middle Ages.

Despite the risks, devotional relationships between men were common in Europe at the time, at least among the literate, and many of these affairs must have included sex at some point. Knights, aristocrats, and especially clerics left expansive evidence of their intense passions for male lovers, relationships that often ended in side-by-side burials. A letter from a respected monk–scholar in Charlemagne’s court named Alcuin (circa 735–804) to a beloved bishop shows how thick those relations sometimes became:

I think of your love and friendship with such sweet memories, reverend bishop, that I long for that lovely time when I may be able to clutch the neck of your sweetness with the fingers of my desires. Alas, if only it were granted to me, as it was to Habakkuk, to be transported to you, how would I sink into your embraces … how would I cover, with tightly pressed lips, not only your eyes, ears, and mouth but also your every finger and your toes, not once but many a time.

While this epistle is unusually erotic, it reflects the intimacies that existed among men everywhere. Assuming, as we must, that at least some of these men’s sexual longings were fulfilled, the next question is the extent to which intimate homosexual relationships were tolerated. Love was one thing, sodomy another. If male hustlers on the Rialto were burned to death and other European sodomites were being cut to ribbons, could long-term, loving relationships among men ever be permitted?

The answer, paradoxically, is yes. In the period up to roughly the thirteenth century, male bonding ceremonies were performed in churches all over the Mediterranean. These unions were sanctified by priests with many of the same prayers and rituals used to join men and women in marriage. The ceremonies stressed love and personal commitment over procreation, but surely not everyone was fooled. Couples who joined themselves in such rituals most likely had sex as much (or as little) as their heterosexual counterparts. In any event, the close association of male bonding ceremonies with forbidden sex eventually became too much to overlook as ever more severe sodomy laws were put into place.

Such same-sex unions—sometimes called “spiritual brotherhoods”—forged irrevocable bonds between the men involved. Often they involved missionaries about to set off on foreign voyages, but lay male couples also entered into them. Other than the gender of the participants, it was difficult to distinguish the ceremonies from typical marriages. Twelfth-century liturgies for same-sex unions, for example, involved the pair joining their right hands at the altar, the recital of marriage prayers, and a ceremonial kiss.

Norway's controversial 'cushy prison' experiment has the lowest reoffending rate in Europe.

Can a prison possibly justify treating its inmates with saunas, sunbeds and deckchairs if that prison has the lowest reoffending rate in Europe? Live reports from Norway on the penal system that runs contrary to all our instincts - but achieves everything we could wish for.

On a clear, bright morning in the tranquil, coastal town of Horten, just south of Oslo, a small ferry slides punctually into harbour. I am to take a short boat ride to the sunlit, green island of Bastoy shimmering on the horizon less than two miles away. It is a curious place. There are no secluded holiday homes or elegant hotels with moorings for passing yachts. The 120 people who live there never visit the mainland, but then why would they?

They spend their days happily winding around the network of paths that snake through the pine forests, or swimming and fishing along the five miles of pebble beaches, or playing on the tennis courts and football pitch; and recuperating later on sunbeds and in a sauna, a cinema room, a band rehearsal room and expansive library.

Their commune has handsomely furnished bungalows with cable TV. The residents eat together in an attractively spacious canteen thoughtfully decorated with Norwegian art. The centrepiece is a striking 10ft long model of a Norwegian merchant ship.

If it sounds like an oddball Scandinavian social experiment, you’d be right. Bastoy is home to Norway’s only island prison. I am here to scrutinise its hugely controversial approach to crime and punishment, and to do so with some knowledge; the last time I set foot in a prison was as a foolish 23-year-old man.

Paul Krugman: Death of a Fairy Tale

For the past two years most policy makers in Europe and many politicians and pundits in America have been in thrall to a destructive economic doctrine. According to this doctrine, governments should respond to a severely depressed economy not the way the textbooks say they should — by spending more to offset falling private demand — but with fiscal austerity, slashing spending in an effort to balance their budgets.

Critics warned from the beginning that austerity in the face of depression would only make that depression worse. But the “austerians” insisted that the reverse would happen. Why? Confidence! “Confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank — a claim echoed by Republicans in Congress here. Or as I put it way back when, the idea was that the confidence fairy would come in and reward policy makers for their fiscal virtue.

The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had de facto austerity in the form of huge spending and employment cuts at the state and local level.

So, about that doctrine: appeals to the wonders of confidence are something Herbert Hoover would have found completely familiar — and faith in the confidence fairy has worked out about as well for modern Europe as it did for Hoover’s America. All around Europe’s periphery, from Spain to Latvia, austerity policies have produced Depression-level slumps and Depression-level unemployment; the confidence fairy is nowhere to be seen, not even in Britain, whose turn to austerity two years ago was greeted with loud hosannas by policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

None of this should come as news, since the failure of austerity policies to deliver as promised has long been obvious. Yet European leaders spent years in denial, insisting that their policies would start working any day now, and celebrating supposed triumphs on the flimsiest of evidence. Notably, the long-suffering (literally) Irish have been hailed as a success story not once but twice, in early 2010 and again in the fall of 2011. Each time the supposed success turned out to be a mirage; three years into its austerity program, Ireland has yet to show any sign of real recovery from a slump that has driven the unemployment rate to almost 15 percent.

However, something has changed in the past few weeks. Several events — the collapse of the Dutch government over proposed austerity measures, the strong showing of the vaguely anti-austerity François Hollande in the first round of France’s presidential election, and an economic report showing that Britain is doing worse in the current slump than it did in the 1930s — seem to have finally broken through the wall of denial. Suddenly, everyone is admitting that austerity isn’t working.

The French Revolution: Ideas and Ideologies The philosophe may have laid the egg, but was the bird hatched of a different breed? Maurice Cranston discusses the intellectual origins and development of the French Revolution. Edmund Burke was one of the first to suggest that the philosophers of the French Enlightenment were somehow responsible for the French Revolution, and his argument was taken up, and elaborated on, by many historians, including Tocqueville and Lord Acton. The philosophes undoubtedly provided the ideas. It may well be that the collapse of the old regime was the consequence of other factors - economic problems, social unrest, conflicting ambitions of groups and individuals - but in the unfolding of the Revolution, what was thought, what was said, and what was advocated, was expressed in terms and categories that came from political theorists of the Enlightenment. Those theorists were far from sharing the same ideas; but, then, the French Revolution itself was not animated by a single revolutionary programme. Unlike the English and American Revolutions, the French Revolution went through a series of phases, each of which almost amounted to a revolution in itself; and as the Revolutionists repudiated one policy to adopt another, more or less its antithesis, they were able to turn from one philosopher of the Enlightenment, to an alternative, competing or rival theorist from the same stable. The first phase of the French Revolution was the one in which the dominant ideas were those of Montesquieu, notably those expounded in his masterpiece, L’Esprit des lois first published in 1753. Montesquieu claimed that a liberal constitutional monarchy was the best system of government for a people who prized freedom, on the grounds that by dividing the sovereignty of the nation between several centres of power, it provided a permanent check on any one of them becoming despotic. Montesquieu suggested that the English had achieved this by sharing sovereignty between the Crown, Parliament and the law courts. The French, he suggested, would need, if they were to adopt the same idea, to make use of the estates with which they were themselves already familiar: the Crown, the aristocratic courts, the Church, the landed nobility and the chartered cities. Montesquieu’s project gives a conspicuous share of the sovereignty to the aristocracy – the class to which he himself belonged - both the noblesse de robe in the courts and the noblesse de race on the land. Some of the people most active in the earliest stages of the Revolution were aristocrats, who undoubtedly identified the cause of national freedom with the interests of their own estate. When the French Revolution began, Louis XVI took it to be an enterprise on the part of some of his privileged subjects to do what the Whig nobles of England had done in 1688, and replace an absolute monarch with a constitutional monarch. It was in order to avoid being another James II of England that Louis XVI tried to play the part of another William III.
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The French Revolution: Ideas and Ideologies

The philosophe may have laid the egg, but was the bird hatched of a different breed? Maurice Cranston discusses the intellectual origins and development of the French Revolution.

Edmund Burke was one of the first to suggest that the philosophers of the French Enlightenment were somehow responsible for the French Revolution, and his argument was taken up, and elaborated on, by many historians, including Tocqueville and Lord Acton. The philosophes undoubtedly provided the ideas. It may well be that the collapse of the old regime was the consequence of other factors - economic problems, social unrest, conflicting ambitions of groups and individuals - but in the unfolding of the Revolution, what was thought, what was said, and what was advocated, was expressed in terms and categories that came from political theorists of the Enlightenment.

Those theorists were far from sharing the same ideas; but, then, the French Revolution itself was not animated by a single revolutionary programme. Unlike the English and American Revolutions, the French Revolution went through a series of phases, each of which almost amounted to a revolution in itself; and as the Revolutionists repudiated one policy to adopt another, more or less its antithesis, they were able to turn from one philosopher of the Enlightenment, to an alternative, competing or rival theorist from the same stable.

The first phase of the French Revolution was the one in which the dominant ideas were those of Montesquieu, notably those expounded in his masterpiece, L’Esprit des lois first published in 1753. Montesquieu claimed that a liberal constitutional monarchy was the best system of government for a people who prized freedom, on the grounds that by dividing the sovereignty of the nation between several centres of power, it provided a permanent check on any one of them becoming despotic. Montesquieu suggested that the English had achieved this by sharing sovereignty between the Crown, Parliament and the law courts. The French, he suggested, would need, if they were to adopt the same idea, to make use of the estates with which they were themselves already familiar: the Crown, the aristocratic courts, the Church, the landed nobility and the chartered cities.

Montesquieu’s project gives a conspicuous share of the sovereignty to the aristocracy – the class to which he himself belonged - both the noblesse de robe in the courts and the noblesse de race on the land. Some of the people most active in the earliest stages of the Revolution were aristocrats, who undoubtedly identified the cause of national freedom with the interests of their own estate. When the French Revolution began, Louis XVI took it to be an enterprise on the part of some of his privileged subjects to do what the Whig nobles of England had done in 1688, and replace an absolute monarch with a constitutional monarch. It was in order to avoid being another James II of England that Louis XVI tried to play the part of another William III.

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes

Review finds thousands of papers detailing shameful acts were culled, while others were kept secret illegally.

Thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments, an official review has concluded.

Those papers that survived the purge were flown discreetly to Britain where they were hidden for 50 years in a secret Foreign Office archive, beyond the reach of historians and members of the public, and in breach of legal obligations for them to be transferred into the public domain.

The archive came to light last year when a group of Kenyans detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion won the right to sue the British government. The Foreign Office promised to release the 8,800 files from 37 former colonies held at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire.

The historian appointed to oversee the review and transfer, Tony Badger, master of Clare College, Cambridge, says the discovery of the archive put the Foreign Office in an “embarrassing, scandalous” position. “These documents should have been in the public archives in the 1980s,” he said. “It’s long overdue.” The first of them are made available to the public on Wednesday at the National Archive at Kew, Surrey.

The papers at Hanslope Park include monthly intelligence reports on the “elimination” of the colonial authority’s enemies in 1950s Malaya; records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of aman said to have been “roasted alive”; and papers detailing the lengths to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

However, among the documents are a handful which show that many of the most sensitive papers from Britain’s late colonial era were not hidden away, but simply destroyed. These papers give the instructions for systematic destruction issued in 1961 after Iain Macleod, secretary of state for the colonies, directed that post-independence governments should not get any material that “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government”, that could “embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg police informers”, that might compromise intelligence sources, or that might “be used unethically by ministers in the successor government”.

Among the documents that appear to have been destroyed were: records of the abuse of Mau Mau insurgents detained by British colonial authorities, who were tortured and sometimes murdered; reports that may have detailed the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed villagers in Malaya by soldiers of the Scots Guards in 1948; most of the sensitive documents kept by colonial authorities in Aden, where the army’s Intelligence Corps operated a secret torture centre for several years in the 1960s; and every sensitive document kept by the authorities in British Guiana, a colony whose policies were heavily influenced by successive US governments and whose post-independence leader was toppled in a coup orchestrated by the CIA.

The documents that were not destroyed appear to have been kept secret not only to protect the UK’s reputation, but to shield the government from litigation. If the small group of Mau Mau detainees are successful in their legal action, thousands more veterans are expected to follow.

The French Foreign Legion

The French Foreign Legion is a unique military service wing of the French Army established in 1831. The foreign legion was exclusively created for foreign nationals willing to serve in the French Armed Forces. Commanded by French officers, it is also open to French citizens, who amounted to 24% of the recruits as of 2007. The foreign legion is today known as an elite military unit whose training focuses not only on traditional military skills but also on its strong esprit de corps. As its men come from different countries with different cultures, this is a widely accepted solution to strengthen them enough to work as a team. Consequently, training is often described as not only physically challenging, but due to a number of reasons, extremely stressful psychologically.

Keith Lowe on the Aftermath of World War Two

FiveBooks interviews asks writers, academics, and experts to list recommended books on a given topic.

Europe after the war was a scene of both physical and moral destruction. The author of Savage Continent recommends essential reading for understanding the suffering, dislocation and fighting after the war was over

It’s very convenient to think of wars as having neat beginnings and endings but that’s rarely the case, especially World War Two. Perhaps you could describe for us continental Europe in the months and years immediately after VE Day in May 1945, the date when hostilities officially ended.

Europe, after what we call the ending of the war, was a continent in complete chaos. There were literally millions of displaced people wandering around not knowing where to go. More than 35 million people had been killed and there was physical destruction everywhere. There was also a sense of moral destruction across the continent. People didn’t really know what was right and wrong any more. They were so used to seeing violence and destruction around them that they had begun to look at it as something that was quite normal. That’s the general atmosphere that existed when formal hostilities ended.

What were the consequences of this and how long did the chaos last?

The first thing to say is that all of the institutions that had been taken for granted before the war had been swept away. There was no real government, no police force, no transport infrastructure – there was nothing. With no system to keep law and order in place, people could get away with anything and there was a big wave of crime and violence across Europe, particularly revenge killings.

What you have to remember is that the liberation occurred at different times across the continent. In southern Italy it was in 1943, whereas France was a year later in the autumn of 1944, and the closer you get to Germany, the later the liberation comes. So the chaos lasts for different periods in different countries. In central and Eastern Europe it lasted much longer than anywhere else, simply because the destruction was so much worse there – not only the physical destruction but also the human and moral destruction.

We have a good idea how many people were killed during the war, but do we know the number who perished in the lawlessness that followed?

Well, statistics are really tricky when you’re talking about this subject. There are so many different people with so many vested interests to make sure the statistics suit them. For example, in Germany for many years all sorts of groups have claimed that two or three million Germans were killed in revenge after the war. That is generally not accepted any more. The number was far smaller. But to pin down the exact number is very difficult because the whole continent was in such chaos and there was no one keeping records of these things. All that we really can say is that hundreds of thousands of people were either directly killed or died through starvation or mistreatment in the aftermath of the war.

Would it be correct to say that the further east you look, the greater the atrocities were, and it was also harder to get data about them because they fell under the control of the Soviet Union?

Yes, that is true. The general rule of thumb is that the further east you go, the worse the atrocities get and the worse the conditions were for the people who survived the war. Probably the worst of the chaos after the war was in Poland and Ukraine – the Nazis committed their worst atrocities there and the ground was fought over so many times and was repeatedly subject to scorched-earth policies. There was really nothing there at the end of the war, so anybody who was unlucky enough to find themselves in this landscape had nothing to live on and no institutions to rely on, apart from the Red Army, which obviously had other priorities.

A dedicated young German boy pulls off an elaborate scheme to keep his mother in good health in this comedy drama from director Wolfgang Becker. Suffering a heart attack and falling into a coma after seeing her son arrested during a protest, Alex’s (Daniel Brühl) socialist mother, Christiane (Katrin Sass), remains comatose through the fall of the Berlin wall and the German Democratic Republic. Knowing that the slightest shock could prove fatal upon his mother’s awakening, Alex strives to keep the fall of the GDR a secret for as long as possible. Keeping their apartment firmly rooted in the past, Alex’s scheme works for a while, but it’s not long before his mother is feeling better and ready to get up and around again. 
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A dedicated young German boy pulls off an elaborate scheme to keep his mother in good health in this comedy drama from director Wolfgang Becker. Suffering a heart attack and falling into a coma after seeing her son arrested during a protest, Alex’s (Daniel Brühl) socialist mother, Christiane (Katrin Sass), remains comatose through the fall of the Berlin wall and the German Democratic Republic. Knowing that the slightest shock could prove fatal upon his mother’s awakening, Alex strives to keep the fall of the GDR a secret for as long as possible. Keeping their apartment firmly rooted in the past, Alex’s scheme works for a while, but it’s not long before his mother is feeling better and ready to get up and around again. 

The Success of Drug Decriminalization in Portugal

I [Richard Branson] visited Portugal, as one of the Global Drug Commissioners, to congratulate them on the success of their drug policies over the last 10 years. Ten years ago the Portuguese Government responded to widespread public concern over drugs by rejecting a “war on drugs” approach and instead decriminalized drug possession and use. It further rebuffed convention by placing the responsibility for decreasing drug demand as well as managing dependency under the Ministry of Health rather than the Ministry of Justice. With this, the official response towards drug-dependent persons shifted from viewing them as criminals to treating them as patients.

Under Portugal’s new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker, and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.

…

It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the problem far better than virtually every other Western country does. Compared to the European Union and the US, Portugal drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal has the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the EU: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%, Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%. Drug use in older teens also declined. Life time heroin use among 16-18 year olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8%. New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003. Death related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. The number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and the considerable money saved on enforcement allowed for increase funding of drug – free treatment as well. Property theft has dropped dramatically (50% - 80% of all property theft worldwide is caused by drug users).

America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the EU (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the US, it also has less drug use. Current policy debate is that it’s based on “speculation and fear mongering”, rather than empirical evidence on the effect of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country’s number one public health problem.

Oradour-sur-Glane: Reflections on the Culture of Memorial in Europe The atrocity of war committed by German forces at the French town of Oradour on the afternoon of 10 June 1944 is well documented. It is not my aim here to echo such accounts by presenting a detailed investigation of the traumatic events, or to seek a way through the veritable labyrinth of national tragedy rhetoric that threatened to over-symbolise Oradour as a victim of war’s brutality, or to indulge in the prolonged mental exhaustion of attempting to ascertain the existential implications of its bitterly lingering aftermath. My aim is rather to simply present my thoughts and observations on an indecently sunny afternoon when I visited the memorial ruins of Oradour some sixty-five years later. But in doing so I shall be obliged to recount to some extent the terrible reality of that day. After the war President Charles de Gaulle paid a visit to Oradour and declared the ruins a permanent national monument to the suffering of civilians in war. He declared that the site would be sealed off never to be rebuilt and thus remain a reminder to the excesses of totalitarian bestiality. Oradour was to be frozen in time, preserved in the exact state that it was found after the perpetrators had left. Nothing was to be touched or removed and the entire site, virtually unique in the western sphere of the war’s destruction, would be preserved as a nightmarish exhibit for future visitors to pass through and ponder the capacity of mankind to impose murderous destruction on complete strangers with impunity. Entering Oradour and obeying bold signs to the memorial ruins, I was surprised to find myself in a vast car park, a limitless expanse of tarmac, more suited one would think to a sports complex or shopping mall. There on the sleek asphalt of the car park I observed luxury coaches with their tinted glass and climate controlled interiors spill their chattering cargoes, just as they will now in the newly constructed ‘reception area’ at Auschwitz I in Poland. Cars of suntanned visitors parked obediently between the freshly painted lines, disembarked and moved off all in the same direction, as if drawn by some unspecified magnetic source towards the giant modern bunker of a building that sat in a kind of man-made hollow. I realised as I followed them down the smart new concrete steps to the lower level that this was a relatively new visitors centre, inaugurated in 1999 by President Chirac, a largely superfluous building, the new scourge of every memorial site in Europe, whether merely ruins or formal cemetery. For today it is considered not quite enough to have solely the memorial itself before which to contemplate man’s destructive capability, the intricacies of murderous folly and the resulting nerve straining conclusion. Again and again some shadowy authority slips in between the individual and their private purpose and imposes an artificial construction in their path, which they have to wade through, straddle or circumnavigate before they can get back to the path they thought they were on. In Auschwitz Museum, for example, one sees such changes as the perceived ‘demand’ or ‘expectation’ of the mass of new visitors delivered to this once remote area. When I visited the snow bound camp in February 1993, in a world before Schindler’s List, it was still petrified in its ex-Soviet austerity. Things seemed little changed from when the camp opened as a museum after the war: the overall effect was unadorned, brutally direct and low key. I remember distinctly that there were only a handful of visitors who had made it out to the site that day on a rickety local bus crammed with country people. I remember during the journey seeing the distinctive old carts and horses waiting at rural cross roads and somehow this backwoods atmosphere was echoed in the museum itself, where only a small amateurish kiosk was in evidence, offering a primitive guidebook whose cover fittingly showed a can of Zyklon B with a sprinkling of pellets and a primitive cafeteria which served soup, dumplings and little else. However, even this seemed indecent given the location. Even sitting sipping a simple bowl of soup seemed in that place repellent, an impertinence, something innately disrespectful. Yet now I learn due to increased visitor demand, a modern pizza restaurant has been installed to sustain those who choose to pass beneath the gate of death. But this unembellished rawness, this leaving alone and distinct lack of interference did not lessen the tremendous shock of all one witnessed there, it amplified it. But now Auschwitz has like anywhere else felt the first feelers of the intrusive makeover. At Birkenau, the extermination area of the complex, no longer is one allowed as I then did, to enter the ruins of the gas chambers. They are fenced off for fear of further damage. But how does one damage a ruin, in this case a pile of bricks and concrete? One can only contribute to it. But the gas chambers at Birkenau, like the ruined houses at Oradour have become sacred; as they are the only visible existing evidence of the site of the crimes. They must, it is argued, be preserved at any cost, so we will never forget what happened here. The old mantra… now archaeological teams are strenuously engaged in preserving the collapsed remains of rooms in which hundreds of thousands were annihilated, so we will never forget. But one might ask why we need a mound of bricks and sheared concrete barely recognisable as a building to guarantee not forgetting? Are we really any nearer to properly accepting the Holocaust when we gaze stricken with an unavailing numbness at the miserable ruins of the crematoria? When we plod slowly down the fatefully preserved, brief flight of steps into the void of what was the vast undressing room of Krema II? When we descend the same steps thousands never walked back up again and stand in a bare rectangular space littered with rubble trying to imagine the unimaginable scenes enacted there day in day out for two years, what exactly does it mean to ‘not forget’, and to ‘remember’? Furthermore, what does it gain humanity to remember something that cannot be remembered authentically and to its true extent, arguably even by those who were there? To remember events that we are unable to absorb without reducing them through the language of remembrance and the corrosive distance of decades, is to fall short again and again, to circle the crater of a volcano, with our hair and clothes on fire, unable to accept the reality of our imminent incineration.
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Oradour-sur-Glane: Reflections on the Culture of Memorial in Europe

The atrocity of war committed by German forces at the French town of Oradour on the afternoon of 10 June 1944 is well documented. It is not my aim here to echo such accounts by presenting a detailed investigation of the traumatic events, or to seek a way through the veritable labyrinth of national tragedy rhetoric that threatened to over-symbolise Oradour as a victim of war’s brutality, or to indulge in the prolonged mental exhaustion of attempting to ascertain the existential implications of its bitterly lingering aftermath. My aim is rather to simply present my thoughts and observations on an indecently sunny afternoon when I visited the memorial ruins of Oradour some sixty-five years later. But in doing so I shall be obliged to recount to some extent the terrible reality of that day.

After the war President Charles de Gaulle paid a visit to Oradour and declared the ruins a permanent national monument to the suffering of civilians in war. He declared that the site would be sealed off never to be rebuilt and thus remain a reminder to the excesses of totalitarian bestiality. Oradour was to be frozen in time, preserved in the exact state that it was found after the perpetrators had left. Nothing was to be touched or removed and the entire site, virtually unique in the western sphere of the war’s destruction, would be preserved as a nightmarish exhibit for future visitors to pass through and ponder the capacity of mankind to impose murderous destruction on complete strangers with impunity.

Entering Oradour and obeying bold signs to the memorial ruins, I was surprised to find myself in a vast car park, a limitless expanse of tarmac, more suited one would think to a sports complex or shopping mall. There on the sleek asphalt of the car park I observed luxury coaches with their tinted glass and climate controlled interiors spill their chattering cargoes, just as they will now in the newly constructed ‘reception area’ at Auschwitz I in Poland. Cars of suntanned visitors parked obediently between the freshly painted lines, disembarked and moved off all in the same direction, as if drawn by some unspecified magnetic source towards the giant modern bunker of a building that sat in a kind of man-made hollow. I realised as I followed them down the smart new concrete steps to the lower level that this was a relatively new visitors centre, inaugurated in 1999 by President Chirac, a largely superfluous building, the new scourge of every memorial site in Europe, whether merely ruins or formal cemetery. For today it is considered not quite enough to have solely the memorial itself before which to contemplate man’s destructive capability, the intricacies of murderous folly and the resulting nerve straining conclusion. Again and again some shadowy authority slips in between the individual and their private purpose and imposes an artificial construction in their path, which they have to wade through, straddle or circumnavigate before they can get back to the path they thought they were on.

In Auschwitz Museum, for example, one sees such changes as the perceived ‘demand’ or ‘expectation’ of the mass of new visitors delivered to this once remote area. When I visited the snow bound camp in February 1993, in a world before Schindler’s List, it was still petrified in its ex-Soviet austerity. Things seemed little changed from when the camp opened as a museum after the war: the overall effect was unadorned, brutally direct and low key. I remember distinctly that there were only a handful of visitors who had made it out to the site that day on a rickety local bus crammed with country people. I remember during the journey seeing the distinctive old carts and horses waiting at rural cross roads and somehow this backwoods atmosphere was echoed in the museum itself, where only a small amateurish kiosk was in evidence, offering a primitive guidebook whose cover fittingly showed a can of Zyklon B with a sprinkling of pellets and a primitive cafeteria which served soup, dumplings and little else. However, even this seemed indecent given the location. Even sitting sipping a simple bowl of soup seemed in that place repellent, an impertinence, something innately disrespectful. Yet now I learn due to increased visitor demand, a modern pizza restaurant has been installed to sustain those who choose to pass beneath the gate of death.

But this unembellished rawness, this leaving alone and distinct lack of interference did not lessen the tremendous shock of all one witnessed there, it amplified it. But now Auschwitz has like anywhere else felt the first feelers of the intrusive makeover. At Birkenau, the extermination area of the complex, no longer is one allowed as I then did, to enter the ruins of the gas chambers. They are fenced off for fear of further damage. But how does one damage a ruin, in this case a pile of bricks and concrete? One can only contribute to it. But the gas chambers at Birkenau, like the ruined houses at Oradour have become sacred; as they are the only visible existing evidence of the site of the crimes. They must, it is argued, be preserved at any cost, so we will never forget what happened here. The old mantra… now archaeological teams are strenuously engaged in preserving the collapsed remains of rooms in which hundreds of thousands were annihilated, so we will never forget. But one might ask why we need a mound of bricks and sheared concrete barely recognisable as a building to guarantee not forgetting? Are we really any nearer to properly accepting the Holocaust when we gaze stricken with an unavailing numbness at the miserable ruins of the crematoria? When we plod slowly down the fatefully preserved, brief flight of steps into the void of what was the vast undressing room of Krema II? When we descend the same steps thousands never walked back up again and stand in a bare rectangular space littered with rubble trying to imagine the unimaginable scenes enacted there day in day out for two years, what exactly does it mean to ‘not forget’, and to ‘remember’? Furthermore, what does it gain humanity to remember something that cannot be remembered authentically and to its true extent, arguably even by those who were there? To remember events that we are unable to absorb without reducing them through the language of remembrance and the corrosive distance of decades, is to fall short again and again, to circle the crater of a volcano, with our hair and clothes on fire, unable to accept the reality of our imminent incineration.

Mapping Home

Learning a new city, remembering the old.

In the spring of 1997, I flew from Chicago, where I was living, to Sarajevo, where I was born and grew up. This was my first return to Sarajevo since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had ended, a year and a half earlier. I’d left in 1992, a few months before the siege of the city began. I had no family there anymore (my parents and my sister now lived in Canada), except for Teta Jozefina, whom I considered to be my grandmother. When my parents had moved to Sarajevo after graduating from college in Belgrade, in 1963, they’d rented a room in an apartment that belonged to Jozefina and her husband, Martin, in the part of town called Marin Dvor. In that rented room I was conceived, and it was where I lived for the first two years of my life. Teta Jozefina and Čika Martin, who had two teen-age children at the time, treated me like their own grandchild—to this day, my mother believes that they spoiled me for life. For a couple of years after we moved out, to a different part of Sarajevo, I had to be taken back to Marin Dvor to visit them almost every day. And until the war shattered our common life we spent every Christmas at Teta Jozefina and Čika Martin’s, following the same ritual: the same elaborately caloric dishes crowding the big table, the same tongue-burning Herzegovinian wine, the same people telling the same jokes and stories, including the one that featured the toddler me running buck naked up and down the hallway before my nightly bath.

Čika Martin died of a stroke toward the end of the siege, so when I went back in 1997 Teta Jozefina was living alone. I stayed with her, in the room (and, possibly, the very bed) where I had commenced my messy existence. Its walls had been pockmarked by shrapnel and bullets—the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary all around her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man, because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband’s heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn’t move so carelessly in their own apartment.

In my first few days back in Sarajevo, I did little but listen to my grandmother’s harrowing and humbling stories of the siege, which included a detailed rendition of her husband’s death (where he had sat, what he had said, how he had slumped), and wander around the city. I was trying to reconcile the new Sarajevo with the version I’d left behind in 1992. It was not easy for me to comprehend how the siege had transformed the city, because the transformation was not as simple as one thing becoming another. Everything was fantastically different from what I’d known and everything was fantastically the same as before. The buildings were in the same places; the bridges crossed the river at the same points; the streets followed the same obscure yet familiar logic; the layout of the city was unaltered. But the buildings had been mutilated by shells and shrapnel showers, or reduced to crumbling walls; some of the bridges had been destroyed and almost everything in their vicinity was levelled, because the river was the front line; the streets were pocked with mortar-shell marks—lines radiating from each little crater, which an art group had filled with a red substance and which the people of Sarajevo now, incredibly, called “roses.” The map of the city that I carried in my head had to be fundamentally emended.

I revisited all my favorite spots in the city center, then roamed the narrow streets high up in the hills, beyond which lay a verdant world of unmapped minefields. I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted like burned corn, instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war. Everything around me was both familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.

One day I was strolling, aimlessly and anxiously, down the street whose prewar name had been Ulica J.N.A. (the Yugoslav People’s Army Street) and now was Ulica Branilaca Sarajeva (the Defenders of Sarajevo Street). As I passed what had been called, in the times of socialism—which now seemed positively prehistoric—the Workers University, something made me turn and look over my shoulder into its cavernous entranceway. The turn was not of my own volition: it was my body that turned my head back, while my mind continued forward for a few steps. Impeding impatient pedestrian traffic, I stood there puzzled until I realized what had made me look back: the Workers University used to house a movie theatre (it had shut down a couple of years before the war), and whenever I’d walked by in those days I’d stopped to look at the display cases where the movie posters and showtimes were exhibited. From the lightless shafts of corporal memory, my body had recalled the action of turning to see what was playing. It had been trained to seek out stimulation in the form of a new movie poster, and it still remembered, the fucker, the way it remembered how to swim when thrown into deep water. Following that involuntary turn, my mind was flooded with a Proustian, if banal, memory: once upon a time in Sarajevo, at the Workers University, I had watched Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America,” and I recalled the acrid smell of the disinfectant that was used to clean the floors of the cinema; I recalled having to peel myself off the sticky fake-leather seats; I recalled the rattle of the parting curtain.