Despite their many efforts to stave off greater mobilization inspired by the ideals of the New Citizens Movement, the Party must know that eventually the force of popular mobilization will be too great to disregard by mere omission.
When confronted with the question of how much killing is enough the answer is always more (c.f. Blair’s calls for the west to enter the Syrian civil war). If a strategic sufficiency of death were realisable, killing would not stop. It would not even stop if one side exterminated the other.
If it did not sound too eccentric or polemical, then, I would go as far as singing the praises of a politics of anxiety, i.e. a politics preserving the limits and enigmatic essence of social life.
The attempts to escape the nightmare of Stalinism provoke false fantasy alternatives, of vacuous democratic participation or individual freedom. NSK works through elements of the revolution betrayed, and in the process, instills anxiety about what is real, and about what must be given up.
Operation Blame the Victims was in full swing again today as Scott Morrison insisted that it was the unarmed men who received the beating who are to blame.
Brazil is indeed stuck in the past. However, this temporal disjunction is less the outcome of being economically or institutionally backward, but more of an insistence on resorting to violence as a mean of managing political anxiety.
A Shanghai worker imprisoned following the Tiananmen events remains haunted by her experience, finds Kerry Brown.
The heroes of the democracy movement were crushed in 1989. That taught Chinese people an indelible lesson, says the pioneering democracy campaigner, Wei Jingsheng.
The sentencing to death in Sudan of Meriam Ishag for 'apostasy' is a brutal example of a wider pattern of exclusion on racial, religious and gender lines. The majority of Sudanese experience some form of marginalisation, economically, politically, or culturally.
