Category: migration

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Published in Canadian Dimension, August 13, 2025 

An aerial view showing destruction in Rafah, Gaza. Photo by Ashraf Amra/UNWRA.

Cometh the hour, cometh the politicians

Back in February, Canadian-American novelist and journalist Omar Al Akkad published a book titled One Day, Everyone WIll Have Always Been Against This. “This” was Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. That day seems to be getting closer by the minute.

While most have carefully avoided using the word genocide, the list of politicians who have been staunch defenders of Israel’s “right to defend itself” but are now condemning its actions in the strongest of words—but not doing very much more—is growing fast.

They include British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas; Canadian PM Mark Carney and Foreign Minister Anita Anand; and Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong.

Following the Israeli war cabinet’s decision on August 8 to launch a new offensive to recapture Gaza City—an action likely to cause thousands more deaths and certain to displace a million more starving Palestinians to the overcrowded “evacuation zones” in southern Gaza—Carney and Starmer condemned this “escalation.” But there is no sign of the “concrete actions” the UK, France, and Canada threatened on May 19 if Israel did not “cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.”

The foreign ministers of Australia, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom (later joined by Austria, Canada, France, Norway, and the EU commission) got together to rush out a statement on August 9 “strongly rejecting” the Israeli decision to expand the war and urging “the parties and the international community to make all efforts to finally bring this terrible conflict to an end now.”

This was followed on August 12 with a statement signed by no less than 25 foreign ministers and two high representatives of the EU, lamenting that “humanitarian suffering in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels.”

The ministers complained that:

due to restrictive new registration requirements, essential international NGOs may be forced to leave the OPTs [Occupied Palestinian Territories] imminently which would worsen the humanitarian situation still further. We call on the government of Israel to provide authorisation for all international NGO aid shipments and to unblock essential humanitarian actors from operating. Immediate, permanent and concrete steps must be taken to facilitate safe, large-scale access for the UN, international NGOs and humanitarian partners. All crossings and routes must be used to allow a flood of aid into Gaza, including food, nutrition supplies, shelter, fuel, clean water, medicine and medical equipment. Lethal force must not be used at distribution sites, and civilians, humanitarians and medical workers must be protected.


Neither of these statements threatened any sanctions if Israel chose not to comply.

Surprisingly, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz came closest to actually doing anything to restrain Israel when he announced that “Under these circumstances, the German government will not authorise any exports of military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip until further notice.” Because of its past role in the Holocaust, Germany regards the security of Israel as a raison d’être of the German state (Staatsräson) and is Israel’s second-largest supplier of arms after the US.

Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, too, says it is contemplating sanctions on Israel “as a way to save its citizens from a government that has lost its reason and humanity.” “We are not facing a military operation with collateral damage,” Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said in an interview with La Stampapublished on August 11, “but the pure denial of the law and the founding values of our civilization.”

France’s President Emmanuel Macron has spearheaded a move to get Western powers to join the 147 countries (out of 193 UN member states) that already recognize the state of Palestine. Britain, Canada, and Australia have undertaken to do so in September at the UN, albeit with conditions. Whether or not such recognition happens, in the absence of stronger measures this too will remain little more than an empty symbolic gesture.

The Trump administration in the US has meantime doubled down on its support for Israel. But fractures are appearing in the Democratic Party, which provided the Israeli government with “ironclad” backing throughout the Biden-Harris administration.

Thirty Democratic members of Congress have signed onto Delia Ramirez’s Block the Bombs Act to block offensive weapons sales to Israel, while on July 31, in the words of Senator Bernie Sanders:

By a vote of 27-17, Senate Democrats voted to stop sending arms shipments to a Netanyahu government which has waged a horrific, immoral and illegal war against the Palestinian people. The tide is turning. Americans don’t want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza.


Even Trump’s MAGA ally Marjorie Taylor Greene has gone on record saying “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that October 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”

This is all way too little and way too late for the people of Gaza. Whether it is better than nothing at all remains to be seen. As of now, this performative Western outrage is little more than a sideshow that leaves the IDF free, as Donald Trump put it, to “finish the job.”

Seeing the light

Politicians are not the only ones claiming to have had their eyes recently opened to the full horror of Israel’s crimes. Many credit photos of famine victims for their conversion. We can now add the no less horrifying photographs and powerful video footage of the “wasteland of rubble, dust and graves” to which two years of Israeli bombardment have reduced Gaza, shot by journalists from Jordanian planes dropping aid packages.

It was with “immense pain and a broken heart,” Israel’s most celebrated living writer David Grossman told the Italian daily La Repubblica on August 1, that “For many years, I refused to use that term, ‘genocide.’ But now, after the images I have seen and after talking to people who were there, I can’t help but use it…” Quoting Grossman’s words later got left-wing lawmaker Ofer Cassif expelled from Israel’s Knesset chamber.

Grossman was one of over 2,300 cultural figures to sign two recent Israeli petitions denouncing the “killing of children and civilians, the starvation and displacement of the population, and the destruction of cities across the Gaza Strip” as “atrocities on a historic scale,” which are “currently taking place in our name against a population that is only several kilometers away, in an impossible reality and terrible suffering.”

Across the democratic world, hundreds of writers, artists, film makers and others in the cultural industries have signed petitions condemning Israel’s actions. In Canada, “500+ law professors, lawyers, academics, former ambassadors, and civil society, faith and labour leaders” sent Mark Carney an open letter prior to the June 15 Kananaskis G7 summit imploring him “to catalyze G7 action to end the genocide.” It has yet to receive an acknowledgment from the prime minister’s office, let alone an official response.

Something is clearly changing when Bob Geldof, of “Do They Know It’s Christmas (Feed the World)” fame, breaks his silence to accuse Israel of “lying. Netanyahu lies, is a liar. The [Israeli forces] are lying.” He added:

It enrages me to a point beyond comprehension when I see the images published by Sky News and what [former Gaza-based British surgeon] Dr [Nick] Maynard has been reporting from inside Gaza. And at that point, I thought, the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, my own past and history with this—I thought I should say something now.


Now? Where have you been for the last two years, Bob? Remember five-year-old Hind Rajab? Seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna, hanging dead from the wall of a bombed-out apartment building in Rafah, her legs shredded to ribbons of flesh in an Israeli air strike?

Remember Rafah, which Joe Biden once said was his “red line,” a city of 200,000 people that the IDF has now pulverized to unrecognizable ruins?

Purity and danger

In the US, Jewish Currents Editor-at-Large Peter Beinart has suggested that “a kind of dam has broken… in mainstream media discourse and public discourse more generally”:

people are much more willing to say things that they were reluctant to say in the past, that there is starvation in Gaza, that it is Israel’s fault, and that beyond that, that this slaughter and starvation, this assault on the people of Gaza, has to end, and that it’s immoral.


This applies even more in other Western countries, where popular support for Israel has never been as strong as in America and opinion polls indicate it is now in steep decline. Up to 300,000 people marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge for Gaza on August 3, completely wrongfooting Australia’s government. These were not your usual suspects.

Nor were the 522 people arrested in Parliament Square in London on August 9 as they protested the UK government’s proscription of Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act. The signs they were carrying—for which they can now be sentenced to up to 14 years in prison—read “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” This was the most arrests the Metropolitan Police had made in a single operation in at least the last decade. Half of those detained were over 60, nearly 100 were in their 70s, and 15 were in their 80s.

While Beinart welcomes latecomers and converts to the cause, “even if they come painfully late, and much, much later than one would like,” and counsels that “to gain the power to change policy, [you] have to swell beyond the initial group of activists and bring in people who may not be as morally pure as those people,” he is equally insistent that:

it’s also really, really important to remember and… elevate the voices of people who were correct initially, who said things early on that I think have turned out to be factually and morally correct. Because the danger is, if you don’t do that, then you… end up, you just replicate, you don’t change the… structure of discourse.


Among those voices, he instances Rabbis for Ceasefire; the student protestors who “were greeted… for being prematurely correct… with being suspended and being expelled and by beaten up by the police who were called in”; and “the writers, the intellectuals who said things about Israel’s attack that have proven to be correct.”

He name-checks several Palestinian writers and activists, including Representative Rashida Tlaib, who was censured by Congress in 2023 for “representing the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust… as justified ‘resistance’ to the ‘apartheid state.’”

The danger now is that in our outrage at the awful images that are overwhelming our newsrooms and the pious statements proliferating from our politicians we will forget Beinart’s “prematurely correct” voices and reproduce the same discursive tropes that have enabled, sustained, and gaslit the Gaza slaughter even as we criticize Israel.

We need to face up to the conditions that produced these horrors—and this requires us to jettison some widespread liberal illusions not only about Israel, but also about the part played in this human calamity by the free, democratic, civilized West.

An ancestral homeland?

The congressional motion censuring Rashida Tlaib in November 2023 began “Whereas Israel has existed on its lands for millennia and the United States played a critical role in returning Israel to those lands in 1948… in recognition of its right to exist…”

Western politicians habitually frame the Israel-Palestine conflict in terms of “the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland” (I quote Justin Trudeau). But the modernconnection between the Jewish people and Israel is tenuous. It is the Palestinians who have existed on this land for millennia—who are its Indigenous inhabitants—and the Israelis who are immigrants. Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that a majority of present-day Israeli Jews are in fact the descendants of converts.

Nobody disputes the existence of Jewish kingdoms in what is now Israel during the first millennium BCE. But Jews were never the only people living in the area—what was the Biblical Samson doing among the Philistines in Gaza? Many Jews were expelled by the Romans after defeat of rebellions in 70-71 and 132-36 CE. Most of those who remained converted to Christianity under the Byzantine Empire or Islam after the Muslim conquest in 635-7 CE, without the ethnic composition of the land being significantly altered.

Were we to apply the Zionists’ “ancestral homeland” logic and timeframe elsewhere in the modern world, we would have to return England to the Celts, kick the Hungarians and Slavs out of Central Europe, and expel everyone of European descent from the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. It is a poor justification for a genocide.

Or a settler colony?

By any sane definition, present-day Israel is a settler colony, which was established and has since been maintained by often extreme violence against the indigenous population.

In 1878, according to Ottoman records, Palestine had 462,465 inhabitants, of whom 403,795 (87 percent) were Muslim, 43,659 (10 percent) were Christians, and just 15,011 (three percent) were Jewish. Zionist-inspired Jewish immigration from Europe began in the 1890s, fuelled by pogroms in the Russian Empire. By the end of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was broken up, Palestine’s population was still 90 per cent Palestinian.

Encouraged by Britain, which governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate from 1922, Jewish immigration snowballed, particularly after the rise of the Nazis in Germany. By 1944 Jews made up 30 percent of Palestine’s population. Tensions between Palestinians and Jewish incomers peaked in the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-9.

Jewish numbers grew by 100,000 (including 70,000 Holocaust survivors) immediately after World War II. Seeking to establish a Jewish state, the Irgun (led by future Israeli PM Menachem Begin), and Lehi (led by future Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir) militias used terrorist tactics against the British, including hanging captured British soldiers held as hostages and bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem with the loss of 91 lives.

Things came to a head in 1947, when Britain informed the UN of its intention to leave Palestine. A UN plan to partition the territory into two states, which would have given the minority Jewish community 56 percent of the land, was rejected by the Palestinians.

Civil war between Jews and Palestinians broke out at the end of November 1947, in which both sides committed atrocities. During the Deir Yassin massacre of April 9, 1948, Irgun and Lehi slaughtered over 100 Palestinian villagers, including women and children.

On the day British forces withdrew, May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion unilaterally declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel.” Troops from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, later joined by units from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, poured across the borders. The Jewish militias were meanwhile absorbed into the newly-created IDF.

After ten months of fighting Israel not only held the land allotted to it by the UN partition plan but 60 percent of the land intended for the Arab state, as well as West Jerusalem.

Jaffa, Palestine, 1920.

The great replacement

The population of Gaza is largely made up descendants of at least 750,000 refugees driven out during the 1947-8 war in what Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe), boosted by refugees from the 1967 Six Day War. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes that:

In a matter of seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied. The mass expulsion was accompanied by massacres, rape, and the imprisonment of males over the age of ten in labor camps for periods of over a year. (Ten Myths About Israel, chapter 1)


The total population of Palestine fell from 1,970,000 in 1947 to 872,700 in 1948. In 1947, Jews made up 32 percent of that population; by 1948, 82.1 percent. If you want to know what a real demographic “great replacement” looks like, this is it.

Between 15 May 1948 and the end of 1951, more than 684,000 new Jewish immigrants—many, now, fleeing from Arab lands where they had lived for centuries—settled in Israel. According to the UN:

Of the 370 Jewish settlements established between 1948 and the beginning of 1953, 350 were established on land abandoned by the Palestinians. In 1954 more than one-third of Israel’s Jewish population, plus 250,000 new Jewish immigrants, settled in whole cities that had been completely deserted by the Palestinians as a result of the military operations of 1948.


The so-called Law of Return, granting every Jew in the world the right to settle in Israel, was passed by the Knesset on July 5, 1950. More than 3.25 million Jews have availed themselves of this right since 1948.

In flagrant violation of international law, Palestinians driven out in the Nakba have no right of return to the lands they and their forbears had lived in and cultivated for millennia.

The “war” didn’t start on October 7

Israel’s supporters insist that the present “war” in Gaza “began”—to quote the stock phrasing that has been repeated in hundreds of news articles over the last two years—”when Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the October 7 attack and abducted 251 hostages.” Not only is this inaccurate as regards the actual events of October 7. More importantly, it totally ignores their immediate context.

Gaza is part of the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) Israel seized from Egypt and Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War. After that war, the UN Security Council unanimously—that is, with American, British, and French support—adopted Resolution 242 mandating “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

Despite further UN resolutions, Israel has not only failed to comply with this demand for 58 years, but has established Jewish settlements in the OPT in defiance of international law. The rate of settlement has increased hugely in recent years, with a 40 percent rise in the West Bank since the formation of Netanyahu’s government at the end of 2022.

In March 2025 there were 737,332 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, spread across150 settlements and 128 outposts. Perhaps as many as 160,000 of these are American citizens, who have been at the “forefront of the rise of settler violence.” The IDF and settlers have killed at least 964 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, 2023 and driven tens of thousands from their homes.

Within the OPT, the Palestinian population—numbering around 5.6 million, as compared with Israel’s population of 9.5 million—has been subjected to what among many others the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN human rights office (OHCHR), Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Israel’s human rights organization B’Tselem all characterize (and comprehensively document) as an apartheid regime.

While this context cannot justify the war crimes and crimes against humanity that the ICC charged Hamas leaders with committing during the October 7 attack, it goes a long way toward explaining why Hamas launched such a desperate attack in the first place.

Hamas’s attack was not unprovoked

In a landmark ruling of July 19, 2024, the ICJ held not only that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” but also that Gaza remains part of the OPT because Israel:

continue[s] to exercise, certain key elements of authority… including control of the land, sea and air borders, restrictions on movement of people and goods, collection of import and export taxes, and military control over the buffer zone, despite the withdrawal of its military presence in 2005 […] This is even more so since October 7, 2023.


As B’Tselem summarized the situation in January 2021, “the military occupation has not ended: Palestinians in the West Bank remain its direct subjects, while in the Gaza Strip they live under its effective control, exerted from the outside.”

Hamas narrowly won elections in 2006 and expelled its rival Fatah, which nominally governs in the West Bank, from the Gaza Strip the following year. Israel responded by imposing a tight land, sea and air blockade in June 2007, turning the beleagured enclave into what Human Rights Watch has described as the world’s largest open-air prison.

Conflict has flared intermittently ever since, with Hamas and other militias firing rockets into Israel, which has responded with periodic military operations the IDF derisively calls “mowing the lawn.”

This is not an equal contest. Between January 2008 and October 6, 2023, Israel killed 6,540 Palestinians (5,360 of them in Gaza). In the same period 309 Israelis were killed by Palestinian action—a fatality ratio of 21 to 1. The disproportion speaks for itself.

IDF snipers, firing through the perimeter fence, killed 266 people and injured 30,000 during the (peaceful) weekly Great March of Return demonstrations of 2018-19. In May 2022, Israeli forces shot and killed journalist Shireen Abu Akleh—one of many more such killings to come (the most recentbeing the assassination of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and his crew in a targeted airstrike on their tent near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on August 10). Two days before Hamas’s October 7 attack, 832 Jewish settlers stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem—the third holiest site in Islam.

If these are not provocations, the word has lost all meaning.

Israel’s response was not self-defense

As the occupying power in the OPT—including Gaza—Israel’s responsibilities toward the Palestinians under international humanitarian law include:

the obligation to ensure humane treatment of the local population and to meet their needs, the respect of private properties, management of public properties, the functioning of educational establishments, ensuring the existence and functioning of medical services, allowing relief operations to take place as well as allowing impartial humanitarian organizations such as the ICRC [Red Cross] to carry out their activities.


Israel’s conduct toward Gaza’s civilian population since October 2023 flagrantly ignores any and all of these legal obligations.

Leaving aside for the moment Palestinian deaths and injuries, the IDF had damaged more than 190,000 buildings by early April 2025—roughly 70 percent of Gaza’s structures—of which 102,000 were destroyed. This translates to roughly 300,000 homes lost.

By August 6, 80 percent of Gaza’s commercial facilities, 88 percent of school buildings, and 68 percent of road networks had been destroyed or significantly damaged, and only 50 percent of Gaza’s hospitals were even partly functioning. According to the latest UN data, Palestinians now have access to only 1.5 percent of cropland suitable for cultivation. The IDF demolished Gaza’s only functioning cancer hospital on March 21. The same fate was suffered by Al Israa University—the last remaining university in Gaza—in January 2024.

In an appendix to the ICJ July 19, 2024 judgment, Justice Hilary Charlesworth explained that:

the population in the occupied territory does not owe allegiance to the occupying Power, and … is not precluded from using force in accordance with international law to resist the occupation.


“On the assumption that Israel is the victim of an armed attack triggering the right to self-defence,” she goes on:

The use of force in self-defence … is directed at restoring the situation as it was prior to the armed attack. This purpose distinguishes lawful self-defence from measures that aim to punish the aggressor for the harm inflicted. The latter measures constitute armed reprisals, which are prohibited under international law.


“Whether the use of force employed by the victim of an armed attack serves the purpose of self-defence,” she concludes,” is determined by “standards of necessity and proportionality.”

An existential threat?

As of August 6 at least 61,709 people, including 17,492 children, had been killed in Gaza a direct result of IDF military action; more than 111,588 people had been injured; and more than 14,222 are missing and presumed dead. These figures, which come from the Gazan health ministry, are widely believed to be a serious undercount. The IDF lost 454 soldiers in Gaza during the same period. This is disproportionate by any criteria.

But was this killing and destruction militarily necessary? In order to restore the status quo ante, which is all international law allows?

Or was it an armed reprisal—a collective punishment inflicted on Gaza’s civilians in order to demonstrate, in Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise to Israelis at the outset of the present war, that “We will exact a price that will be remembered by them and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come”? A reprisal that also serves the Zionist longterm objective of ridding Eretz Israel, by one means or another, of its indigenous Palestinian population?

At the outset of hostilities the IDF estimated Hamas to have some 30,000 fighters. In contrast to Israel—a nuclear power with one of the strongest, most experienced, and technologically sophisticated militaries in the world—Hamas has no navy or air force, tanks or armoured vehicles. Its armoury is made up of light automatic weapons, grenades, mortars, explosives, improvised rockets, and anti-tank guided missiles and shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles. It is, we might say, a David to Israel’s Goliath.

“Brutal,” “savage,” and “barbaric” as Hamas’s October 7 attack may have been, it was in essence a DIY assault from paragliders, small boats, bulldozers, pickup trucks, and motorbikes. It revealed serious failures in Israel’s security (which Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly refused to have investigated until after the “war” is over) but it hardly adds up to what Israel’s supporters have loudly proclaimed to be an existential threat.

Hamas is even less of a threat now, when Israel claims to have eliminated at least 20,000 of its fighters and destroyed its command structure. Much as it might wish to wipe Israel from the face of the earth and reestablish Islamic domination from the river to the sea, Hamas doesn’t remotely have the capacity to do so—either now, or in any foreseeable future.

At this point it must be asked—as it should have been long, long ago—if this has long ceased to be (and possibly never was) a war of self-defense, why is Israel still fighting?

It’s not a “humanitarian crisis,” it’s a genocide

For whatever reasons—geopolitics, economics, guilt at turning a blind eye to the Holocaust, Islamophobia, racism—for the last two years Western politicians, with the overwhelming support of the mainstream media, have supported Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and done their best to brand all opposition as “antisemitism.”

Not only have they provided Israel with arms and diplomatic cover at the UN and elsewhere, frustrating any coordinated international response to impose a ceasefire. They have repeatedly ignored orders from and sought to discredit the world’s two highest courts, the ICJ and the ICC. They have eroded their citizens’ civil liberties by criminalizing pro-Palestinian actions and vilifying pro-Palestinian speech.

They have gaslit their populations, requiring us to believe that when Israel destroys a hospital or a school in Gaza it is because Hamas has a tunnel underneath it; that the doctors, nurses, aid workers, and journalists it has killed, often with their whole families, are all Hamas operatives; and that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world.”

Perhaps most insidiously—and here Islamophobia and racism do work their evil—they have tried to convince us that when Hamas commits war crimes they are the result of primitive, barbaric, fanatical religious hatred, but when Israel commits the same crimes on a massively greater scale, it is defending not only itself but “Western civilization.”

I predict that in the coming days and weeks we will see plenty of blame for the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza being laid at the door of Benjamin Netanyahu, who will seemingly do anything to survive in office (and keep out of jail). But the problems go far deeper than Bibi appeasing his extremist right-wing ministers to keep his coalition intact and his government in power.

The West may now be finally waking up to the full enormity of the horrors Israel has inflicted in Gaza. It needs also to wake up to the evils it has nurtured not just for the last two years, but for over a century, under the banner of “the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.” It is time we started listening to Palestinian voices, while there are still Palestinians left alive to speak truth to power.

By on

“To articulate the past historically … means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger … In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Theses on the Philosophy of History—Walter Benjamin’s last text

Hope Obscured. Photo taken at Tate Modern, London, December 2019. Copyright Derek Sayer 2023.

I was one of those writers who were honored at the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards ceremony in Toronto last Sunday. What should have been a joyous celebratory occasion was inevitably overshadowed by the horrific events unleashed by Hamas’s brutal assault on Israeli civilians on October 7—which, let me be clear, I utterly and unreservedly condemn. After much soul-searching the organizers decided the ceremony should go ahead, as a gesture of affirmation of faith in the redemptive power of culture. I think this decision was the correct one even if the audience was much smaller than usual and there was a heavy security presence at the door.

Among those I talked with, there was no politicking but just profound sorrow, grief, and apprehension—above all fear for the fate of civilians, especially the children, who were already paying the price of politicians’ belligerence and intransigence on both sides. Fear, also, for the future, both immediate and longterm.

The proceedings began with a recitation of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. It put me in mind of two other recitations of the same prayer, which I had recounted in the book for which I received the award, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History.

The first recitation took place in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp following one of the most infamous Nazi reprisals of World War II. In retaliation for the Prague assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (and architect of the Final Solution), by Czechoslovak paratroopers based in Britain, on 10 June 1942 German security forces sealed off the little village of Lidice, where they shot 173 adult males and deported 205 women to concentration camps. Ninety-eight children were taken to be “appropriately raised,” of whom 81 were subsequently murdered in the gas vans at Chelmno. None of the victims had played any part whatsoever in Heydrich’s assassination, though some had relatives fighting for the Czechoslovak resistance abroad. It was a collective punishment, of the sort the 1949 Geneva Convention (4) specifically outlawed (article 33) in the hope of preventing such atrocities ever happening again.

Following the shootings,

The troops doused the buildings with gasoline and set them on fire. Thirty Jewish prisoners were trucked in from Terezín. When they arrived in the burning village at 4:00 in the afternoon they were given pickaxes, shovels, 350 grams of bread, and 30 grams of margarine; taken to the place where the men’s bodies were heaped up; and told to dig a mass grave twelve meters long, nine meters wide, and three meters deep by six the next morning “or else they can quietly lay down with the others.” One of them, the journalist and broadcaster František R. Kraus, wrote a powerful account of his experience soon after the war ended. It was a Czech Jew who sang a requiem over the bodies of Lidice’s Christian dead:

“Suddenly the church breaks apart: a new metallic thundering breaks up the walls, the ringing of the bells resounds clearly, there is a thumping in the tower, flames roar up again, then suddenly the ringing stops, torn away from the roof the bell hurtles down, breaks through the wooden floor and ends with huge clattering on the stone floor, white smoke rolls out of the fallen nave. . . . Next to me stands Karl Langendorf, young, beautiful, the composer, he stands there like a marble statue, his mouth wide open, he raises and lowers his fists. . . . Then low singing sounds from his lips, it is Antonín Dvořák’s Requiem . . . Requiem aeternam dona eis domine et lux perpetua luceat eis [Eternal rest grant them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them] . . . Dies irae, dies illa [Day of wrath, that day] . . . a windy morning rises from the blood-drenched east and Karl Langendorf sings Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus . . . Dominus Deus Sabaoth [Holy, holy, holy . . . Lord God of the Sabbath] . . . bricks drop onto the empty church benches, jump high again and dance to and fro as if it were a festive church holiday, then the beams clatter down and break the roof, walls and vaultings shake, pictures of saints in gold frames fall from the old walls, and thunder to the ground . . . mass is being celebrated for the last time here.”

The grave diggers arrived back in Terezín to find candles burning at the heads of their bunks, “just as at that time, when the first of our comrades were hanged. Comrades are singing the monotonous melody of the Kadish [sic], stop, smother their joy.” “I sink back. My eyes pass over the barred windows. Outside the night is of the deepest black. And beneath me, on the lower bunk, Karl Langendorf sings quietly: ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. . . .’ Then he adds in a low voice: ‘But Lidice is in Europe!’ Kraus survived the war to write one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs, titled Plyn, plyn . . . , pak oheň: vězeň č. B 11632 (Gas, gas . . . , then fire: Prisoner #B 11632), published in Havlíčkův Brod in 1945. Karel Langendorf, as he is named in Czech sources, was transported to Auschwitz on 18 May 1944. He did not survive.

Postcards from Absurdistan, pp. 180–2

The second recitation of the Kaddish was by the great Prague Jewish reporter Egon Erwin Kisch, who spent most of World War II as a refugee in Mexico. It was in Mexico City that he learned of the murder of two of his brothers in the Holocaust.

“In Mexico Kisch suffered horribly from the fact that Prague was occupied,” Lenka [Reinerová, another Prague Jewish writer and Kisch’s fellow refugee in Mexico City] told a Czech TV interviewer in 2001. “When we were alone, Egon spoke in Czech with me in Mexico—out of nostalgia and homesickness.”

Nostalgia and homesickness did not blunt the raging reporter’s insatiable curiosity. Egon’s Entdeckungen in Mexiko (Discoveries in Mexico, 1945) contained twenty-four essays on a wide range of topics, including sports among the ancient Maya, how to make tortillas, the hallucinogenic properties of peyote, and the cultural history of the cactus. He attends a Sabbath service in the village of Venta Prieta, whose thirty-seven Jewish inhabitants, “in no way distinguishable from other Indians or Mestizos,” were descended from Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition in the sixteenth century.

“My father and mother were born in Prague, lived there, and are buried there. It never could have occurred to them that one day one of their sons would be reciting the prayer for the dead for them amid a group of Indians, in the shadow of the silver-laden mountains of Pachuca. My parents, who lived their entire lives in the Bear House of Prague’s Old Town, never dreamt that their sons would sometime be driven out of the Bear House, one of them to Mexico, another to India, and the two who were unable to escape the Hitler terror, to unknown places of unimaginable horror. My thoughts roamed farther—to relatives, friends, acquaintances, and enemies, sacrifices of Hitler, all entitled to be remembered in the prayer for the dead.”

quoted in Postcards from Absurdistan, pp. 279–80.

Here, for the record, is the speech I gave at the Canadian Jewish Awards ceremony on Sunday. I shortened it a little in the delivery—this is the fuller text I had prepared in advance. Its resonances will, I hope, be obvious.

I am greatly honored to receive the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship, and would like to thank all those involved—especially the jury, upon whom I inflicted a very much longer book than I sat down to write in the fall of 2018.  I am particularly gratified for my work to be recognized in this way when I am not Jewish and Postcards from Absurdistan does not pretend to be a work of Jewish history.  But one cannot write the history of Prague without foregrounding the part played by Jews in that history—for over a thousand years—and it means a lot to me that the jury thinks I have done them justice. 

Postcards from Absurdistan is the final volume in a trilogy of books which take Prague as an alternative vantage-point on modernity.  In his unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, the great German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin nominated Paris, the so-called “city of lights,” as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” and set out to discover “the prehistory of modernity” in the “dreamworlds” incarnated in its material fabric and cultural products.  I thought Prague might be treated analogously, as a site in which to excavate the dreamworlds of the very much darker twentieth century.  

My subtitle  “Prague at the End of History“ is deliberately ironic, because history was declared at an end no fewer than three times during Bohemia’s turbulent twentieth century: by the Nazis, when they incorporated Prague into their ‘thousand-year Reich’ in March 1939; by the communists, who proclaimed socialism ‘achieved’ in 1960; and by many Western commentators, who were confident that the 1989 revolutions in Europe heralded (in Francis Fukuyama’s words) ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’  

Each was the illusion of its epoch. Each proved spectacularly wrong.  Prague is a place where modernist phantasmagoria of history-as-progress have repeatedly unraveled.  The period covered in Postcards, from the Munich Agreement to the fall of communism, were the years of peak unraveling.

At a time in which democracy is once again under global assault, the dark half-century of Prague’s modernity considered in Postcards holds up a disturbing mirror to our own historical crossroads.

Postcards from Absurdistan is not a conventional academic history book, but a tapestry woven out of a multitude of fragments—a “collection of close readings, insightful narratives, obscure gems, and sometimes-funny, sometimes-wrenching reflections,” as the jury generously describes them.  Like Benjamin, “I want to allow “the rags, the refuse” that gets lost in the grander narratives of modernity, to “come into their own.”   These fragments are intended to function as dialectical images, to use Benjamin’s term, in which “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”

As well as providing a model (The Arcades Project) and a method (literary montage), Walter Benjamin makes a brief appearance in the book.  This particular passage takes off from the First International Exhibition of Caricatures and Humor, a deliberate antifascist provocation that took place at the Prague gallery of the Mánes Artists’ Society in the spring of 1934,. The exhibition was organized by one of the main characters in my story, the cartoonist, writer, avant-garde artist, anti-fascist activist and sometime Czechoslovak ambassador to France, Adolf Hoffmeister.

At this point I read the following extract from Postcards from Absurdistan:

The exhibition drew protests from the German, Austrian, Italian, and Polish governments, not to mention that eternal censor of social morality the Vatican. The Czechoslovak government ordered several works to be removed; the ensuing brouhaha ensured that the show had sixty thousand visitors by the time it closed. All the leading Czech caricaturists of the time were represented. The most eminent foreign participants were George Grosz, Otto Dix, John Heartfield, Thomas Theodor Heine, and Erich Godal. By then, Grosz was already in America, and Dix had been fired from his position at the Dresden Academy (he would later be forbidden to paint anything but landscapes). Heartfield, Heine, and Godal had arrived in Prague as refugees in 1933.

Heartfield and Heine moved on again in 1938—Heartfield to England (where he was soon interned on the Isle of Man) and Heine to Oslo and then (in 1942) Stockholm. Godal made it to the United States, where he became a political cartoonist for Ken magazine and the New York newspaper PM. His widowed mother Anna Marien-Goldbaum, whom Godal had been forced to leave behind, was less fortunate. Finally given an exit visa from Germany in 1939, she was one of more than nine hundred Jewish passengers on the MS St. Louis, which sailed from Hamburg to Havana on 13 May. The ship was turned away from Cuba and was then refused permission to dock in the United States (by president Franklin D. Roosevelt) and Canada (by prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King). A US State Department telegram sent while the ship was close enough to the coast to see the lights of Miami stated that the passengers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.”  The New York Daily Mirror published two letters “from an aged mother on the wandering steamship to her son, an artist, in New York” on 6 June 1939. “It is so strange how near, and yet how much cut off we really are,” Mrs. Goldbaum wrote. The St. Louis turned back to Europe the same day. Anna Goldbaum was marooned in Belgium. She was deported to the death camps within a year.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. As the Western world faced another “refugee crisis” in 2015, the Nigerian American writer and photographer Teju Cole remembered Walter Benjamin—“not so much Benjamin the scholar of surrealism as Benjamin the despairing refugee. The Benjamin who fled, like millions of others, for fear of his life”—who committed suicide in 1940 in the little town of Port Bou on the Franco-Spanish border rather than be sent back to occupied France. “The receipt made out to the dead man, the difunto Benjamin Walter, by the Hotel de Francia, for the four-day stay . . . include[d] five sodas with lemon, four telephone calls, dressing of the corpse, plus disinfection of his room and the washing and whitening of the mattress.” “The itemization reminds me of two things,” writes Cole. “Less, of the usual little list of what I drank or ate (mineral water, Toblerone), what I spent, when I check out of these frequent hotels of my life. More, of the little plastic bags I saw at the public morgue in Tucson, containing the last few personal effects of unknown travelers recovered from the Sonora desert in Arizona. A few dollars, a few pesos, photograph of a family, a mother’s passport to remember her by.” These are the rags and the refuse, the dialectical images that condense the terrible recurrences of the past in the present, blowing Benjamin’s “phantasmagoria of history” to smithereens. 

“Every refugee is alike, but each generation fails refugees in its own special way,” explains Teju Cole.

Right now the world is drowning in ancient memories—pogroms, expulsions, the Holocaust, the Nakba—whose contemporary mobilization is fueling hatred on both sides. I do not suggest that we can or should forget—any of the injustices, on either side. Those who have committed atrocities should be brought to account. But the one thing that needs to be remembered amid the fog and fury of war, and not just in the Middle East, is our common humanity. Otherwise what hope is there for any of us?

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us
and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
and say, Amen.

from the Kaddish, as translated at myjewishlearning.com

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Adolf Hoffmeister on terrace of Les deux magots café, Paris, 1969. Photo by Václav Chochola, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I have recently published a short essay on the eventful life of the “Czech writer, publicist, dramatist, painter, illustrator, scenographer, caricaturist, translator, diplomat, lawyer, professor, and traveler” (as he is described in the Czech Wikipedia; French Wikipedia adds “and radio commentator”) Adolf Hoffmeister (1902–1973), known to his friends as Ada.

A central character in my book Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, Hoffmeister wrote the libretto for Hans Krása’s children’s opera Brundibár, which was staged 55 times in the notorious Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto during 1943-4 before the composer, the set designer František Zelenka, and most of the children in the cast were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.

I end the essay:

Hoffmeister died of a heart attack on July 24, 1973. His life was extraordinary, and yet it was thoroughly representative of Czechoslovakia’s twentieth century. Like countless other men and women—writers and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians—his story shows why Czech dissidents sardonically baptized their country Absurdistan. Biographies like Ada’s are why Prague provides a more revealing vantage point on the modern condition than the western capitals from which we are accustomed to look out, naively equating history with progress. Things look different when viewed from Central Europe. Prague’s modernity undermines easy distinctions between east and west, good and evil, right and wrong. Here, all choices come with costs, and the lines dividing collaboration and resistance, consent and dissent, dissolve into a blur of moral uncertainties. This is a landscape painted in infinite shades of gray. When authoritarianism is in the ascendant and democracy under global assault, we cannot afford to dismiss twentieth-century Czechoslovakia as a faraway country. Prague’s modern history should sound a warning to us all.

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Christian Michelides, Stolperstein für Milena Jesenska, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The Guardian did not think the following letter, responding to a column by the self-proclaimed feminist Zoe Williams, worth publishing. The “terrible gift” to which Williams refers was a book that she identifies as Kafka’s Milena: Life of Milena Jesenská. No such book exists: she might be referring to Jesenská’s daughter Jana Černá’s Kafka’s Milena (which has no subtitle) or Mary Hockaday’s biography Kafka, Love and Courage: The Life of Milena Jesenská. It probably doesn’t matter, since Williams considered her father’s gift an insult and didn’t bother to read the book.

19 December 2022

Dear Editor,

I take issue with Zoe Williams’s article “I unwrapped Dad’s terrible gift …” (December 19).  Humour is humour, but Milena Jesenská deserves better than to be ridiculed as “KAFKA’S FUCKING MUSE” (sic). Jesenská was a pioneering advocate of women’s emancipation, who as an independent journalist and translator practiced what she preached.

For the record: “Metamorphosis” was published in 1915, five years before Franz and Milena first corresponded in connection with her translating his work into Czech.  Their love affair was almost entirely epistolary, lasted less than a year, and was likely not consummated.  Jesenská was then in her early twenties.  She had a life before, after, and beyond Kafka. 

She went on to became one of Czechoslovakia’s most distinguished journalists, whose reportage on events in Central Europe in the 1930s (the rise of Nazism, the Vienna Anschluss, persecution of Jews, the Munich Agreement, the invasion of Czechoslovakia) is of lasting value to historians.  Her writings on refugees are especially moving and have lost none of their pertinence today.  

Milena was arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities in November 1939 and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in May 1944.  In 1995 the World Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem listed her as Righteous among the Nations—that is, “non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust.”

Perhaps Williams should open that “terrible gift.”  Better yet, she could dip into Kathleen Hayes’s excellent selections in The Journalism of Milena Jesenská: A Critical Voice in Interwar Central Europe.  Zoe’s Dad was doing her a favour. What better role model could a young, female Guardian journalist ask for?

Sincerely,

Derek Sayer

Professor Emeritus

University of Alberta

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Is there some law that says the worse it gets in the world out there, the better it gets in the arts?  It was an outstanding year for music.  Highlights for me were discovering the incredible jazz+++ scene in diasporic London, as eloquent a fuck you to the white Anglo mean-mindedness of Brexit as I can imagine, and slowly excavating the assembled talents of the West Coast Get Down—which turns out to be much more than just (the phenomenal) Kamasi Washington.  It has also been a spectacular year for that peculiar category comprising stuff recorded way back when but only released for the first time this year, meaning it is not a reissue.  Most years I combine both in my top 10, but this year was so rich overall that I’ve made separate lists.

#1 Record of the Year

Janelle Monáe  Dirty Computer

The range of her imagination on this record is astonishing.  Not a weak track over 4 sides.  My favorite LP side of the year (A 2) has three very different varieties of joy: “Screwed” (featuring Zoë Kravitz), “Django Jane” (just Janelle, laying down the most kickass rap I’ve heard in 2018), “Pink” (featuring Grimes).  Warning: the download that comes with the LP beeps out all the fuck words.

The rest of the Top Ten (in alphabetical order)

Ambrose Akinmusire     Origami Harvest

The record company blurb sums it up nicely: “a surprisingly fluid study in contrasts that pits contemporary classical wilding against deconstructed hip-hop, with bursts of left-field jazz, funk, spoken word, and soul with help from the Mivos Quartet and art-rap expatriate Kool A.D. (Das Racist), along with pianist Sam Harris, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and saxophonist Walter Smith III.”  No, really, it’s a stunner.  Reminds me of the best of Uri Caine (like his Mahler recordings), which is high praise indeed.

Moses Boyd Exodus  Displaced Diaspora

Recorded in 2015, i.e., just before the contemporary London jazz scene exploded internationally, featuring Theon Cross (tuba), Nubya Garcia (bass clarinet), Nathaniel Cross (trombone), and Zara McFarlane (vocals) in addition to Moses Boyd on drums.  The Bandcamp website tags it under experimental hip hop beats jazz space music London, which seems about right.

Brandi Carlile  The Joke 

The songwriting is uniformly strong (try “The Mother”) but it’s that huge, soaring, effortless voice.  You can get lost in it.  Usually only operatic sopranos thrill me like that.

Alejandro Escovedo  The Crossing

I don’t usually go for concept albums, because usually the concept overwhelms the album.  This one is an exception.  The concept is the immigrant experience.  Escovedo seems hardly known outside Texas, where he is somewhere between a legend and a god.  A pity.  This album has huge musical variety and great emotional depth.

Nubya Garcia  When We Are (EP)

We first heard Nubya on We Out Here (see below) where she plays on five tracks, and were lucky enough to see her with her own band (Nubya on tenor sax, Joe Armon-Jones on keyboards, Daniel Casimir on double bass, Femi Coleoso on drums) at Ronnie Scott’s in London (where we also saw Ambrose Akinmusire).  She can honk squeak with the best of them, but its the unfailing warmth and luminosity of her tone that always gets to me.

Pistol Annies   Interstate Gospel

A top ten albums from me without a country offering is unthinkable but it was getting to look that way (see disappointments of the year, below) until this arrived through the mail this week.  Thank you Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angeleena Presley.

Ryan Porter  The Optimist

Recorded in Kamasi Washington’s parents’ basement in 2008-9, this triple album brings together West Coast Get Down veterans Ryan Porter (trombone), Kamasi Washington (tenor saxophone), Miles Mosley (upright bass), Cameron Graves (piano, fender rhodes), Tony Austin (drums), Jumaane Smith (trumpet), and more.  What Kamasi was before he Busby Berkeleyed it with cinematic strings and those god-awful choirs.  Great jazz.

Sons of Kemet  Your Queen Is a Reptile

Best of British for an era when the geriatric white majority is settling for blue passports to nowhere.  An angry album, and rightly so (read the sleeve notes).  Shabaka Hutchins (tenor sax), Theon Cross (tuba), and Tom Skinner + Seb Rochfort or Eddie Hicks + Moses Boyd on drums depending on the track.  Nubya Garcia on tenor sax and Congo Natty and Joshua Idehen (rap) guest.  Heady, polyrhythmic, driving stuff.  Saw them at Vancouver Jazz Festival, a riveting performance.  Luci hates it.

Various artists  We Out Here

The Brownswood compilation double-album that introduced me to the London jazz+++ scene.   If it wasn’t for Janelle Monáe this would be my undisputed #1.  These are the tracks:

A1. Maisha – Inside The Acorn
A2. Ezra Collective – Pure Shade
B1. Moses Boyd – The Balance
B2. Theon Cross – Brockley
C1. Nubya Garcia – Once
C2. Shabaka Hutchings – Black Skin, Black Masks
C3. Triforce – Walls
D1. Joe Armon-Jones – Go See
D2. Kokoroko – Abusey Junction

Nuff said.  Here is the Brownswood documentary that went with it.

Best five older recordings first issued in 2018 

#1  Miles Davis and John Coltrane  The Final Tour (The Bootleg Series, vol. 6)

Trane is incandescent, especially on CD 4.  Luci would like everyone to know that this is her favorite album of 2018 and that most of that London jazz+++ stuff is *very difficult* to doze off to.

and the rest—

Bob Dylan  More Blood, More Tracks

Charles Mingus  Jazz in Detroit / Strata Concert Gallery / 46 Selden

Thelonius Monk  Mønk

John Coltrane  Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album

2018 Honorable Mentions

In most other years any of these would make it into my top ten list, but it’s 2018 so they didn’t.

Boygenius (Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus)  Boygenius (EP)

Lucy Dacus  Historian

Charles Lloyd and the Marvels + Lucinda Williams  Vanished Gardens

Maisha  There Is a Place

Mitski  Be the Cowboy

Most Played Album This Year

Nubya Garcia Nubya’s 5.  Recorded in 2017, second vinyl pressing 2018.  Her first album as leader, backed by Joe Armon-Jones / Piano, Moses Boyd / Drums, Daniel Casimir / Bass, Femi Koloeso / Drums, Sheila Maurice-Grey / Trumpet, Theon Cross / Tuba

Disappointment of the Year

A close-run thing between Kacey Musgraves Golden Hour (very clever but left me cold), Joe Armon-Jones Starting Today (love his work but somehow this offering never gelled as an album), and Kamasi Washington Heaven and Earth (too much concept, way too much choir—though as ever with him some great blowing).

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“Years ago we saw No-Man’s-Land, in a film, and because the film took place in 1918, we thought, fools that we were, that it was past history.  We went home from the cinema with a feeling of pride in the free radiant future toward which the people of today walk hand in hand.  At that time we had not yet experienced the strange twists and turns, the detours, dead ends, blind alleys, that history creates” (Milena Jesenská, “In No-Man’s-Land,” Přítomnost [The Present], 29 December 1938; translated by A. G. Brain, in Jana Černá, Kafka’s Milena, Northwestern University Press, 1993, p. 201).

Three months later Czechoslovakia was dismembered and Bohemia and Moravia invaded by Hitler’s Wehrmacht and turned into a Protectorate of the Third Reich.  Milena Jesenská was arrested in November 1939.  She died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in May 1943.

Today, almost 100 years after Czechoslovakia declared independence from Austria-Hungary and 28 years after the Velvet Revolution, Czech history veers off down another inimitably Czech country lane.

Miloš Zeman, who has warned that if the Czech Republic accepts more refugees from Syria (currently it has admitted a grand total of 12) “unfaithful women will be stoned, thieves will have their hands cut off and we will be deprived of the beauty of women, since they will be veiled” was re-elected as President of the Czech Republic.  At least the margin of victory was narrow (51.36% to Jiří Drahoš’s 48.63%) and the major cities of Prague, Brno and Plzen turned out in force for Drahoš.

Moral: history is never past.  Good thing Václav Havel appreciated the absurd.

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I’m sorry I have been off here for a year.  I have been retiring (from full-time employment at a university), traveling, writing, and moving continents (from UK to Canada, where I am reacquainting myself with real winter in Calgary, Alberta).

If there is anybody still reading this blog, I’ve just posted a piece on academia.edu (whose final version will be published next month in the Journal of Historical Sociology) on Brexit and Trump.  Please publicize if you like it.

Here is the abstract:

Following the victories of the “Brexit” camp in the UK’s 2016 referendum and Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, a new explanatory narrative rapidly established itself. According to this view, which has been widely accepted on both the political left and right, we are witnessing a popular revolt against “elites” spearheaded by white working-class “victims of globalization.” Drawing on extensive polling and census data, this paper debunks this new consensus as an artifact of post-factual politics driven by feeling rather than evidence. These were not instances of a “misshapen class struggle” that sometimes assumed racist or xenophobic forms, but centrally a race war on the non-native Other that has successfully managed to pass itself off as a revolt of the (white) deprived and dispossessed.

Here is the link:

https://www.academia.edu/31635901/White_Riot_Brexit_Trump_and_Post-Factual_Politics

 

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This is an Op-Ed piece I wrote for CEE New Perspectives, the companion blog of the academic journal New Perspectives which is published by the Institute of International Relations (IIR) in Prague.  I reproduce it here with permission.

http://ceenewperspectives.iir.cz/2016/01/08/prejudice-hysteria-and-a-failure-of-political-leadership-of-refugees-and-november-17-in-prague/