Interview for In These Times
- June 16, 2016
- by
- Matt
The Left Must Put Refugees and Migration at the Heart of Its Politics
Mathew Carr rebukes Europe”s inhumane and fear-fueled response to the refugee crisis.
Tom Ladendorf
The current refugee crisis is the worst that Europe has seen since World War II, and in many countries, it remains in the political center stage. As Syrian and other refugees continue to flee to Europe to escape violence and destitution, the EU has struck a controversial new deal to stem the flow of asylum seekers. Public opinion on the issue remains sharply divided, with those expressing solidarity with refugees...
Stand Up to Racism Tomorrow
- March 18, 2016
- by
- Matt
Tomorrow Stand Up To Racism is staging a national demonstration in London to coincide with UN Anti-Racism Day, which commemorates the 1960 Sharpeville massacre when 69 peaceful demonstrators were shot by police in South Africa. Tomorrow’s demonstration takes place at a critical period in European history, when racism, xenophobia, and hatred towards foreigners...
Europe’s Porous Borders: Leonidas Cheliotis and the logic of ‘punitive inclusion’
- March 13, 2016
- by
- Matt
Think of borders in the 21st century and you immediately think of walls, barbed wire fences, razor wire, checkpoints, quasi-military border patrols on land and sea, surveillance cameras, sensors and a panoply of high-tech paraphernalia whose essential purpose is to keep unwanted people out. This is the kind of imagery that we tend...
The Archbishop’s Fears
- March 12, 2016
- by
- Matt
One of the most depressing and inane themes in the great British ‘debate’ about immigration is the idea that there is no debate about immigration. It’s a refrain emanating mostly from the right, which has been replayed for years like a stuck record. It goes essentially like this; ‘we’ aren’t allowed to speak about...
Europe’s ‘Migration Crisis’ : Repression with a human face
- March 08, 2016
- by
- Matt
Many years ago Franco Solinas, the scriptwriter for Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, was asked by an interviewer why the French colonel Mathieu – a pragmatic exponent of torture – was portrayed as ‘ too much of a gentleman in fatigues, excessively noble. He is elegant, cultured….’ Solinas replied that...
Kamel Daoud and the Rape of Europa
- February 20, 2016
- by
- Matt
I’m a big fan of the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, which I read last year. It was a brilliant deconstruction of L’Etranger, which movingly and provocatively imagined the voice of the Arab colonial subject that was missing from the Camus’s novel.
In doing so, it invited Camus’s readers to re-think the essential...
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