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...
Hope I die before I get old
- March 06, 2016
- by
- Matt
There was a time when living longer was considered to be a desirable goal, and rising life expectancy was regarded as a metric of social progress. In those not so distant times, ‘developed’ capitalist societies and already existing socialist societies alike assumed that work was a preparation for an old age in which you...
Karl Schlögel’s Moscow
- February 28, 2016
- by
- Matt
There have been many books, both fiction and non-fiction, written about Stalin’s purges, but there is nothing quite like Karl Schlögel’s monumental Moscow 1937, which I’ve just finished. As the title suggests, the book is a portrait of Moscow in the year in which the Stalinist terror reached a horrific pitch of self-destruction on...
Darkness in Trumptown: Breaking News
- February 26, 2016
- by
- Matt
FIONA BRUCE: And now we cut to the White House to hear our political editor Laura Kuenssberg cover Donald Trump’s inaugural speech. Laura, can you tell us what’s happening?
KUENSSBERG: Well Fiona, we are really witnessing some extraordinary scenes here on what is truly a momentous occasion.
(Camera pans out to the White...
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