Stop, Look, and Listen #54
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week. I also keep a record of my daily reading and listening on the ‘Notes’ section of this site.
Five things to look at
Pavlos Roufos traced Chilean president José Antonio Kast’s political lineage, in this article for The Brooklyn Rail, through his father Michael’s journey from Nazi émigré to Chilean businessman and active supporter of Augusto Pinochet’s regime, and elder brother Miguel’s embodiment of the Chilean far right’s embrace of neoliberalism.
For the Illiberalism Studies Program blog, Richard Hayton explored Britain’s Conservative and Reform parties’ roots in a conservative populism epitomised by Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher, and how interparty competition drives them in increasingly extreme directions, amid the atrophying of the wider centre right.
In this post for Just Security, Luca Trenta and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi contextualised the targeted killing of Ali Khamenei within the history of the taboo established in 1970s US politics against assassinating foreign leaders, ensuing executive resistance to fully embracing this norm, and its abandonment by Donald Trump’s administration.
Cathy Otten reflected in Aeon Magazine on humanitarian journalism’s exploitation of trauma for ostensibly progressive ends, its roots in imperialism and resulting problematic registers of either pity or idealisation, and a possible alternative approach that eschews sentimentality for pre-emptively speaking out against injustice.
Abdullahi Halakhe wrote for his The Horn and the Gulf newsletter about how Tanzania’s 1972 invasion of Uganda and resulting International Monetary Fund bailout arose from President Julius Nyere’s same project of Ujamaa that they doomed, and the lessons from this that defined Yoweri Museveni’s subsequent rule in Uganda.
Five things to listen to
Miranda Melcher interviewed Kristina Jonutytė for the New Books Network about her book Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Urban Religion and Minority Politics at the Asian Borderlands of Russia, and Buryat Buddhists’ fraught position between the state’s authoritarian Russification, and their own transnational religious and ethnic ties.
David Runciman was joined by David Klemperer on the Past Present Future podcast to discuss American and British former Trotskyists’ journeys rightward, including ardent support for the Iraq War and Brexit, rooted in an embrace of confrontation for its own sake, and a class politics that swaps out material for cultural analysis.
On the New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz considered HBO miniseries DTF St. Louis within a longer cultural tradition of representing American suburbs as sites not of idyllic prosperity, but of psychological repression, patriarchy, property fetishism, and interpersonal conflict.
Alan Boswell spoke to guest Hafsa Halawa on the International Crisis Group’s The Horn podcast about the the US-Israeli war against Iran’s economic and security implications for the Horn of Africa, amid Gulf states’ growing involvement in the region, its resulting integration with the Middle East, and its own local flashpoints.
On Foreign Policy’s Ones and Tooze podcast, Adam Tooze and Cameron Abadi examined economic contributors to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the Chinese state’s economic policy response to the unrest, and the conflict between human rights advocacy and business interests that drove the US’s inconsistent approach to China.
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