Stop, Look, and Listen #9
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 (and occasionally programmes and films) that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week. I also maintain a regular record of all these via Substack’s ‘Notes’ feature; you can also read these via the Notes section of my site.
This week’s recommended reading and listening are on the areas of:
History of political thought.
Transnational implications of the war in Gaza.
Contemporary environmental politics.
Religious holidays.
Aftermaths of the Second World War.
History of political thought
A range of articles and podcasts on different aspects of political thought across the spectrum and from early modernity to the present.
Recommendations
On the What’s Left of Philosophy? podcast, Lillian Cicerchia, Owen Glyn-Williams, Gil Morejón, and William Paris discuss Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism, his criticism of a Marxist tradition that became divorced from political practice and the working class as it became increasingly integrated into the academy, and whether and why philosophy is particularly guilty of avoiding politics in this way.
This episode of The Ministry of Ideas podcast’s ‘Genealogies of Modernity’ series, written by Terence Sweeney, looks at the life and career of Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican friar who became an ardent opponent of the colonisation and brutalisation of indigenous Americans by the Spanish, how his worldview was shaped by a medieval Christian understanding of human equality as a mark of God’s perfection, how this competed with the justification of the Spanish conquest of the Americas through a modernising framework of human inequality, and how Las Casas’s arguments provided an antecedent for later liberation and anti-racist movements.
Nathan J. Robinson talks to Matt McManus about his work on reactionary political philosophy on the Current Affairs podcast. They discuss why the American right feels obliged to draw upon democratic and populist discourses when this runs counter to conservative ideas about natural inequality, and about the right-wing idealisation of unthinking people and its emphasis on the sublimation of hierarchy.
- writes for their DigressionsImpressions newsletter about the misattribution of a faith in a free market of ideas to John Stuart Mill, and the contradiction between a faith in providence and the pursuit of progressive ideals…
…and also this post on some of the characteristics of conservative political philosophy – a normative vision of a contract between the dead, living, and not yet born, centred on obligations and the preservation of existing institutions – and how its rejection of both the terms of debate and systematism may have inhibited its presence within political philosophy and theory as an academic discipline.
Transnational implications of the war on Gaza
How Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza provokes morally compromised responses beyond the Middle East that enables it to continue.
Recommendations:
Writing for Overland, Daz Chandler argues that the cowardice of legacy media institutions’ coverage of Palestine has been thrown into further relief by the bravery of Palestinian citizen-journalists for whom ‘objectivity’ is an unaffordable luxury.
Michael Bishku writes about the more muted response of East African states to Israel’s assault on Gaza for The Conversation, attributing this to their long, complex history of relations with Israel post-independence, their own experiences of dealing with terrorism, and Christian-Muslim divides in public opinion.
- writes for his The Turbulent World newsletter about the conflation of political with national interests within the US and other Western democracies, as well as Israel and Palestine, over Israel’s assault on Gaza, and in the face of morally indefensible casualty totals. He also highlights the chilling effect that Western states’ conflation of Israel’s interests with their own has had on free speech.
- writes for his Unpopular Front newsletter about how Zionism works in some ways to make Jews worldwide less safe, but also more tolerable to the far right, who identify with the unification of race with territory, and with violent settler-colonialism.
Contemporary environmental politics
Contested environmental spaces as sites of international and domestic power struggles.
Recommendations:
Writing for OpinioJuris, Dobrin Dobrev looks at the Russian practice of laying sea-mines in the Black Sea, the complex limits on and allowances of the practice under international law, and the collaboration between Bulgaria, Romania, and Türkiye in addressing the threats sea-mining poses to non-belligerent shipping in their waters in this particular regard.
This post for
looks at why political developments in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s politics are so vital to the global environment, and how not only have the country’s resource riches been wasted through greed and corruption, but external actors’ desire further exacerbated political instability and violence and undermines its democracy.The first of a two-part instalment of the BBC’s The Documentary series on ‘The New Silk Road: The Arctic’, presented by Anna Holligan. Focused on the Norwegian coastal town of Kirkenes, it explores how - amid changing climatic conditions - China is seeking to exploit new opportunities for harvesting resources and sea transportation along the Northeast passage, for economic and strategic reasons, and the local impact of and response to this in Arctic Norway.
Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent presents this instalment of ‘Assignment’, about how songbird hunting has gone from forming part of poor Cypriots’ diet to being a lucrative but illegal industry on the island, the efforts of the Cypriot authorities and environmental campaigners to clamp down on the practice, and the tensions between sustainability and tradition.
Religious holidays
Hannukah and Christmas, and the significance of the myths that continue to surround them.
Recommendations:
- explores the challenges posed by the story of Hanukkah and its celebration during the ongoing conflict in Israel-Palestine, given the Maccabees’ history of both resisting oppression and oppressing others, and the need for a critical and discerning treatment of the historical foundations of one’s culture, in this post for her Life Is a Sacred Text newsletter.
- looks at the contested meaning of Hannukah. He argues that, faced with a moment of choice, Jews should recognise the liberatory potential of its story of resistance against a larger imperial power, while rejecting both a right-wing version celebrating the use of force against dissidents, and a wholly apolitical one that sees no resemblances in contemporary events.
Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley discuss 1980s Christmas movies on this episode of the Why Theory? podcast, examining nostalgia, the carnivalesque, racism, and capitalism in films such as A Christmas Story, Christmas Vacation, Trading Places, Scrooged, and Home Alone.
For her Review Roulette newsletter,
looks at A Christmas Story, and how it broke ground in the Christmas film subgenre by leaning into rather than hypocritically denouncing the commercialism of the season.
Aftermaths of the Second World War:
How the material and mental legacies of the conflict have impacted upon the US, Italy, and Japan.
Recommendations:
On ’s ‘Political Science’ channel,
talks to Andrew C. McKevitt about his book Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America. They discuss how, contra to dominant originalist arguments about gun ownership as intrinsically American and constitutionally guaranteed, the actual spike in American gun ownership really occurred after the Second World War, due to a confluence between the availability of surplus guns produced during the conflict, growing consumer markets particularly in suburban and semi-rural areas, Cold War era discourses around freedom, and racial anxieties among white men. Given the contingent nature of mass gun ownership in the US, McKevitt poses the question as to whether this situation might eventually be unmade.Ari Barbalat interviews Paolo Caroli on
’s ‘History’ channel about Caroli’s book Transitional Justice in Italy and the Crimes of Fascism and Nazism. They discuss the limitations of criminal justice as a tool of transition from autocratic regimes and addressing their crimes; how Italy failed to build upon the amnesty it granted in 1946 to build greater familiarity with the crimes committed by the Fascist regime and a deeper stigma against Fascist symbolism; and why the Italian state deliberately dragged its feet over prosecuting Nazis for war crimes committed in Italy so as to avoid its own perpetrators of war crimes abroad being similarly prosecuted.- features Akiko Takenaka and Bill Tsutsui on this episode of the Historians at the Movies podcast, discussing new release, Godzilla Minus One. They explore where the film and the broader Godzilla film series fits in within Japan’s post-1945 reckoning with the memory of the Second World War and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Godzilla Minus One’s depiction of gender and gender relations.
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