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Obedience
To be honest, I know next to nothing about conditions for the press in Russia. I expect there is little if any room for dissent. Would-be critical journalists are up against not only powerful people, but also Government, as the Navalnyj example has demonstrated so dramatically. But then again, Russians don’t expect a free press.…
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The Great Divide
The other night I had a terrible argument with a couple whom I consider particularly close friends. They were spending the weekend at my place, and we had enjoyed two lovely days, when in the evening, I unwittingly stepped on a sore toe. Now, I had been very careful not to even mention Ukraine; in…
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What enlightenment is not
Yep, artificial intelligence and Wikipedia have already met, I fear. Or are the automatons at work human? Diligent cancelists? At any rate, things are starting to happen, awful things reminiscent of noxious chemical reactions. The other day, I looked up Helsinki Times in Wikipedia. The first paragraph read: Helsinki Times is the first English language…
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Back to Palestine
While the war in Ukraine has engulfed most of our attention, the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied territories, and Jerusalem has grown dramatically worse. Almost every day, one or multiple Palestinians are killed. The paragraph I just wrote is no different from what you might read in any mainstream paper. What is missing…
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Suggested reading
Article by Jacob Siegel: A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the CenturyThirteen ways of looking at disinformation Though the title may seem sensationalist, the contents of this profound and illuminating analysis are not. If you prefer to just get a gist of what Jacob Siegel wrote, you can turn to Glenn Greenwald’s interview of…
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Harnessing history to politics, part II
The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the second part of his analysis. Causes of grain shortage Historians explain the food shortage in the Soviet Union in 1933 in various ways. The predominant view is that the dramatic changes imposed by the…
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Intermezzo
I shall be publishing the second part of Thorarinn Hjartarson’s analysis of the “Holdomor” narrative in a couple of days. In the mean time you might take a look at an article that appeared yesterday in Helsinki Times. I was kindly informed about it by a friend in Poland. I gather press freedom is not…
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Harnessing history to politics
The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the first part of his analysis. The quotes included by the author were translated by him to Icelandic from English. Since I have been unable to consult all his sources, I must include some of…
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Antagonising journalists
By mistreating and possibly poisoning the prisoner Aleksej Navaljnyj, the Russian authorities are merely reinforcing the Western public’s perception that the concept of justice simply does not exist in Russia. No matter what you or I think about Navaljnyj’s political views, he is not suspected of having killed anybody, or of having turned “customers” into…
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Rødt
Rødt is the name of a Norwegian left-wing political party. It is the only political party that still advocates leaving NATO. The party maintains that NATO is not a defence alliance, but an alliance of nations vindicating US global hegemony. The party avers that NATO not so much solves as creates problems. It is the…