Britain and the Brexitiers

Why Britain Needs Its Own Mueller

Carole Cadwalladr,  NYRB, NYRDaily November 16, 2018  

A very interesting article, reveealing some hidden backgrounds on the Brexit-Connections with the USA und Russia. 

Recommended Reading!

The eternal leader

Chairman Xi, Chinese Idol

Ian Johnson

I was skeptical at first when political analysts suggested that Xi might try to rule past a second term. One reason was that the Chinese political class has fought hard to institutionalize transfers of power. I wondered if Xi would want to risk alienating so many of his peers by taking such a step. Another risk is that this puts Xi in the crosshairs if his policies fail. And while it’s easy to imagine Xi steamrolling opponents until his health fails him, there are small signs of unease among people in China.

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Xi is further than Putin in his power installment. Anyway: clear is, we have again the times of the leader, the strong man, the subordination, the mindless followers, the plebs, the mobs. All the ugly sides of fascism in modern, new cloth. Be it Turkey or Poland, or the leading superpowers...

Nukes and the Global Schism

Nukes and the Global Schism
Robert Koehler, Counterpunch, July 14, 2017

The United States boycotted the U.N. negotiations to ban — everywhere across Planet Earth — nuclear weapons. So did eight other countries. Guess which ones?

The international debate over this historic treaty, which became reality a week ago by a margin of 122 to 1, revealed how deeply split the nations of the world are — not by borders or language or religion or political ideology or control of wealth, but by possession of nuclear weapons and the accompanying belief in their absolute necessity for national security, despite the absolute insecurity they inflict on the whole planet.

Annotation to "Gaiety"

In his introduction to „Hope Against Hope. A Memoir” by Nadezhda Mandelstam (translated by Max Hayward; Atheneum, NY 1970), Clarence Brown remarks on the specific gaiety of Osip Mandelstam:

“But the buoyancy … depends upon the central figure of Osip Mandelstam himself. Nadezhda Yakovlevna calls him in one place ‘endlessly zhizneradostny’. The words is usually rendered as ‘cheerful’ or ‘joyous’ – rather feeble counters for an original that means, in its two parts, ‘life-glad’. Those who seek the roots of poetry in a close equivalency with life will find it perfectly astonishing that there are so few sad poems in Mandelstam. But while this or that fact of his tragic existence can explain the brute meaning of many lines, nothing can explain the poetry of them other than the wild joy that he took in the Russian language. It is not astonishing, ‘Pechal moy svetla’, Pushkin wrote, ‘My sadness is luminous’; and Mandelstam not only could but did use the line. (…) In an early essay on Pushkin and Scriabin, of which only fragments remain, Mandelstam was evidently trying to find the source of this joy within the terms of Christianity. Christian art is joyous because it is free, and it is free because of the fact of Christ’s having died to redeem the world. One need not die in art nor save the world in it, those matters having been, so to speak, attended to. What is left? The blissful responsibility to enjoy the world. Such, I take it, was the argument, as one can see it, from what is left. Whether in later years Mandelstam would have sought quite this underpinning for his innate gladness in life, I cannot tell. Perhaps the missing segments of this same essay might have modulated the statement in some way. But that is beside the essential point, which is that Mandelstam habitually converted not only the prose of life but even its truly darker moments into poems from which a sense of pleasure, even beatitude, is seldom absent.”

If compared to Jorge Luis Borges one sees the essential difference of their respective gaiety: Mandelstam a religious poet, Borges a nonbeliever. Yet the one common aspect remains: the importance and source of beauty and joy of language.