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In this mailing:
- Giulio Meotti: The Closing of the
Cultural Mind?
- Amir Taheri: Putin and Lessons
from Lenin and Gromyko
by Giulio Meotti • June 10, 2018 at
5:00 am
- In France, recently, a
group of intellectuals published a manifesto asking the Islamic
world to eliminate anti-Semitic verses from the Koran. The
initiative followed the murder of an 85-year-old Holocaust
survivor, Mireille Knoll.
- The Turkish Council of
Higher Education responded with a moratorium on establishing
additional departments of French studies in Turkey.
- There are no
guarantees that curiosity, self-doubt and free speech will
create a more liberal society. But closed-mindedness and
censorship, in the Middle East, Europe or anywhere, are not
likely to, either.
At the age
of 82, Naguib Mahfouz, the only Egyptian Nobel Laureate for
Literature, was stabbed nearly to death by an Islamist. (Image
source: Alaraby/Wikimedia Commons)
In the West, books and documentaries have been
cancelled. In France, recently, a group of intellectuals published a
manifesto asking the Islamic world to eliminate anti-Semitic verses
from the Koran. The initiative followed the murder of an 85-year-old
Holocaust survivor, Mireille Knoll. The Turkish Council of Higher
Education responded with a moratorium on establishing additional
departments of French studies in Turkey. For years, under the
presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish culture has been closing
in on itself. "Going into a Turkish bookstore is like walking
into a psychiatric ward," according to the British journalist
Gareth Jenkins in The New Yorker. Turkey sentenced journalists
and writers to prison, and put publishers of foreign novels, such as
its most famous translator, Necmiye Alpay, on trial. The problem,
however, may not be just Turkish, but, as the author Robert R. Reilly
called it, "the closing of the Muslim mind".
by Amir Taheri • June 10, 2018 at
4:00 am
- Andrei Gromyko
believed that the so-called Westphalian system, in place at
least until the Second World War, had been replaced by a duopoly
in which only the USSR and the United States counted as powers
that could truly affect things. Moscow these days is full of
rumors and speculation regarding an impending bid by Putin to
revive at least in part and in a new form, the Gromykan
"duopoly" by reaching out to the Trump administration
in Washington.
- Putin knows that
without reaching out to the US, he may not be able to
consolidate his gains in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Georgia,
while he could become stuck in the Syrian quagmire with no
prospect of getting out anytime soon.
- Russia's isolation was
best illustrated during the big annual military parade in May 2017,
when of all the foreign dignitaries invited by Putin only one
turned up: the President of Moldova.
Soviet
foreign minister Andrei Gromyko at the United Nations, September 21,
1961. (Photo by William Lovelace/Express/Getty Images)
"Consolidation". In Moscow these days this
is the word that most flavors discussions in political circles. The
idea is that, thanks to President Vladimir Putin's bold and
risk-taking strategy, Russia has made a number of major gains on the
international scene and must now act to consolidate those gains and
reduce the diplomatic, economic and political price it has had to pay
for them.
The analysis is inspired by Lenin's famous
"Two-steps-forward, one-step back" dictum that saw the
founder of the now defunct Soviet Union abandon vast territories
under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in order to consolidate the then
fragile Bolshevik hold on power in Russia itself. Later, Lenin used
the same dictum to justify his New Economic Policy (NEP), a step back
to confuse the growing opposition from the hated
"bourgeoisie".
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