Any concept which — like "exterminism" — collates all the "inertial," "irrational," "symmetrical" and institutionally "autonomous" aspects of the arms race into a single over-riding process will make it harder to understand the purposeful, strategic function of the current arms build-up within the larger context of the New Cold War.
Last week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, in which the Israeli military occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. In a strikingly illustrated essay for the Funambulist blog, Léopold Lambert reconstructs eleven crucial moments from the pivotal war.
Click here to read on.
Trump’s election has raised the specter of nuclear war in a way unseen since the 1980s, the last time a global mass movement pushed back against the threat of nuclear catastrophe. One of the major intellectual forces behind that mass movement was E.P. Thompson. With the utopian hopes surrounding the ban treaty now meeting the actually existing dystopia of US policy, it is high time for an update to Thompson’s seminal concept of “exterminism.”Â
Brecht’s verses say uncomfortable truths rather than toe party lines and so offer us a still vital critique of the economic forces behind war, of how wartime rhetoric becomes a lie machine unfairly demonising and dehumanising our foes.
Brecht considered War Primer part of “a satisfactory literary report on my years in exile,” as he wrote in a 1944 journal entry. Since this first English language reception of War Primer on the centenary of Brecht’s birth in 1998, what are we now to make of his poignant modernist epic of four-liner lyrics and scrapbook photos? Today, in our post-crash era, with its renewal of Marxism, Brecht the formalist can be freed from a series of postmodern qualifications. War Primer’s historical intervention can be seen in a new way today. With the far right politically relevant again, Brecht’s image-by-image analysis of social democracy, America, and fascism, which is the veritable heart of War Primer, possesses fresh relevance.
