Isabella Hammad, Equator:

as Freud himself argued in Mourning and Melancholia, proper mourning requires a person to acknowledge what exactly they have lost. If a loss is not brought into the full light of consciousness, grief curdles into melancholia. Stopping to perceive the traces of what is there no longer, then, precisely enacts the psychic movement of looking, acknowledging, and then, eventually, separating.

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Crucially, mourning requires a person – whether as a child or as an adult – to recognise that they are not omnipotent, that they are capable of being bad and of having destructive thoughts. In other words, mourning involves not only coming to terms with your lost or departed loved object (or beloved), but also with your own vulnerability and finitude.

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Witnessing, or looking and weeping, did not stop the atrocities, and the proliferation of images may even have conditioned people to normalise them, as they look at another mangled corpse covered in dust on a phone screen and then inevitably continue with their day. There have been other genocides in the history of our species; what has made this different seems to be the flagrancy with which it has been conducted, recorded and abetted.

How plainly we see the future, continuous with our past: casual, industrial-scale warfare perpetrated with a lucid sadism, powers that care neither for the Earth nor for other human beings, a world increasingly in ruins, dominated by a technocratic elite that considers entire populations disposable, and has the power to dispose of them.

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The memorialising of the Nazi Holocaust in museums and other forms of pedagogy in the West seems designed to facilitate, in Naomi Klein’s words, not “re-membering” but rather re-traumatisation. “Looking back,” she writes in Doppelganger, “I am struck by what wasn’t a part of these strangely mechanical retellings. There was space for the surface-level emotions: horror at the atrocities, rage at the Nazis, a desire for revenge. But not for the more complex and troubling emotions of shame or guilt, or for reflection on what duties the survivors of genocide may have to oppose genocidal logics in all of their forms.” This is not mourning: this is a wound kept purposefully open to preclude reflection and justify genocidal violence through the logic and rhetoric of an ontological victimhood.

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The US built many army bases around the world, but the exercise of American imperialism did not require the same kind of colonial architecture as the old European empires. US military interference was most often conducted covertly or by proxy, through the funding of militant opposition groups, assassinations and the indirect facilitation of coups d’etat. Meanwhile, the bulk of Cold War “containment” policies consisted in a strategy of soft power, including economic and cultural influence.

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Decades later, as US soft power is being rapidly dismantled, the disproportionate influence of American ideology suddenly appears obvious. Where the Biden administration expressed a final croaky gasp of a hypocritical establishment, still verbally committed to values like democracy and goodwill – a mask that was revealed to be very slippery indeed during Biden’s unrelenting funding of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – the Trump administration demonstrates little ideological consistency beyond the maskless slogan “America First”. It was always America first; they just used to be more quiet about it.

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Israel’s accelerated genocide of the Palestinians made the contradictions in the US’s imperial architecture unbearable and untenable, and threatened it with collapse, setting into motion a process of destruction that we are still trying to look at, and that is sometimes hard to see.

As we look upon burned flesh in Gaza, we are also seeing the rubble of this older version of Western empire. How best to splice the frame, to keep them both in mind, to keep looking?

I am very much struck by these last paragraphs being written in the past tense: “the exercise of American imperialism did not require”, not “does not require”. This is the first time I believe I have seen this. But yes, with Biden’s Gaza and Trump’s Iran War following Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq the American Century truly is over.

once the consequences of climate change start having a more concrete effect on the lives of individuals, it’s not impossible that attitudes toward the economic system may shift very quickly, in Europe as in the rest of the world.

—Thomas Piketty, Nature, Culture, and Inequality, (London: Scribe, 2024), 81.

After World War II, the German government devised another, noninflationary way of getting rid of its public debt: a monetary reform that divided the value of old debts by a hundred, coupled with a system of extremely high levies on the holders of large assets, so as to compensate for the losses to small and medium asset holders; the largest fortunes were assessed at up to 50 percent of their asset value. Germany adopted this reform in 1952, and it remained in force until the 1980s.

When we hear Germans speaking on the subject of economics today and saying how absolutely essential it is for Greece to repay its debt down to the last euro, these events seem very far in the past … It‘s often the way of things: history’s major players have a short memory, especially when it works to their advantage. I think we should resist this historical amnesia, however. It’s worth recalling that the problem of public debt has been dealt with in different ways over the course of history; there’s no right way.

—Thomas Piketty, Nature, Culture, and Inequality, (London: Scribe, 2024), 68.

there can be no resolution to the global warming crisis, no possible reconciliation between man and nature, without a drastic reduction in inequality and without a new economic system that is radically different from the current capitalist one. In describing this system, I refer to “a participatory, democratic, and ecological socialism,” but other terms could clearly be devised—and no doubt will be.

—Thomas Piketty, Nature, Culture, and Inequality, (London: Scribe, 2024), 5.

Anton Jäger, New Left Review:

Trump the hyperpolitician is a consequence of this elite disarticulation, providing agency absent a stabilizing structural frame.

What Trump catalyses, of course, is more incoherence, as the contemporary condition of Europe shows. Here, a set of pre-existing geopolitical and economic dependencies makes elite fracture and cross-class bloc failure far more disabling than in the us. Mainstream parties still hold power in Europe’s three largest countries, but their situation is precarious and—a sign of the hyperpolitical mood of the electorates—their leaders are deeply disliked. In Germany, Merz leads a directionless, ill-tempered coalition which collectively won only 45 per cent of the vote; his personal rating is on –64. Though Germany is the de facto leader of the eu bloc, its ruling elites cannot muster enough cohesion and popular backing to relaunch their own export industries against Chinese competition and American energy pressure, let alone craft a continental strategy.

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This lack of vertical backing for European rulers is in part explained by their inability to unite capitalist fractions behind a coherent strategy to recharge their stagnant economies, trapped between the diktats of the bond markets, a faltering Energiewende, regulatory burdens of the eu’s ‘compliance capitalism’, the growing weight of social care for the elderly, failing public infrastructure, unbeatably cheap Chinese manufacturing and the crippling, self-inflicted gas-price shock resulting from their culpable failure to structure and support a diplomatic answer to the Ukraine–Russia question. Instead of directly grappling with these problems, Europe’s governing classes are issuing a call to arms against Russia and greedily tallying the martial stock of poor war-torn Ukraine for the inventory of a future eu army.

In their switch to intense Ukrainophilia—having long disdained the country as a troublesome peripheral mendicant in need of harsh neo-imperial financial discipline: viz., the 2013 eu–Ukraine association agreement—otherwise bureaucratic figures like Merz and Starmer launch into the mode of hyperpolitics, their energy and enthusiasm delinked from material and political reality. Despite patent lack of popular support, their eagerness for military spending swings from aircraft carriers and fighter jets to the best possible intercontinental ballistic missiles, like an oligarch’s mistress comparing handbags or earrings.

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Instead of negotiating a lasting peace with Russia that would respect Ukraine’s self‑determination, the eu debate revolves—behind closed doors—around what credit system its member states should use to arm against their great continental neighbour. Accompanying this are sly attempts by each to stay in the Pentagon’s good books with logistics and supply for the Trump–Netanyahu war of aggression against Iran, while posturing about a rules-based international order.

Ho-fung Hung, New Left Review:

Thus, just when the US global military umbrella – the longstanding foundation of dollar hegemony – is showing signs of weakening, the CCP’s party-state is inadvertently prolonging the dollar’s dominance. Short of profound financial reform in China, the current stalemate, in which the world remains reluctantly trapped within the dollar system, is likely to persist. It is ironic that as US-China rivalry intensifies, China’s control over its economy has become a key factor in the staying power of the American empire.

Wikipedia:

The dombra, also known as the dombyra (Kazakh: домбыра, dombyra; Persian: دمبوره, dambūra), is a long-necked, plucked lute used in the traditional music of the Kazakhs, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Nogais, Bashkirs and Tatars, and the principal national instrument of Kazakhstan.^[1][2] Together with the bowed fiddle qyl-qobyz, it is one of the two most widely recognised symbols of Kazakh musical culture.^[3]

Until reading this I could not have named a single symbol of Kazakh musical culture.