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One of the first songs taken off U.S. radio playlists in the run up to the Iraq war was The Cure’s “Killing an Arab.” Far from an incitement to hatred, the 1980s hit is a tribute to Albert Camus’ book L’ Etranger, The Outsider. In the book, the main character, alienated in society and in…
Europe’s migration crisis is not over. It is spreading. An estimated 1.3 million asylum seekers arrived Europe in 2015. The migrants have caused discord in destination countries and divisions within the EU. The European Commission guessed that 1.3 million migrants will arrive in 2016. The flat-line scenario is a low-ball estimate since the number of…
Reactions to Trump show that elites are also susceptible to collective moods. When a CNN correspondent asked a female protester on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, about her response to the new President’s Inaugural address, she laid her head back and howled like a wounded animal. To many Americans it seems as if it is…
London, Europe’s most globalized city. Of the roughly 8 million inhabitants, white Britons now make up less than half. The city is rich and at the same time rickety. While neighbourhoods such as Chelsea and Kensington are plunged into evening darkness by rich owners living elsewhere, districts like Hackney and Ilford have many bodies and…
India’s growth can zero out all the world’s environmental measures Nigambodh Ghat is the place where the Hindu god Brahma bathed in the Yamuna River and regained his memory. Today the river runs thick as snot. Nigambodh is one of the busiest outdoor crematoriums in Delhi. Fifty pyres a day, every day. The ashes are…
Herder vs. Fichte and the fight for the soul of nationalism Imagine a time of globalization, modernization; of decadence and alienation. Imagine living in a country where the mother tongue is devalued at the university. Where elites pride themselves on declaring stronger loyalty to foreigners than to socially inferior compatriots. Where the universalisms of the…