The New York Review (Continuación)

The Reichstag during the fire, Berlin, February 1933. WikiCommons

MundoAméricaReflexionesDemocraciaInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional

On February 27, 1933 the German Parliament building burned, Adolf Hitler rejoiced, and the Nazi era began. Hitler, who had just been named head of a government that was legally formed after the democratic elections of the previous November, seized the opportunity to change the system. “There will be no mercy now,” he exulted. “Anyone standing in our way will be cut down.”

The next day, at Hitler’s advice and urging, the German president issued a decree “for the protection of the people and the state.” It deprived all German citizens of basic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly and made them subject to “preventative detention” by the police.…  Seguir leyendo »

Riccardo Manzotti’s metaphysical switchboard

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

How is it that we experience the world? How is it possible that the environment we live in, the objects we use and see, touch and taste, hear and smell, are both patently out there and simultaneously, it seems, in our heads? After four long conversations, considering the positions of philosophers and neuroscientists, those who assume that experience is an amalgam of neuron-generated representations in the brain and those who have looked for it in our interaction with the environment, Riccardo Manzotti and I are no nearer to establishing what consciousness is or where it resides. Today, then, we have set ourselves a simple task: to review all the ways philosophers have supposed a subject might relate to and become conscious of an object, setting aside once and for all those hypotheses that have clearly failed and asking, is there one approach which has not yet been given due attention?…  Seguir leyendo »

Anna Politkovskaya. ITAR-TASS Agency

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On Thursday, February 2, the young Russian journalist and pro-democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza was at his in-laws’ apartment in Moscow when he suddenly felt ill. He appeared confused and disoriented. His parents-in-law rushed him into a taxi and to a hospital. By the time they arrived, Kara-Murza was experiencing organ failure. Fortunately, the doctor who admitted him was the same one who had treated Kara-Murza’s previous multiple-organ-failure episode, in May 2015. The doctor wasted no time starting treatment, beginning with dialysis.

Kara-Murza, who is thirty-five, is normally in good health. He is also a longtime opponent of the Putin regime. He divides his time between Washington, D.C.,…  Seguir leyendo »

Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul. Page from a Koran, Near East, Abbasid period, late ninth-early tenth century.

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia,

In the beginning, long before ISIS or al-Qaeda, before the smiling suicide bombers and black flags and all the other lurid signposts we have come to associate with Islam, there were manuscripts. They emerged from the desert in the seventh and eighth centuries AD: yellowed animal-skin parchments inscribed with Arabic letters that proclaim a faith in one God. Some were written on the shoulder bones of camels, or stripped palm-branches. No one knows who wrote them. They may have come from many hands in disparate places. But at some point, a powerful story emerged to bind them. The angel Gabriel, it was said, recited them to a man named Muhammad in a cave (and later outside of it).…  Seguir leyendo »

A mural of Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump, Belgrade, Serbia, December, 2016. Marko Djuric/Reuters

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Abetted by fake news stories, manipulation of social media, and continual lying, the coming to power of Donald Trump has raised the question of whether other countries’ populations might be susceptible to the same level of deceit. An interesting case is Serbia, whose current prime minister, Aleksandar Vučić, a former ultranationalist who served as an information minister in the late 1990s, when newspapers were fined and shut down in order to muzzle dissent as Slobodan Milošević fought a war with NATO over Kosovo.

The following commentary by the Serbian opposition politician and human rights activist Vesna Pešić describes the tricks Vučić and his party use to rule the country these days.…  Seguir leyendo »

Migrants arriving from North Africa, Lampedusa, March, 2011. Giorgio Cosulich/Getty Images

EuropaUnión EuropeaPolítica Inmigración

As Donald Trump denies entry to the already small number of pre-screened refugees the US had agreed to accept—among them Syrian and Iraqi families fleeing terrorism who have been carefully vetted and approved by the UN Refugee agency and by the US Department of Homeland Security—Europeans face a far more dire situation: the hundreds of thousands of desperate people from North Africa and the Middle East, who, without any UN help, are attempting to reach their shores. Thousands each year die trying.

While countries from Malta to Norway have been shutting their doors to this cataclysmic mass migration, a sixty-year-old Italian named Pietro Bartolo has decided to spend his energy otherwise.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa,

Amid the political and diplomatic chaos in the US since Donald Trump assumed the presidency, Russian leadership has been experiencing its own turmoil, until recently kept under wraps, but now emerging into the open. To be sure, Russian President Vladimir Putin is still firmly in power, as evidenced by his hour-long conversation last Saturday with Trump and by Putin’s high ratings in opinion polls (which far surpass Trump’s). Yet we have now learned that, since the US election, there has been an unprecedented, and perhaps still continuing shakeup of top officials in Putin’s main security agency, the FSB, and that a top former intelligence official in Putin’s entourage died recently in suspicious circumstances.…  Seguir leyendo »

Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the year before his murder by right-wing paramilitaries, El Salvador, 1979. Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

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The murder of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero in El Salvador on March 24, 1980 was a momentous event. As the US Ambassador to El Salvador at the time, Robert White, testified many years later in a civil suit brought against one of Romero’s killers in an American federal court, the assassins “destroyed the one figure in El Salvador that could have served as a bridge, as a creative interpreter between all the different sides, and his removal by violence basically sent a signal that no dialogue was warranted.” The message to the leftist insurgents in the twelve-year war that followed was that they had no hope of achieving anything by peaceful means.…  Seguir leyendo »

Hugo Gernsback wearing his Isolator, which eliminates external noises for concentration, from Science and Invention, July, 1925

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

The annual awards for best science fiction are called “Hugos”. A futuristic story by William Gibson in 1981 was called “The Gernsback Continuum”. But except for a few markers like these, Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967) has mostly vanished from our cultural memory, which is a pity, because he was an extraordinary man, and his influence on our modern age—electrical, science-permeated, and full of wonders—was outsized.

Gernsback is sometimes called the father of science fiction, though not because of any he wrote himself.⁠  (He did self-publish one novel, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660, which Martin Gardner called “surely the worst SF novel ever written”.)…  Seguir leyendo »

A Syrian refugee and her family in the apartment complex where they now live, Sacramento, California, November 16, 2015

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As tens of thousands of people across the United States rushed to airports and took to the streets to protest Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigration by Muslims from seven countries, and refugees generally; as four federal judges issued emergency orders to prevent immediate deportations and sixteen state attorney generals made a rare joint statement calling the president’s action “unconstitutional, un-American, and unlawful”—we recalled a refugee we’d met not long ago from Nepal, where he’d spent more than a decade in a refugee camp. Resettled in New Hampshire, he was working several jobs, having already learned English and gotten a degree as a surgical technician.…  Seguir leyendo »

A soldier in San José Guayabal, El Salvador, August 21, 2016. Monique Jaques

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The small town of San José Guayabal is located in a region of dry, flat land about forty minutes north of San Salvador, the Salvadoran capital. Most of its 11,000 inhabitants work in farms, growing onions and corn, and it has little to distinguish itself from other places in the area. But in one sense, it is remarkably different than almost anywhere else in El Salvador: in recent years, it has apparently been largely free of violent crime.

The Salvadoran Civil War ended twenty-five years ago, when the right-wing military government entered a peace agreement with the leftist rebels it had been fighting since 1979.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Ice Cream Problem

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

The average human brain weighs in at something under three pounds and has a volume of 1,250 cubic centimeters (76 cubic inches). Despite the complexity of its architecture and the daunting interconnectedness of its 85 billion neurons, the goings-on in this small space have now been pretty well documented. We know what faculties are impaired when each part of the brain is injured, which neural activity, more or less, correlates with which behavior. Yet, as we discussed in our earlier dialogues, all these impressive results have not brought us any closer to accounting for consciousness or even establishing where exactly it “happens.”…  Seguir leyendo »

Representative John Lewis, Selma, Alabama, February 14, 2015

MundoAméricaReflexionesDemocracia

Moscow, June 1989. A stooped, bespectacled old man named Andrei Sakharov is at a podium, making an urgent appeal to the Congress of People’s Deputies about respect for the rule of law. Another man, the most powerful in the Soviet Union, is sitting at a presidium that towers over the podium and tells him he is out of time. “Don’t you respect this congress?” he asks. Sakharov continues speaking and gesticulating, but he can no longer be heard: his microphone has been cut off. Only the other man’s voice is audible: “That’s it,” he keeps saying. “That’s it.” Sakharov finally turns around, scooping up his speech, steps up to the presidium, still stooped, and tries to hand his sheets of paper to the other man.…  Seguir leyendo »

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What does it mean when the man chosen to run the State Department has no experience in government but ample experience doing business with dictators of every stripe? Ever since ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson was picked by Donald Trump to be the country’s top diplomat, critics have focused on his work in Russia—and his close relationship to members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, including Rosneft chief Igor Sechin, at times in open defiance of sanctions. These ties also took up much of the questioning during Tillerson’s confirmation hearing Wednesday.

As it happens, though, Putin and Sechin are far from the only strongmen that Tillerson has dealt with in the course of his career.…  Seguir leyendo »

Dao County, China, 2016. Sim Chi Yin/VII

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Tan Hecheng might seem an unlikely person to expose one of the most shocking crimes of the Chinese Communist Party. A congenial sixty-seven-year-old who spent most of his life in southern Hunan province away from the seats of power, Tan is no dissident. In fact, he has spent his career working for official state media and trying to believe in Communism.

But in a meticulously detailed five-hundred-page book released in English this week, he lays out in devastating detail one of the darkest, and least known, episodes in Communist Chinese history: the mass murder of nine thousand Chinese citizens by explicit order of regional Party officials during the height of the Cultural Revolution.…  Seguir leyendo »

US Defense Under Secretary for Intelligence Marcel Lettre, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers testifying before the Senate, Washington, D.C., January 5, 2017. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

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After months of anticipation, speculation, and hand-wringing by politicians and journalists, American intelligence agencies have finally released a declassified version of a report on the part they believe Russia played in the US presidential election. On Friday, when the report appeared, the major newspapers came out with virtually identical headlines highlighting the agencies’ finding that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an “influence campaign” to help Donald Trump win the presidency—a finding the agencies say they hold “with high confidence.”

A close reading of the report shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Indeed, it barely supports any conclusion. There is not much to read: the declassified version is twenty-five pages, of which two are blank, four are decorative, one contains an explanation of terms, one a table of contents, and seven are a previously published unclassified report by the CIA’s Open Source division.…  Seguir leyendo »

A mural of Leonard Howell in Tredegar Park, near where the first Rastafari community was formed in the 1930s, Spanish Town, Jamaica, January 4, 2014

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In the postcard view of Jamaica, Bob Marley casts a long shadow. Though he’s been dead for thirty-five years, the legendary reggae musician is easily the most recognizable Jamaican in the world—the primary figure in a global brand often associated with protest music, laid-back, “One Love” positivity, and a pot-smoking counterculture. And since Marley was an adherent of Rastafari, the social and spiritual movement that began in this Caribbean island nation in the 1930s, his music—and reggae more generally—have in many ways come to be synonymous with Rastafari in the popular imagination.

For Jamaica’s leaders, Rastafari has been an important aspect of the country’s global brand.…  Seguir leyendo »

John Constable’s drawing of a mouse with a piece of cheese, inscribed “Jack,” 1824

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

In our first two dialogues, we presented the standard, or “internalist” version of how our conscious experience of the world comes about: very bluntly, it assumes that the brain receives “inputs” from the sense organs—eyes, ears, nose, etc.—and transforms them into the physical phenomenon we know as consciousness, perhaps the single most important phenomenon of our lives. We also pointed out, particularly with reference to color perception, how difficult it has been for scientists to demonstrate how, or even whether, this really happens. Neuro­scientists can correlate activity in the brain with specific kinds of experience, but they cannot say this activity is the experience.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mode of public communication is the very opposite of Donald Trump’s: rather than Tweet 140-character bursts, he stages elaborate, laboriously choreographed affairs that far outlast anyone’s attention span. He holds one press conference and one televised call-in show a year. Participants are pre-screened, question topics are pre-cleared, and many are pre-scripted. Each event usually lasts more than four hours. Each usually contains a memorable and informative passage that summarizes Putin’s current vision of himself in the world. There have been times when he positioned himself as the savior of a country on the brink of catastrophe, a conqueror, a victor.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Carnegie Museum of Art’s Neapolitan crèche (detail of a Wise Man with musicians), Pittsburgh, 2016

ReflexionesSocial,

The Gospel of Luke says that the pregnant mother of Jesus could not find shelter in an inn, so she had no place to put down her newborn but in an animals’ food trough—phatne in Luke’s Greek, the word rightly translated as praesepium (Latin), krippe (German), crèche (French), presepe (Italian), manger or crib (English). They all mean food trough. Yet this humble picture of a homeless mother having this as her last resort is turned into grand theatrical displays in our annual crèche unveilings. In this celebratory setting, the vagrant woman has become queenly, she is receiving royalty, she is lit by angelic hoverings.…  Seguir leyendo »