The New York Review (Continuación)

EuropaUnión Europea

In 2011, Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party (known as PiS), announced he wanted to create “Budapest in Warsaw.” Since his party’s resounding election victory in October, the conservative politician has kept his promise. Led by Kaczyński protégé Beata Szydło, the new Law and Justice government has done everything it can to emulate the authoritarian course of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán: already, it has attacked the constitutional court, undermined Poland’s independent civil service, and set out to bring the public media under government control. Unlike in the case of Hungary, the European Union has reacted quickly.…  Seguir leyendo »

Administrators observe seismic waves from North Korea's nuclear test in a media briefing at the Korea Meteorological Administration in Seoul, South Korea, January 6, 2016

MundoAsia,

On January 6, the North Korean government announced that it had successfully carried out its first underground test of a hydrogen bomb. Until now, this claim has not been independently verified and many international experts have cast doubt on it. So what was the bomb that was tested? It appears to have produced a yield that was larger than that of any previous North Korean nuclear test. As I write, North Korea has not announced whether this was a plutonium or uranium device, but the information we have about its nuclear program offers some clues.

The major North Korean nuclear facility—the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center—is located about sixty miles north of Pyongyang, the capital.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente PróximoInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional, , ,

The Taliban and al-Qaeda have killed more than fifty journalists in Afghanistan since 2001. But until this year, nobody had tried to massacre an entire busload of journalists in the center of Kabul, all working for the country’s largest and most successful broadcaster. That changed on January 20, when a suicide bomber drove a car laden with explosives into a minibus taking forty journalists and staff of Tolo TV home after a day at the office.

At least seven people were killed including several women in their early twenties; some of the victims were burnt and scarred beyond recognition. Another twenty-six were injured, some so seriously that the death toll is expected to rise.…  Seguir leyendo »

Provincial Party Secretary Wang Yilun, one of Heilongjiang's most powerful leaders, is criticized by Red Guards from the University of Industry and forced to bear a placard around his neck with the accusation "counterrevolutionary revisionist element," Harbin, northern China, August 23,1966

MundoAsiaReflexionesTestimonios, ,

By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-limits. Serious books on the period, whether comprehensive histories, in-depth analyses, or detailed personal memoirs, are remarkably few. Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which has just been released in English for the first time, is something of an anomaly.

At the center of the book is the cowshed, the popular term for makeshift detention centers that had sprung up in many Chinese cities at the time.…  Seguir leyendo »

Riot police dispersing a gathering of opposition supporters in Jinja, eastern Uganda, September 10, 2015. James Akena/Reuters/Corbis.

MundoÁfrica,

In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt told Americans that, by arming Britain against the Nazis, we’d serve as an “arsenal for democracy.” But during the cold war, the opposite was often true, and apparently still is. According to two recent studies, the United States provides aid and sells weapons far more often to autocratic regimes than to democracies; even China partners with democracies more than America does. This pattern is particularly clear in sub-Saharan Africa. For a brief period after the cold war, America used foreign aid and other measures to pressure many countries to democratize; some, like Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia, now hold more or less credible elections.…  Seguir leyendo »

Donald Trump with supporters in Biloxi, Mississippi, January 2, 2016

MundoAmérica,

A revolution is taking place in our presidential campaign. Though no one has voted yet and the polls—especially nationwide ones—shouldn’t be taken too literally, there’s every indication in both parties that what’s termed the political establishment is being rejected. We’re some distance from the end of the nomination contests, though perhaps not in the Republican race: if Donald Trump were to sweep Iowa and New Hampshire it’s hard to see how he can be stopped. So far, the talk of a savior entering the race is only that, and to make such a challenge would be daunting. Those who’ve ventured to predict the outcome and gone by past patterns haven’t had it right.…  Seguir leyendo »

Portraits by Liu Yi of Tibetans who have self-immolated, in his studio, Beijing, December 25, 2012. Andy Wong/AP Images

MundoAsia,

February 27, 2009, was the third day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. It was also the day that self-immolation came to Tibet. The authorities had just cancelled a Great Prayer Festival (Monlam) that was supposed to commemorate the victims of the government crackdown in 2008. A monk by the name of Tapey stepped out of the Kirti Monastery and set his body alight on the streets of Ngawa, in the region known in Tibetan as Amdo, a place of great religious reverence and relevance, now designated as part of China’s Sichuan Province.

At least 145 other Tibetans have self-immolated since then.…  Seguir leyendo »

Dancers and musicians at the Qajar court, late nineteenth century. Antoin Sevruguin/Collection of Azita Bina and Elmar W. Seibel.

MundoOriente PróximoReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia, , ,

Few of the representations of late-nineteenth-century Iran that are currently on display at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World would win any prizes. Part of an exhibition called “Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past,” they have for the most part been composed with little wit or imagination and show individuals or small groups in not very inspiring locations. A number of them were shot in portrait studios with backdrops of classical balustrades and rotundas; some of them are badly faded. For harmony, crispness, and grandeur, they suffer in comparison to the commercial work done by Victorian photographers in the Middle East, such as Francis Bedford’s majestic, lonely studies of the Holy Land from 1862.…  Seguir leyendo »

Takashi Shimura as Kanji Watanabe in Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, 1952

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) was the first film I saw after I moved to Japan in 1987. A Zen-trained painter from San Francisco, who’d spent fifteen years around Kyoto mastering its classical arts and the graces they stand for, pushed a videotape into his creaking machine the day we met, my first week in the old capital, and urged me to sit still. He’d already spent all day showing me the sights of my new adopted home, and now he might have been sharing with me a guidebook to its heart. We sat for 143 minutes on the tatami mat in his crumbling old wooden house, paper screens around us, and the piercing melancholy of the central story, about a bureaucrat in a dead-end job suddenly realizing he is about to die of stomach cancer, carried me off into what seemed to be a distinctly Japanese sensibility.…  Seguir leyendo »

US Special Forces in Khost, Afghanistan; photograph published in The New York Times on August 30, 2002, and included in David Shields’s War is Beautiful, 2015

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia, ,

A handsome book just arrived on my desk. War Is Beautiful the title declares. Surely not! Then I see the subtitle: “The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict.” Ah, irony. An asterisk takes me to some tiny print at the bottom left of the cover: “(in which the author explains why he no longer reads The New York Times).” And who is the author? David Shields, the man who gave us Reality Hunger and many other thoughtful provocations. In fact, I now recall that a couple of years ago Shields, with whom I occasionally exchange an email opinion or two, and who was then on the lookout for a publisher, ran this project past me and although at the time I saw neither the book’s title or its actual photographic contents, I endorsed his introductory essay with the quote: “Absolutely right, to the point and guaranteed to stir things up.”…  Seguir leyendo »

A man in Jingshan Park, overlooking the Forbidden City, Beijing, China, December 8, 2015

MundoAsia, ,

I am a member of a martial arts group that performs at annual temple fairs around Beijing. Half of our group are children, and almost without fail they meet at a park on the west side of town at around three in the afternoon to practice fighting with staffs with our teacher, a bear-like thirty-seven-year-old bus driver named Mr. Zhao. His personal motto: “Life is but a dream; keep smiling all the time.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Zhao wasn’t smiling. Around two, one of the children sent out a message on China’s most popular social media site, WeChat, asking if anyone was going to the park.…  Seguir leyendo »

Graffiti depicting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, April 17, 2015.

MundoAmérica,

Venezuela is on the edge. In a stunning defeat of the country’s ruling party—the greatest setback in over ten years for the movement created by the late Hugo Chávez—voters overwhelmingly supported the opposition Democratic Unity (MUD) alliance in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. In the early hours of December 7, the election authority (CNE) said the MUD had won 99 of 167 seats, with 22 still to be determined. The MUD, however, claimed 112, which would just be enough to give it two-thirds “super-majority” needed, for example, to convene a constituent assembly.

The outcome, which exceeded the opposition’s most optimistic forecasts, gives the MUD sufficient control of parliament to precipitate a standoff with President Nicolás Maduro and his Chavista supporters.…  Seguir leyendo »

Bashar al-Assad by John Springs

ReflexionesIslam y Mundo Árabe

The Arab uprising that started in Tunisia and Egypt reached its climax on February 11, the day President Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down. It was peaceful, homegrown, spontaneous, and seemingly unified. Lenin’s theory was turned on its head. The Russian leader postulated that a victorious revolution required a structured and disciplined political party, robust leadership, and a clear program. The Egyptian rebellion, like its Tunisian precursor and unlike the Iranian Revolution of 1979, possessed neither organization nor identifiable leaders nor an unambiguous agenda.

Since Mubarak’s ouster, everything that has happened in the region has offered a striking contrast with what came before.…  Seguir leyendo »