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Stalin’s War on Religion
No full textThis paper examines the context, actions, and motivation of Joseph Stalin’s war on religion between the years of 1929 and 1941. This paper documents Stalin’s context through the works of Karl Marx, anti-religious precedents set by Vladimir Lenin, and Stalin’s own personal views on religion. Anti-religious actions of Stalin examined within this paper include the Law on Religious Associations, reshaping of the Gregorian calendar, support for the League of Militant Godless, and the Great Purge. This paper argues that Stalin’s extreme levels of religious repression were done not with the sole intention of fulfilling communist ideology but rather held a distinct power-oriented motive. Religion was a state-undermining influence to Stalin’s communist regime through religious followers’ allocation of authority to a higher power rather than Stalin and the Communist Party. Furthermore, religion propagated ideals contradictory to the state. Stalin eases his anti-religious policies during and after World War II when it aided in stabilising his position of power proving that following communist doctrine was not his sole motivation
The Wild Medium: Anarchism and Surrealist Cinema
No full textIn an earlier article, I discussed the surrealist reception of film in relation to the movement’s affinities with anarchism, which I further aligned with the surrealists’ fascination with occultism and ecological tendencies. My article extends that analysis to films made by surrealists, or those in close proximity to the movement. I focus primarily on four filmmakers – Jean Vigo, Luis Buñuel, Nelly Kaplan, and Jan Švankmajer – whose films span a period of nearly a century, from the late 1920s to the early 2020s. Here, I make the argument that their approach to surrealism in film aligns them with anarchism.
The surrealists were initially attracted to film because it appeared to them as free from aesthetic conventions and hierarchies, and they thought of cinema as an intervention in the closed-off classical and rationalist idea of neatly ordered space and time. I propose that the surrealists viewed film as a “wild medium,” free from the elitism characterizing the classical arts. In his 1951 film-theoretical essay “As in a Wood,” André Breton laments the fact that following the transition to sound, film settled into “a theatrical type of action.” For Breton, film had been domesticated: surrealist filmmakers, however, continued to draw on film’s wild potential. Narratives of revolt, montage employed to subvert the conventional order of the world, and, for some of the filmmakers, an affinity with magic and occultism, ally them with broader anarchist tendencies in surrealism
Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, Punk Culture, and Anarchist Anti-Fascism
No full text“Our biggest obstacle is that Love and Rage is still culturally very white….Smashing this culture of whiteness is a major task in becoming the kind of truly inclusive organization we are committed to building.” Thus argued a 1997 editorial that sparked controversy in the newspaper of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. The editorial intervened in an ongoing debate: should the predominantly white federation attempt to become multi-racial, or should it accept its whiteness and try to work in coalitions withpeople of color? These debates exposed the internal contradictions of Love and Rage. Love and Rage (1989-1998), which was the most prominent US anarchist organization in the 1990s, was embedded in the largely white punk world even as its members attempted to move beyond it. Although punk had helped keep anarchism alive during the post-1960s neoliberal counterrevolution, particularly during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, members worried that punk’s white subcultural affinities excluded people of color and thus held back the federation’s revolutionary potential. Yet despite its contradictions and shortcomings, Love and Rage transformed the discourse and practice of anti-racism in the US anarchist movement. Influenced by a new generation of Black anarchists, they advocated militant anti-racism and “race traitor” politics that sought to abolish whiteness to build Anarchist Antiauthoritarian and Antifascist Cultural Politics revolution. Following this analysis, they were active in struggles against white supremacy and fascism, including by working with the leading anti-fascist organization of the period, Anti-Racist Action
M. Testa, Militant Anti-Fascism: A Hundred Years of Resistance (Oakland: A.K. Press, 2015).
No full textM. Testa’s (a pseudonym) Militant Anti-Fascism: A Hundred Years of Resistance is a rare thing, an historical overview of a dimension of European antifascism written specifically with activists in mind
Bordering Inclusion and Exclusion in the Discourses of Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour
No full textThis paper focuses on the discursive construction of borders and discourses of exclusion and inclusion in French right-wing populist discourse. It elaborates on the idea of the politicization of borders in contemporary political communication and their symbolic meaning as an expression of national sovereignty, security, and identity. Using the approach of discourse analysis, the author investigates how bordering discourses were employed by Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour during the 2022 presidential campaign. The empirical analysis focuses on the parties’ programs, candidates’ discourses, and their social media communication. This offers valuable insights into how political actors construct borders and shape ‘us’ and ‘them’ groups.
Keywords: populism, discourse analysis, borders, othering, inclusion, exclusion
Border Temporalities of an Old Letter: A Hermeneutic Interpretation of Cross-Border Veteran Welfare
No full textThe article uses the concept of border temporalities to offer a hermeneutic interpretation of an old letter containing a request from a cross-border female migrant from Luxembourg to access French welfare benefits. In doing so, it systematically unravels the way in which time was lived and experienced differently by borderland residents as opposed to French lawmakers. The alternative temporality characterizing the third space of the Luxembourgian–German–French borderlands clashed with the spatio-temporal hierarchy imposed by France in the period after the First World War to exclude the majority of people living abroad from access to social provision. The article concludes its hermeneutic circle with a reflection on how historical research on borders and borderlands is conditioned by the temporality of archives and the temporality of research funding.
Keywords: Luxembourg; France; Germany; hermeneutics; welfare; veterans; First World War
Living in the Time of the State: Border Temporalities in the Northern Irish Borderlands
No full textIn dialogue with Sarah Green’s concepts of “traces” and “tidemarks”, as well as a notion of “storytelling”, and Michel de Certeau’s allusion to “ghosts”, I revisit the Irish borderlands more than 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement. I show how everyday life in these borderlands (still) locates in border temporalities articulated as the continual drawing of lines, deeply embedding what I call “the time of the state”. The lines of division and belonging narrate in relation to two periods of time: the Troubles and the island’s British imperial past, appearing materially in the landscape and cityscapes with an ever-present rearticulation of physical divisions by walls and fences and related symbolism, informing and ordering everyday practice. In these borderlands it is not just the popular storytelling about the conflicts that survives, but also a multiplicity of practices associated with them, dividing the population and turning the landscape ghostlike as supposedly past conflicts continue to haunt the everyday lives of people living there.
Keywords: Northern Ireland; traces of lines; tidemarks; ghostly traces; practice-oriented approach
Struggling for Time on Lesvos: The Impact of EU and National Legislation and Procedures on Refugee Temporalities
No full textSince the summer of 2015, the Greek island of Lesvos has been centre stage of the so-called refugee crisis and one of the sites where new EU policies for migration control have been tested and implemented. This combined study of jurisprudence with ethnographic fieldwork aims to understand the impact of the asylum regime on the experience of time for refugee applicants on Lesvos. Indeed, different national and EU laws and regulations affect people on the move and their ability to continue their journeys through Europe, forcing them to remain on Lesvos for variable amounts of time waiting for their asylum procedure while experiencing a legal limbo. Long, indefinite waits and abrupt accelerations of the procedure are both part of the temporality of control imposed on refugee subjectivities. Through testimonies collected during ethnographic fieldwork, time is here analysed both in its productivity in terms of humanitarian and labour economies, and in its effects on subjectivities. Different forms of temporal and economic oppression are highlighted, as well as the resulting resistance against these conditions enacted by the refugee population.
Keywords: asylum; time; waiting; border regime; temporalities
Customs Laboratories and the Prevention and Detection of Customs Fraud: Two Case Studies
No full textCustoms fraud poses significant threats to global trade and national economies, demanding advanced solutions. This article delves into the vital role of customs laboratories in combating fraud, emphasizing their function in scrutinizing goods and ensuring compliance. By evaluating various case studies from Moldova’s Customs Laboratory, the research reveals the methods employed to detect fraud, exposing schemes like misclassification and VAT recovery. The findings underscore the need for ongoing investments in technology and international collaboration, highlighting customs laboratories as essential defenders of trade integrity. Policymakers, customs officials, and stakeholders can draw valuable insights from this study to fortify their anti-fraud strategies