Category Archives: government

Tourists and Refugees

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Tourists and Refugees Cross Paths on Gran Canaria

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/it-ruins-the-vacation-feeling-tourists-and-refugees-cross-paths-on-gran-canaria-a-783962e7-8beb-4373-8423-ae209cb1775ds

Gran Canaria’s tourism industry is doing all it can to survive the coronavirus. Some luxury hotels are even hosting the increasing numbers of migrants arriving from across the ocean. It is a clash of two worlds.
Omar arrived in the port of Arguineguín, located 16 kilometers west of Playa del Inglés, three weeks ago after spending three days on the Atlantic. The Coast Guard pulled him out of the sea along with 22 others. More than 8,000 people like Omar arrived in the Canary Islands in November alone, part of the more than 20,000 for the whole year.

“We all have to die somewhere,” Omar says, adding that he wasn’t afraid during the journey. Once he arrived, he was given a black sweatsuit, the uniform of the new arrivals. He immediately changed, throwing his old clothes into the trash. He then spent a week sleeping on the ground with no running water. His clothes were constantly damp, there was never enough food and, he says, the lines in front of the few portable toilets took forever.

history politics genocide

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The inconvenient past

https://online-lib.ru/41300/nikolay-epple_neudobnoe-proshloe-pamyat-o-gosudarstvennyh-prestupleniyah-v.html

Непогрешимая история

Почему в России оправдывают государственные преступления, объясняет филолог Николай Эппле

https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2020/10/07/87424-nepogreshimaya-istoriya

«Не допустить повторения зверств — вот в чем ответственность»

https://www.znak.com/2020-11-07/istorik_nikolay_epple_o_tom_kak_nam_izlechitsya_ot_potryaseniy_bolshevizmom

The past and the future of Russia – in the new book by Nikolay Epple

https://en.newizv.ru/news/culture/18-09-2020/the-past-and-the-future-of-russia-in-the-new-book-by-nikolai-epple

it is impossible to rely on “it will resolve itself”

Nikolay Epple scrupulously examines not only domestic attempts to overcome the totalitarian past – “thaw”, “perestroika”, current calls for “drawing the line”, masking the legitimation of power from above, or “return of names” as a real ritual of collecting a divided past from below – but also experience countries that differ from each other even in their continental affiliation. Argentina, Japan, Spain, South Africa … And, of course, Germany.

An unworked past creates a gap in the social fabric, for which there are no ready-made healing mechanisms. Just as the ghosts of deceased convicts cannot integrate into the ways of dealing with the spirits of the dead, habitual for local residents, forcing the living to withdraw from their homes, so the memory of the mass Soviet terror on a national scale cannot be built into existing memory structures. It does not form an ordinary cultural humus, but lies in an unprocessed layer, now and then “breaking through” into the reality of today“.

Maxim Trudolyubov: “The Soviet legacy is not just material for historians. This is the foundation on which the country stands”.

 

Xi JinPing China

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https://www.facebook.com/spiegelinternational/posts/10157832430087285

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-dawn-of-the-dragon-how-xi-jinping-has-transformed-china-a-49d467ed-3bd8-4b95-882a-395200cef324

the power of the state has grown, with Xi having secured his office for life, cemented party rule and perfected the surveillance state. In the west of the country, hundreds of thousands of the Muslim Uighur population are in labor camps, and critics of the regime have fled or been silenced.

 

support populist beliefs falls

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Support for populist beliefs in Europe has fallen markedly over the past year,

The YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project, a survey of about 26,000 people in 25 countries

“You could think of the virus like a volcano,” said Matthijs Rooduijn, a political sociologist at the University of Amsterdam and expert on populism. “It has hit populism hard, but it will leave behind fertile ground for the future.”

Populism, which frames politics as a battle between ordinary people and corrupt elites, has grown rapidly as a political force, with support for populist parties in national elections across Europe surging from 7% to more than 25% in 20 years.

Populist leaders mainly on the far right – Italy’s Matteo Salvini, France’s Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Sweden’s Jimmie Åkesson – have surged and populist parties have entered government in nearly a dozen European countries.

“Things are already changing quite rapidly with the second wave,” Rooduijn said. “Conspiracy theories are rising; populations are becoming increasingly polarised over the measures governments are taking.

Anti-immigration sentiment remained most consistently strong in Sweden, where 65% of respondents said fewer immigrants should be allowed into the country in future, up from 58% last year. The figures were similar in Italy, where 64% of those surveyed agreed immigration should be cut, against 53% last year.

The country with by far the strongest anti-immigration feelings was Greece, included in the survey for the first time in 2020. Nearly four out of every five respondents wanted immigration reduced, with 62% saying it should be reduced by “a lot”.