Category USA
The future will be back with a vengeance
Cornered animals are often amongst the most dangerous. Is the virulence of authoritarian politics in western democracies, often coupled with a retrenchment in free market capitalism, a sign of them recognising that they are facing dusk, or something else? In 1996 the late geographer Neil Smith published his work on the revanchist city, in which […]
The hollowness of future as a pastiche of the past – when will the image fall?
It is the parties on the right-hand side of the political spectrum which have appealed to voters most often with messages of preserving foundational values of a given society, protecting it against unwelcome change, proposing in some cases a return to a greater or more wholesome status in the past. Crucially, the future proposed by […]
The age of egotism
Today, with the formal request by the UK to leave the European Union, a decision takes hold which may well prove to be one of the most extraordinarily misguided acts in European politics of this century. We still have 80 and more years to go until 2100. A failure of global leaders to control global […]
The resistable rise of Arturo Ui
In 1941 Bertold Brecht published his play ‘The resistable rise of Arturo Ui’ as a parable of the dynamics and tactics that brought Adolf Hitler to power. A key feature of the play is the pattern of gradual entanglement of initially well-meaning but naïve characters surrounding the mobster Ui, the exploitation of their personal weaknesses […]
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