By B. Venkat Mani · Friday, March 5, 2021 To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
On February 2, the second day of Black History Month, a tweet from a Black woman in the United States unleashed a war of words in India, with global resonance. Rihanna, the Barbados-born U.S. singer, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and cultural activist posted a one-liner: “why aren’t we talking about this?!” with the hashtag #FarmersProtest and a link to a report about the government of India shutting down internet services in areas bordering the national capital, New Delhi, where farmers have been carrying out a movement to oppose three contentious farm laws.
Rihanna’s tweet went viral. The climate activist Greta Thunberg, Hollywood actor John Cusack, U.S.-based lawyer and supporter of Black Lives Matter Meena Harris, former adult star Mia Khalifa, Instagram influencer Amanda Cerny, R&B singer Jay Sean, and music composer Dr. Zeus all expressed support for the Indian farmers’ protests in their own independent tweets. Kisan Ekta Morcha, the official twitter account of the United Farmers’ Front, thanked Rihanna for her support of the movement, and countless Indians praised her for drawing international attention to the movement.
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Over the last fifty years, the West has witnessed a continuous decline in the quality of the state and its activities, along with a cultural deterioration of the public sphere. All OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries have also undergone a massive dichotomization of private property ownership: An ever-smaller fraction of the population owns a growing share of all non-public assets. According to some estimates, the richest one percent holds 70 to 80 percent of all global private property, while an increasing number owns nothing and is excluded from decent incomes and the means to live a normal family life.
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By Arno Tausch · Tuesday, May 14, 2019 The following think-piece by an active participant in the European public discussion on immigration policy, written well before the European parliamentary elections of May 29, 2019, is understood as a contribution to the European and international political debate and not (so much) as a “pure” scholarly article. It begins with a stark prognosis: the earthquake-like outcome of these elections will strengthen the far-right political parties all over Europe, dramatically weakening the European center and left, and breaking down the “welcome culture” initiated by German chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous statement of late summer 2015—”We can do this” (“Wir schaffen das”)—which signaled a temporary and short-lived “air superiority” for multiculturalism, cultural pluralism, and the welcoming of masses of refugees from the Middle East and North. One of the main reasons for the predictable decline of the Left on the European continent is, in my opinion, its inability to find credible solutions to the problems of immigration and integration.
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