By David Pan · Friday, October 18, 2024 Telos 208 (Fall 2024): Carl Schmitt and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 It hardly needs mentioning that liberal democracy is facing a number of threats today, both internal and external. Even if the political parties in the United States cannot agree on the main source of the threats, they both believe that democracy is in danger. Democrats point to the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s role in it as examples of the way in which liberal democratic procedures are being directly attacked. Republicans point to the Democratic-backed court cases against Trump as well as the FBI’s favoritism toward Democrats in their public announcements before elections as evidence that the legal system and the administrative state are being used to shut out political opponents. Both parties point to violations of free speech rights at college campuses, yet they also both seek to establish limits to those rights in defense of liberal democratic values.
Meanwhile, authoritarian governments in places such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have becoming increasingly aggressive in opposing liberal democracies as threats to their own legitimacy. In doing so, they have attempted to provide theoretical justifications for their authoritarian rule that are based in anti-Western and anti-colonial discourses that align with critiques of the West advanced by left-leaning academics in liberal democracies.
Because they are based on freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, liberal democracies must allow open public spheres whose dynamics could take unforeseen directions that end up undermining the cultural and procedural foundations of liberal democratic governance. While the American Revolution provides the best example of the success of liberal democracy, the French Revolution and the Weimar Republic demonstrate spectacular failures. Outside of the West, the contrast between Taiwan and China and between Indonesian democracy and the Iranian Revolution indicate that we can find the same contrasts between failure and success in East Asia and in the Islamic world.
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By Peshraw Mohammed · Wednesday, August 21, 2024 
The following essay originally appeared in German in Siebter Oktober Dreiundzwanzig: Antizionismus und Identitätspolitik, ed. Vojin Saša Vukadinović (Berlin: Querverlag, 2024), and appears here in English translation by permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman.
 More than ever, leftists, political Islam, and postcolonial intellectuals have joined forces in an unholy alliance. Lacking an understanding of the history of Islamic expansionism, Arab colonialism, and Islamic antisemitism, parts of the Western left have come to regard any countermovement to the West as a fight against American imperialism. Therefore, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah are understood to be part of an anti-imperialist bloc. These tendencies were already observed in connection with the rise of the “Islamic State” (IS). When its terrorists attacked the Kurdish city of Kobanê, Kurdish militias fought IS in cooperation with U.S. forces. Some leftists in Germany, Britain, and the United States demanded that the United States stop its bombings.
What was the point of their demand? The United States carried out air strikes to support Kurdish ground troops in order to defeat Islamic terrorism. Failure to bomb IS positions would have resulted in IS conquering Kurdish areas in order to enslave or kill women and children. In the end, as in the case of the Yazidis, genocide could have been the outcome. The anti-Zionist cultural historian Hamid Dabashi compares the Kurds to the Jews and sees a prospective establishment of an independent Kurdistan as the “second settler-colonial Israel.”
The fixation of large parts of the left on the United States while simultaneously remaining indifferent to Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or Turkish imperialism has led to serious political misjudgments. This includes the idea that every form of Western thought, art, or literature is part of a colonial project. The works of progressive philosophers such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and even Frantz Fanon are now viewed as contributing to the reproduction of European white hegemony and are consequently rejected.
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The following essay originally appeared in German in Bahamas 94 (Spring 2024). Translated by Xuxu Song.
For decades now, everything has been known about Rudolf Höss and his ostensible double life as both an enforcer of the Holocaust and a loving family man. Robert Merle’s 1953 roman à clef Death Is My Trade was based in part on publicly accessible notes that Höss had composed while in prison for war crimes. Pictures of the affable Mr. Höss with his wife and colleagues appeared in Alain Resnais’s 1956 film Night and Fog. The testimony of prison psychologist Gustav M. Gilbert, who had spoken with Höss at length in Nuremberg, came up in 1961 during the Eichmann trial. Höss’s autobiographical notes were published by DTV in 1963 under the title Commandant of Auschwitz. Things got especially German in 1977 when the film Death Is My Trade—the German title translates as Excerpts from a German Life—by Theodor Kotulla, based on Robert Merle’s novel and starring the prominent actor Götz George, the son of two celebrated German thespians, was released in German cinemas. A review from the Catholic magazine Filmdienst in December 1977, and quoted on Wikipedia, revealingly states:
The interchangeability of collective thinking and The Enemy becomes frighteningly clear in Kotulla’s emotionless psychohistorical analysis….In Kotulla’s film, political and moral superficiality and the volatile idea of “peace, order and above all cleanliness,” irrationally propagated as the highest value in itself—under this pretext, up to 9,000 people were sent into the “shower room” every day in Auschwitz—rightly appears as the main cause of the totalitarian abuse of power, which is why it can continue to function openly or covertly worldwide in various forms and ideological guises. In this respect, this fact-oriented fiction is a lesson that every teacher, especially every history teacher, should discuss with young people.
Even back then, the pedagogical lesson lay in the notion that Auschwitz merely provided the backdrop for vague musings about man’s responsibility for his actions in times of unfreedom.
Read the full article at the Telos Insights website.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, July 17, 2024 The following comments refer to the interview with Michael Wolffsohn that appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 8, 2024. The interview is published in English translation on TelosScope here.
October 7 and its aftermath are matters primarily concerning regional security in the Middle East, including Israeli national security, the status of the Palestinians, but ultimately the root cause, Iranian hegemonic ambitions and Tehran’s hostility to the United States. But October 7 has simultaneously unleashed a revival of antisemitism across the West, and often enough especially in the universities in the form of a pernicious left-wing antisemitism. Telos and the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute have devoted considerable attention to this phenomenon.
Academic antisemitism is not fully congruent with antisemitism in other social sectors. What happens at Columbia is not exactly the same as what transpired notoriously at Charlottesville, but it would be foolish to deny the unmistakable affinities in the varieties of antisemitism. In the same vein, it is important to keep in mind differences between national settings, but comparative reflections can help tease out important strands common across current manifestations of antisemitism. National particularity in this matter is most salient for Germany, given the shadow of the Holocaust. Germany also incubated a far left that pursued a radically anti-Israel politics at least since the 1960s, and Germany more recently welcomed large numbers of refugees from the Middle East, countries where antisemitic views are widespread. At the same time, however, Germany, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent unification, has witnessed the growth of a vibrant Jewish community. This combination of heterogeneous factors makes the German situation deserving of particular attention.
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By Michael Hanfeld · Wednesday, July 17, 2024 The following interview with historian Michael Wolffsohn originally appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 8, 2024, and is published here in English translation by permission. See Russell A. Berman’s post today on TelosScope for comments on this interview. For background on the incident on the Markus Lanz talk show, click here. Translated by Mark S. Weiner.
Historian Michael Wolffsohn says that for Jews in Germany, the past has become present. Nobody in Germany should be complacent. An interview.
Mr. Wolffsohn, last week you were a guest on the Markus Lanz talk show on [the television channel] ZDF. The broadcast was about Israel and the Palestinians and the threat to Jewish life in Germany. After a little more than an hour, you stood up and said that you didn’t want to take part in “agitprop.” You were referring to the comments of author Deborah Feldman, who was also in the group. Why “agitprop”?
Ms. Feldman argues like the Western New Left of the 1960s. And since I’m a ’68er, at least in generational terms, though not ideologically, I know the technique. It’s a classic method of left-wing agitation, in this case about the Jewish issue. Ms. Feldman veers from one orthodoxy to another, from Jewish to left-wing orthodoxy. Both are equally anti-Israel. For Jewish orthodoxy [for instance, some outlier sects such as the ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic community, who are at odds with mainstream Haredi and Modern Orthodox Judaism—trans.], the State of Israel is blasphemy, and for the Left, the State of Israel is also unacceptable. In this respect, Ms. Feldman has remained true to herself.
The position claims that Jews aren’t safe in Germany because Germany has bound its state interest with Israel’s. Germany is preventing peace in the Middle East. If Jews feel unsafe in our country, it’s the fault of the state and its institutions, especially the police. Deborah Feldman claims that she almost has a heart attack when she simply beholds a German police officer.
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By David Pan · Friday, July 12, 2024 Telos 207 (Summer 2024): Politics and the University is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 There is a fundamental arbitrariness about the work that is done at colleges and universities, which stems from the relationship between academic work and the political parameters of this work. The key issue is that the most basic aspect of our humanity involves having a sense of right and wrong. This sense of values sets the framework for all our other thoughts, actions, and decisions, providing direction and meaning for our lives.
The feeling that we are doing the right thing can motivate us to great achievements, and the loss of that feeling can lead us into inescapable despair. At the same time, when we perceive that others are doing wrong, we have a feeling of indignation at such injustice and seek to redress it. We will also judge the wrong doer in the same harsh light that we might use against ourselves when we fail to live up to our own ideals. Consequently, our sense of values will color all our perceptions and determine our decisions and judgments.
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