AUF Summer Camp on Utøya, 2010, photograph by Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking (AUF) by Markha Valenta However nuanced, it is striking how little extant interpretations attend to the fact that Breivik’s most grotesque violence was not directed at Muslims or immigrants as such but at the youth members of the Norwegian Social Democrats. Anders Breivik may be…
Read MoreWhat does a perfect elephant look like? This was a question that occupied the Flemish artist Crispijn van de Passe II in the years around 1620. By then, several elephants had visited the European continent…
Read Moreby Markha Valenta Desperate to eject some refugees it does not want, the Netherlands is refining the art of radical deprivation. No single step, no single decision, no single action in this process is horrible. Yet the cumulative effect is grotesque. Some months ago, a group of refugees from East Africa and the Middle East…
Read MorePoster for Sofie Peeters’ documentary Femme de la rue by Markha Valenta When Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, “the problem that has no name” was the problem of college-educated housewives sitting at home being bored to death. Today, the “problem that has no name” is more widespread, more alluring and more aggressive.…
Read MoreBrothers Abdullah (L) and Umut Tagi, winners of the national Best Herring award. Leiden, Netherlands, 2012 by Markha Valenta The accounts, symbols and feelings that we have about national identity were largely imagined, created and popularized in the nineteenth century. The word ‘nationalism’ itself dates from the early nineteenth century and marked the increasing use…
Read MoreGoldfinger, United Artists, 1964 by Evan Johnston [BOND, JAMES]: alphabet, anatomy, [auto]biography is a character study conveyed through an index, a book length listicle-with-commentary of one of literature and film’s most distinctive characters. Author Michelle Disler starts with an alphabetical list of situations that Bond has been in throughout the Fleming novels (Approximate Number of…
Read MoreWolfgang Schäuble by Markha Valenta So why are we in Europe going down the path of a deeply self-deceptive and hypocritical race to the bottom, where trans-European solidarity is a non-starter, since it can only be a barrier to a European political elite now intent on pursuing the next phase of our liberalization by means…
Read Moreby Markha Valenta The ritual slaughter of animals has become the last of many areas of contention that are changing the shape of our public domains. The way in which Islamophobia is becoming a part of our public ‘common sense’ has complex knock-on effects, not least for our Jewish minorities. The Dutch Party for the…
Read Moreby Markha Valenta Cas Mudde was quite right to point out recently how liberal arguments are being used in the interests of illiberal attacks on Muslims. However, in the Dutch case this reflects anything but a progressive national consensus It is rather striking, at first sight, to note how much the Dutch politician Geert Wilders…
Read Moreby Markha Valenta The success of Islamophobia in western Europe is both striking and disconcerting. How, after fifty years of the institutionalised nurture of human rights and anti-racism could an ideology of vicious discrimination gain such ground? Time and again, the Islamophobes seize the initiative and run with it: more often than not in the…
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