Guardian:

One of the paradoxes of religious history in Eastern Europe is that paganism lasted so long there, yet we know so little about it. There is no Slavic equivalent to the great compendium of Norse myth preserved in the Icelandic Edda, or the Celtic tales contained in the Welsh Mabinogion or the Irish Táin. All we have are fragments, recorded by hostile witnesses.

One of the first such testimonies comes from, of all places, Sicily. Around A.D. 700, a Slavic raiding party was taken prisoner by the local militia. An enterprising bishop asked its members what they believed in. By means of a translator, they replied that they worshipped „fire, water, and their own swords.“ Almost seven hundred years later, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was still being ruled by practicing pagans who believed something very similar. A vast realm that incorporated much of today’s Belarus and Ukraine, Lithuania was the last country in Europe to give up the old faith. In 1341, when Grand Duke Gediminas died, he was buried in the full, cruel splendor of the pagan rite: burned to ash on a giant pyre, along with his favorite weapons, slaves, dogs, and horses, and a few German Crusaders thrown in for good measure. When the whole thing caught fire, Gediminas’s fellow pagan lords cried out in sorrow and pelted the flames with the claws of lynxes and bears.

—Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye Eastern Europe, (Great Britain: Oneworld Publications Ltd, 2023), 6.

Guardian:

A man has been arrested in Glasgow for holding a paper sign allegedly supportive of the proscribed direct action group Palestine Action, the third arrest of its kind across the city in the past week.

Police Scotland confirmed that the 64-year-old man, who had been speaking to a small group of protesters gathered at Nelson Mandela Place in the city centre on Friday afternoon, had been arrested in connection with an offence under the Terrorism Act “for displaying a sign expressing support for a proscribed organisation”.

The sign read “Genocide in Palestine, time to take action” with the words Palestine and action larger than the others. Another man wearing a T-shirt with the same slogan was charged with a similar offence last weekend at the TRNSMT music festival in Glasgow Green.

A man holding a sign that said ‘Genocide in Palestine, time to take action’ was arrested in Glasgow. Photograph: James Chapelard

Frankly, I don’t think that political awareness is going to prove the best medicine for our current malady. Most people know that financial dictatorship is destroying their life; the problem is knowing what to do about it. It is possible that nothing can be done, that power has become so deeply entrenched in the automatisms regulating daily life, connecting our interchanges, and infiltrating our words, that bio-financial control cannot be undone, or avoided.

So what can be done when nothing can be done?

I think that ironic autonomy is the answer. I mean the contrary of participation, I mean the contrary of responsibility, I mean the contrary of faith. Politicians call on us to take part in their political concerns, economists call on us to be responsible, to work more, to go shopping, to stimulate the market. Priests call on us to have faith. If you follow these inveiglements to participate, to be responsible — you are trapped. Do not take part in the game, do not expect any solution from politics, do not be attached to things, do not hope.

Dystopian irony (dyst-irony) is the language of autonomy. Be sceptical: do not believe your own assumptions and predictions (or mine).

And do not revoke revolution. Revolt against power is necessary even if we may not know how to win.

Do not belong. Distinguish your destiny from the destiny of those who want to belong and to participate and to pay their debt. If they want war, be a deserter. If they are enslaved but want you to suffer like them, do not give in to their blackmail.

If you have to choose between death and slavery, don’t be a slave. You have some chance to survive. If you accept slavery, you will die sooner or later anyway. As a slave.

You will die anyway; it is not particularly important when. What is important is how you live your life.

—Franco ‚Bifo‘ Berardi, Heroes, (London: Verso, 2015), 224-225.

Ω Ω Ω

Wir sind die letzte Generation mit Hoffnungen gewesen. Wir hatten die große Hoffnung, daß eine menschlichere Gesell­schaft auf der ganzen Welt möglich ist. Ob diese Hoffnung nun berechtigt war oder nicht und ob unser Beitrag der richtige gewesen ist, bleibe mal dahingestellt. Doch diese Hoffnung kann heute niemand mehr haben, der bei klarem Verstand ist und sich auch nur einen Tag lang die Nachrichten anhört.…Es sieht rabenschwarz aus.

Ich meine allerdings: Ob man nun noch einen Hoffnungsschimmer sieht oder nicht, man sollte auf jeden Fall etwas tun. Die Hoffnung auf den Fünfjahresplan, die gibt es nicht mehr. Aber Herrschaft zu bekämpfen, dort wo sie ungerecht oder unerträglich wird, für eine solidarische, menschlichere Welt ein­treten, das solltest du zumindest in deiner näheren Umgebung versuchen. Sonst bist du auf jeden Fall verloren.

—Bommi Baumann, 1991 introduction to »Wie alles anfing«, (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag GmbH, 2007), 7-8.

I poke my head into what remains of the American and German peace movements every once in a while, and it’s always disappointing. For years the heads at demonstrations have been a sea of balding pates, white and gray (not that there’s anything wrong with balding or white haired heads). It’s very literally a dying bunch. I exchanged texts with Nuke Resister.org at one point years ago, commenting that everyone in one of their demonstration photos seemed to be over 60, and my correspondent wryly replied that they did have one woman there who was 50.

Like the ritualistic demonstrations the writing shows this decrepitude – it’s tired, formulaic stuff, regurgitating language from literally half a century ago, largely for a readership of a similar age, debating tactics from an anti-Vietnam War struggle which relied on the written word, on leafletting, letters-to-the-editor, in a 2025 world of social media, where young people are watching TikTok and other media in which videos literally never stop. Here Ralph Nader continues to propose writing one’s congressperson as a form of political activism.

But this very obvious geriatric condition cannot/must not be discussed. I’m guessing Kovic’s response to me is an attempt at ironic dismissal. It seems so lame, so impotent, but more importantly, so trite. In response to my criticism of his writing as boilerplate he offers „thank you for your kind and thoughtful comments regarding my piece. I found them to be very helpful. Again, thank you! Best always“? Is this thought to be witty? Self-deprecating irony? This is very much a weak self-own.

This is less than a minute of video. The man speaking is the President of the United States. It’s really beyond words. People use this phrase „beyond words“ rhetorically, but here, for me, I mean it quite literally. Now English is my mother tongue. My university education was in liberal arts and I continue to read a great deal in several languages. Over my academic life as a young person I consistently performed in the top couple percent on standardized tests, so in a box somewhere I possess official documents to back my claim that I know a fair number of words in English. But I just don’t have words for this.

Also very cool of course! 🙂“die Kufiya wohl unter dem Mufti von Jerusalem und SS-Mitglied Mohammed Amin al-Husseini zu einem politischen Symbol gegen Juden, Briten und den Westen.“ Equally weird. 🤔“Equally“? Is American society, or German society, weirder? Can weirdness be spoken about this way? Is weirdness a scalar or a vector value?

Looking at train tickets for different classes I came across this disclaimer and thought it was pretty funny.

I read this headline, and read it again. Man, I just couldn’t believe it! And indeed, when one reads the secondary headline and the photograph caption everything becomes clear: being discussed is Iran, not Gaza.