Hegel´s Lessons on Plato

When a philosopher is reading another philosopher, either it is having a critical stance or agrees with, in the end the aim will be to promote his or her own philosophical concepts and theories. This is especially when you have to deal with big names of the history of philosophy, in this case Hegel´s reading on Plato. A reading which is incomplete, fragmentary, subjective and in the end, serves exclusively the main philosophical narrative of the author. It does not reveal anything new and the observations and conclusion shall be regarded with a very critical eye. 

Reading Hegel again, although in a translation of the French translation from the original German - experience taught me to be vigilent to any philosophical French translation from German as it embelishes the vocabulary but does not always have the right liguistic tools to convene the original German meanings - was a novel intellectual experience for me. 

There, in the secret chamber of the lost books, Plato and his dialogues were as fresh as I left them more than a decade ago. Hegel and his acrobatic Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis - a triptic that I use often in various intellectual constructions by default - were also there. Only that my critical thinking evolved meanwhile which meant that I can read in many ways the use and often misuse various philosophical sources in order to build a different system of thought. It is an intellectual reflex of the modern age, overwhelmed with so much information and texts from the Antiquities onwards. Our age is left therefore only with the critical part. We rarely want to build anything and creating systems is a feareful approach which announces intellectual theologies - with low regard, if any, to individual freedoms. 

Philosophical exercises are useful mind-games but I don´t believe in the philosopher-king. I never did.

´Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe´

I don´t remember when I´ve read the last time about spy stories in Eastern Europe. It used to be a topic I dealt with as a historian, especially when reconstructing intellectual profiles and histories from this part of the world. Personally, I´ve considered it a real hole of rats that disgusted me deeply. Once you start searching through the files carefully set up by the so-called ´intelligence´ services of the time, there is no end of human ignominy. It helps when you try to avoid to have role-models but still, why they should be so low and accept to betray their neighbours, friends, relatives in exchange for money or priviledges that will never amount to the harm they did. I remember I met once a woman who once was recruited when she was in school, a teenager. She accepted. When the public discussion about collaboration and relationship with communist secret police was hot, that woman met me for a coffee and confessed that once she said candidly ´yes´. I tried to be polite with her, finish my coffee and avoid her for the rest of my stay. Simply, don´t want to have anything to do with such people and it is my personal choice for reasons of mental hygiene.

Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe, edited by Valentina Glajan, Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu. is a volume of stories collected from the Stasi archives, Romania´s Securitate and the Ukrainian KGB, among others. In addition, there are also chapter on the representation of the Cold War in movies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

If you are not familiar with the Cold War context and its intricacies do not expect to understand it by reading this book - that I had in audiobook format - but otherwise the stories outlined are really interesting for the specific topics addressed. For instance the story of a Romanian Jew that worked as a secret police officer before being dismissed after ten years of activity on an anti-Semitic ground - which happened very often at the time. Another chapter deals with the many faces of the GDR spymaster Markus Wolf. Literature and the production of books in general were a very important matter of interest for the secret services at the time. They use writers as informers and censors in a clear effort of divide the intellectuals and keep them under the state control. The story of the Romanian-born Hungarian Jew Ana Novac - her real name was Zimra Harsanyi - , a Shoah survivor, a plawriter and memorialist that died in Paris, is an example in this respect. People that were in contact with her were writing surveillance notes with a strong personal note of disdain for her burgeois habits and her sexual activities. Another topic that I´ve found personally very interesting regards the Turkish men working as seasonal labour force in the West that were recruited by the East during their trips to the communist part of Berlin looking for fun and sexual adventures. The story of the Orthodox priest who denounced his collaboration with the West that a couple of years after the end of the Soviet Union was among the ultranationalist Russian-speaking publication Zavtra is no surprise. 

Personally, I was interested in reading more stories from the secret files but that was maybe rather an intellectual voyeurism. I was entering the mood of terrible stories and was ready to remember that this is how the human nature works, regardless the intellectual preoccupations and the particular education. The final part of the book deals with the movies representations of the Cold War, through the analysis of a couple of the productions. The relevance of the topic of surveillance, in a post-Cold War context remains, but as in many respects regarding the multi-polar world, there is a lot of political ambiguity and circumstantial meaning. 

Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe were not intended to be more than fragments of a complex mosaique that still has its own secrets. It has a critical box of tools as well as conceptual delimitations and definitions which are very helpful for the reader that have not experienced directly the political pressures of the time. Personally, I would be curious about the feedback about such stories from someone who never faced the restriction of democratic freedoms. 

Maybe it is about time to delve back into some Cold War stories or write more myself. One day...

Rating: 4 stars

Behind the Diplomatic Battle for the Iran Deal

Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumpf of Diplomacy by Trita Parsi is a detailed, step-by-step account of the heated debates for closing the Iran deal. Parsi, one of the founder and former president of the American-Iranian Council, is a frequent editorialist and commenter on issues pertaining to diplomatic developments in the Middle East, particularly Iran.

For someone interested to read more about the diplomatic steps and proceedings leading to the conclusion of this unique agreement, between two countries whose diplomatic relations were frozen for decades, the book is an useful read. How Obama succeeded to dupe his European partners while working hard to achieve the deal through mysterious ways, including by using a very secret Oman channel, is, among others, an important element to understand the post-Cold War diplomatic games. 

The author´s appreciation for the Iranian top diplomat, Javad Sharif, is clear and compared to a certain part of the local Iranian elites, he certainly may deserve the praise. On the other hand, Sharif himself acknowledged recently in the Iranian Parliament, on an exasperating tone, how much he and his ´diplomats´ worked together to achieve political and ´revolutionary´ aims endeavoured by the militant side of the regime, including the late Qasem Soleimani. In a plain translation, diplomatic positions and outposts of Iran were used for undiplomatic aims, such as planning terror attacks or fuelling Hizbollah and its proxies. Candidly, in the book, Parsi mentions Hizbullah, which is funded regularly with money and ideology by the regime in Tehran, as ´a close ally of Iran´. For an academic approach, I would have expected a critical approach on Sharif and its interesting diplomatic game.

Also a critical stance is missing when it comes to Israel. Clearly, during the negotiations, the long-term prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a hawkish opposer of it, and a supporter of military strikes against Iran, despite the clear opposition of the Israeli intelligence and military establishment. But not all that glitters is gold and taking ad litteram Netanyahu´s declarations and accusing him and the ´lobby´ - that is not called throughoutly this but described in clear terms as one - does not bring any contribution to understanding the complexity of the problem. Blaming Netanyahu and the pro-Israeli voices for  the mishaps of an international system is wrong. Some people simply deserve each other.

As I had the book in audio format, a sidenote is for the pronunciation of non-English words: from Madrid to Persian and Hebrew names, the results are horrendous. Like the content of the book was not deceiving enough. 

Rating: 2 stars

A Modern History of Iran by Abbas Amanat

Iran: A Modern History by Abbas Amanat is a massive historical compedium, which resumes 20 years of work and a time span which covers five centuries. Iran is very often mentioned nowadays in purely political context but few are those - including among journalists and especially politicians - with at least a basic knowledge about this country.

The reason is not only because they might not want to but there is a relative scarcity of general, well-structured information about Iran. One can find snapshots of various kinds of information, but rarely a big picture which covers important data such as historical context, geographical delimitations, economic background, political evolution and cultural developments. 

Abbas Amanat, director of Yale Program in Iranian Studies, was able to introduce to the reader all those details in over 1000 pages of history. It starts with the 16th century with the Safavid Empire, but it offers an overview of the previous historical sequencies by placing the Persians in the world tempo of the previous centuries. The book relies on a multiplicity of sources, double checked and neutraly introduced into the narrative. The research ends with the Green Movement - the protests following the fraudulent presidential elections from 2009. 

The book combines chronological details while following mentality patterns and structures which helps to better understand the religious and political developments and the conflicts and interferences of the two, as well as the positioning of Iran in modern times in various geopolitical contexts. From the conceptual point of view it is an excellent way to offer a basic timeline while filling it with information that helps to understand not only the moment when the events are taking place, but also the bigger picture of the time, what F. Braudel and Ecole des Annales labelled as the long durée.

Personally, I reserved a couple of months to go through the information and most probably will need at least one year to get into more details of various historical time frames and events mentioned more or less in detail. Besides translating in a simple but not simplistic way the realities of six centuries of dense Iranian history, Iran: A Modern History is also a noteworthy example of how to write histories nowadays. Recommended to anyone curious to find more about Iran than what is usually featured in the media but also to historians patient enough to learn not only about a country, but also searching for their writing style.

Rating: 5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Book Review: MBS by Ben Hubbard

MBS by Ben Hubbard is a journalistic investigation into the public life of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud that can be easily used as a a further basis for academic research into the Kingdom history and everyday life. 

After reading the well documented book - both from the journalistic as well as the academic point of view - by Kim Ghattas covering the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran I had relatively high expectations about Hubbard book. However, from many points of view it does not go beyond the news scren and the information that were already published in the international media about the Kingdom and its enigmatic Crown Prince. For instance, the case of the princes kept hostages in the Ritz Carlton or the killing of the journalist Jamal Kashoggi (which is covered in several chapters which is fine, but in my opinion the information could have been easily covered in one or maximum two, not because it is not relevant, but for simple reasons pertaining to the economics of the writing as such). 

By far, the final chapter, which puts into balance the good and the bad sides of the MBS dream of Saudi Arabia, is the most interesting and offers many directions for a further historical and political science investigation: the complete restructuration of the nature of power in the Kingdom, the elimination of the centers of power created by various members of the Royal House, starting the process of diminishing the influence of the clerics on the monarchy, the probable raprochement with the Jewish state. It is a pragmatic rather than an ideological approach which leaves open the long-term commitment and the degree of predictability of the Middle East political map. 

Probably I had high expectations from this book given its publicity and my own curiosity to finally find a good source to understand Saudi Arabia and its ruler. Hopefully, there will be more books and researches on this topic coming up in the next months and years, with a more serious, researched basis.

I´ve listened to the audio version of the book.

Rating: 3 stars

Against the Condescending Attitude in Academic Approaches

Personal accounts and experiences are a valuable addition to the serious, complex and complicated academic researches in human sciences. I deeply valuate both of them because it balances the mind and offer information that creates a full picture of a specific situation or mentality pattern. One without the other guarantee in most cases a misrepresetantion.

I am thinking right now to the recent academic and media takes on racism and white privilege in general. My area of study has to do mostly with ethnic minorities but the research tools used in the case of ethnic minorities can be sometimes used as well for the research in other sub-domains, such as gender and race approaches. 

I will talk less right now about race or my ethnic minorities studies. I want to share only some experiences regarding a certain condescending attitude that I´ve noticed myself among white, privileged, educated intellectuals - some of them academics, in a completely different context.

As a child, I grew up in a relatively privileged family. Although not always enjoying a top political appreciation, I belonged to a family that counted for at least three generation people with high-education, a high profesional mobility and urban background. High-education, that was intensively encouraged to acquire and was, actually, since now, a normal pathway for me and my siblings, was a guarantee against the ever changing political occurences. No matter what happens, you have a profesional qualification that will guarantee employment. Bonus: if you really want to be beyond good and evil, you gather as many qualifications as possible therefore your intelligence will be always praised, no matter what happens outside, in the world of decision makers. A theory that was at a great extent proved by my family members personal and professional journey. No matter how hard the dictatorship was at work in my country of origin, my uncles and mother were always needed for involvement in different scientific projects. No matter the country we landed for a long or short term, the knowledge of multiple languages, academic achievements and scholarhips always guaranteed a place among other intellectual peers.

On the other side, in relationship with the other professional and social groups, we knew our place so well that although some of my family members where genuinely sharing a very socialist/communist political belief, the ways in which those beliefs were put into practice ended up in a very condescending, kitsch-eque way. For instance, of course, we acknowledged the existence of illiterate members of the society, and we are keen to help on a voluntary basis to upgrade their level of knowledge, even teaching them an extra foreign language once their literacy was improving. But those people will always be those whom we helped to get out of illiteracy. Those people, no matter how far they will get, they will always remember based on their social class. Which was very unfair because, if communism did a lot of bad things the fact that it offered free education to everyone was one of the most important successes. 

In fact, we never mixed with those proletarians. They were our ´bon sauvages´ that we cultivate, but we don´t share bread with. The experience acquired through the contact with the masses was purely experimental and exhibitionists. We were curious to have a look at the way in which those people live and think, but at the end of the day we are happy to be home in our educated homes. 

I had later the same experience when I was doing some research about Roma minorities in the Balkans. NGOs and institutions provided with a generous budget were inviting journalists and academics active in the field of ethnic minorities to visit the villages of Roma. They were taking pictures, cautiously entering the mud huts where those people were living, were rolling their eyes looking at the children playing in the dirt together with various domestic animals. After one or two days or just a couple of hours spent in the midst of those people they were back to their clean offices, writing an academic report or some news and think nostalgically about those poor Roma and their poor destiny. 

Practically speaking, no matter the attitude of the actors, the fact that people wrote sympathetically about those poor Roma or the illiterate people were taught to read and write were obvious gains. However, on the long term, the class/caste system was strengthned and further reproduced. Some of my relatives genuinely believed that a fair social system is needed and an equal access to education no matter the social background is normal, but they also accepted to hire other people to do for them the manual work and housework that was considered low level for people with an education or refused to accept as full members of the family people from a lower educational status. 

Returning to the current state of the art in race and gender studies, I see some similarities. There is an open discussion right now about the white feminism and the fact that does not properly include and consider the needs of the POC women. In terms of racism studies, often the system is regulated by white researches that although are well intended it might not take into consideration the genuine list of priorities and problems that affect POC on a daily basis. 

From the academic perspective, inclusion of more POC and people with a background relevant for the problem is very important for a balanced, realistic perspective. In a perfect academic world, the gender, social background and race are irrelevant, as what matters for academic progress is the quality of the studies and complex approach of a specific topic. Academic diversity in human sciences is very important as for now, because it adds to the theoretical background personal approaches and testimonies that might lead to the a critical take of the privileges. One cannot change his or her family but a progressive critical approach can help to acknowledge that you are not alone and not special or that you have a mission to avoid taking your privileges for granted. The permanent critical and self-critical analysis helps to avoid perpetrating this attitude. 

On the Current War on Statues and Other Demons

I belong to a culture that discourages the visual representations of human body based on the belief that it represent an act of idolatry. You have to respect the other fellow humans, but their image in stone or other is an act of worshiping which does not suit the dynamics of the everyday relationship with God. Most of the synagogues do not have images or paintings and you will only find exquisite, colourful decorations in the Oriental-Moorish-style places of worship. No matter my current degree of religious observation, I am still reluctant towards the invasive presence of human representations but as a historian of mentalities I am always very curious to check the ways in which certain personalities are represented as well as the addenda associated with it.

The Western culture in its entirety is, on the other hand, organised and based on a complex system of visual representation, which originates from the Christian symbolism. Saints and their visual representations are intercessors to the God, according to the Christian belief, therefore churches and later, public spaces, are frequent spaces which host elaborated human images. 

The same frequent representation of images with a religious symbolism characterizes the Asian realm as well, with Indian and Japanese or Thai gods, among others, being worshipped intensively in and outside the temples, often by bringing offers and decorating their statues with clothes or flower guirlands.

The laicization of the public space in Europe led to a replacement of the originary religious meaning associated to the statues to a code aimed to reproduce the values of nationalism. The same system but read in a different key. The decision towards having a certain personality represented in the public space become a matter of political decision, as part of a symbolic repertoire that has to do with strengthening the sense of belonging and the national narrative in general. Having displayed a statue in a public space involves an array of administrative measures, with a symbolic weight, from the decision of the location, until the choice of the representation of the statue, usually a pitch during which various artists present their view on the specific personality and the funding of the work as such.

The extreme case of the Soviet-inspired visual propaganda is an illustration of the pressure towards creating a unified perspective which starts with the education of children in school, mostly the texts from the ´classical´ writers of the accepted dogma, and the further cultural productions - exhibitions, movie production, media focus. Once the communism was over, the masses out on the streets to celebrate the beginning of the reign of freedom attacked the statues of the communist idols - among others the ones in the memory of the ´Soviet soldier freedom fighters´ or the Lenin/Marx/Engels statues. Soon after, those were replaced by the new national heroes many of them controversial as well because they are representing values that are in open conflict with the democratic system the post-communist countries were supposed to embrace. The statues of the racist Admiral Horthy in Hungary or Marschal Antonescu in Romania are just some examples of such historical turn-outs.

In Western Europe and USA, the public spaces are shared with personalities whose inclusion within the national narrative are rarely contested. It is generally assumed that by the very fact of including them into the gallery of national heroes they were on the ´good´ democratic side as the countries themselves are associated with democracy and rule of law. 

The current war on statues that started in the American cities following the murdering of a black citizen, George Floyd, proves that when it comes to statues too, things are rarely just black and white. The removal of confederate monuments and personalities with a strong racist, white-supremacy message is a process that started at the beginning of the 2000s but it seems it is far from being properly underwent the middle of the process. On the other side of the pond, the well known racist writings of Cecil Rhodes haven´t discouraged his display at Oxford and even naming him for a prestigious scholarship operated since 1902. True is that in such wars, there are, as usual collateral victims, as the case of the statue of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes whose statue was recently defaced in San Francisco. Was he took for the colonialist Columbus or someone was really disgusted by the war against windmills that his main character, Quixote, fiercely leads ?

Academically speaking, dealing with statues is far more complicated than dealing with controversial texts. In the case of the texts, one can use a critical apparatus in order to create the context and offer a different perspective as well as to reject the problematic affirmations. A statue is an inert piece of stone in the middle of a square and adding a critical text does not guarantee that someone will ever read it. Plus, removal of the statue means political AND administrative decisions which are not easily and wholeheartedly taken.

Should those statue stay there? The role of the academics is to lead the intellectual debate about those controversial figures and their role in the national(istic) representation. Historians of mentalities have the role of exposing, where necessary, the controverses and the inappropriate content for a democratic society. They have to assume a public role, as intellectuals, especially through articles in the main media outlets, that can create a debate at a different level and pressure the decision makers towards a decision for removing those statues. Such a background will lead possibly to a more peaceful and conflict-free approach of the issue and will also avoid confusions and a general outrage against innocent statues, as in the case of the poor creator of Quixote.