Pandaemonium

LISTENING TO DYLAN IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

December 11, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked. Perhaps my favourite of all Dylan lines. Though another from the same song, It’s alright Ma, (I’m only bleeding), runs it close: And if my thought dreams could be seen they’d probably put my head in a guillotine And both seem as relevant today as they were when Bob Dylan first penned them in 1965. In fact, so many of Dylan’s songs seem as insightful about today’s […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: bob dylan, donald trump, music

ALL THE NEWS THAT WAS FIT TO PRINT

December 6, 2016 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on the panic about fake news: In the past, governments, mainstream institutions and newspapers manipulated news and information. Today, anyone with a Facebook account can do it. Instead of the carefully organized fake news of old, there is now an anarchic outflow of lies. What has changed is not that news is faked, but that the old gatekeepers of news have lost their power. Just as elite institutions […]

Categories: Free Speech, History, Politics • Tags: fake news, free press, news, post-truth

A PROFOUNDLY POETIC ANOMALY

December 4, 2016 by Kenan Malik

What is modernism? And what is modernist art? The images here look strikingly like 20th century modernism – Malevich, Miro, Kandinsky, Klee, El Lissitzky, or more recent artists such as Agnes Martin. In fact they come from seventeenth century Rajasthan, in India, and were created within the Hindu Tantric tradition. The images draw upon key symbols of Tantric cosmogony, such as the bindu, a dot symbolizing the undifferentiated absolute, to the negative space of the shunya, the absolute void of […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: abstract art, art, franck andre jamme, india, indian art, modernism, tantric art

BEFORE FACEBOOK WAS THE COFFEE HOUSE

December 1, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Today it’s Facebook. 350 years ago it was the coffee house. In the late seventeenth century, as Markman Ellis tells in his book on the cultural history of the coffee house, there was panic in British royal circles that these newly-established drinking salons had become forums for political dissent, rebellious attitudes and the spreading of untruths. In June 1672, Charles II issued a proclamation ‘to restrain the Spreading of False News, and Licentious Talking of Matters of State and Government.’ […]

Categories: Free Speech, History • Tags: censorship, facebook, fake news, free press, free speech

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #9

November 27, 2016 by Kenan Malik

My latest collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. Since so much of the discussion over the past month has been dominated by that electoral victory, I have divided the collection into two: articles that are about issues related to Donald Trump and his Presidential success and the ones that are Trump-free. . Trumpish 2016 was the apathy election Carl Beijer, 12 November The […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

EDITORIAL INTELLIGENCE COMMENT AWARD 2016

November 24, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Yay, I won an award. The Editorial Intelligence 2016 ‘Society and diversity’ comment award. (No, I am not quite sure, either, what ‘Society and diversity comment’ amounts to, but I am immensely pleased to have won it.) The Editorial Intelligence awards have grown over the past decade to become perhaps the most important journalistic comment awards in the UK. Other winners this year included Jonathan Freedland as ‘Commentariat of the Year’, Gary Younge for ‘Comment Piece of the Year’, Sam […]

Categories: Kenan Malik • Tags: assimilationism, awards, editorial intelligence, evil, identity politics, immigration, islam, islamism, jihadism, multiculturalism, ukip

TO SCULPT MEANING FROM AN ANCIENT ROCK

November 20, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Standing stones have a strange, evocative power, perhaps because they offer a tangible, material connection to peoples like us, yet so different from us; peoples whose thoughts and actions we can appreciate, and yet which also leave us baffled; constructions that express the extraordinary lengths to which humans will go to find meaning in the cosmos, and yet meanings that we cannot comprehend. When non-believers visit Chartres Cathedral or the Blue Mosque or St Petersburg’s Grand Choral Synagogue or the […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: calanais, lewis, standing stones

JYLLANDS-POSTEN AND THE AYATOLLAH WITHIN

November 17, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Flemming Rose is the former culture editor of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten who, in 2005, published the Muhammed cartoons and launched a global controversy. In a new book, De Besatte (The Possessed), Rose claims that far from defending freedom of expression, Jyllands-Posten attempted to gag him and to prevent him from saying or writing anything controversial. The Danish paper Information interviewed me about the case. This is a (rough) translation of the article. ‘Jyllands-Posten viste sin indre ayatollah’ Hans Henrik Rasmussen, […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: censorship, danish cartoons, denmark, diversity, flemming rose, free speech, geert wilders, index on censorship, jytte klausen, rushdie affair, self-censorship, the satanic verses

THE FAULTLINES OF THE IMAGINATION

November 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

‘I hope you’re surviving in these dark times. I don’t seem to understand the world any more. I don’t seem to understand its rationality. I feel all I can do is hunker down.’ So emailed a friend a few days ago. I can understand why she feels that way. After all, America now has as President-elect a truth-shredding, conspiracy-mongering authoritarian demagogue who has promised mass deportations, a wall to keep out Mexicans, a ban on all Muslim immigration, and a […]

Categories: International, Politics • Tags: barack obama, donald trump, elite, hillary clinton, immigration, left, liberalism, racism, us elections, usa, working class

HOW AMERICA GOT TRUMPED

November 10, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Even before Donald Trump’s extraordinary victory in the US Presidential election, two narratives had already been established about his political rise. His supporters saw it as an insurgent movement of the little people against the elite. Liberal opponents viewed it rather as the revolt of what Hilary Clinton infamously dubbed ‘the deplorables’: the rage of racists and bigots fuelled by hate. Neither narrative is true. But both possess a pinch of truth. The predominant view of the difference between Trump and Clinton supporters […]

Categories: International, Politics • Tags: african americans, barack obama, democratic party, donald trump, elite, hillary clinton, identity politics, left, racism, us elections, usa, working class

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #8

November 6, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The latest (and somewhat random) collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . How the education gap is tearing politics apart David Runciman, Guardian, 5 October 2016 The contest between the educated and the less educated is different. Many of the safeguards that have been put in place to bypass popular politics – above all, the authority that now resides in central banks – […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

THAT PROUD HISTORY OF WELCOMING REFUGEES

November 3, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Every time there is a debate about Western attitudes to refugees, many point to the West’s proud history of helping refugees, especially Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In fact Western European nations and the USA were anything but welcoming to fleeing Jews. Britain even set up internment camps in Canada to detain German Jews as ‘enemy aliens’, often together with Nazis. Far from today’s failure to welcome refugees being a betrayal of that proud history, it is […]

Categories: History, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-semitism, evian conference, franklin d roosevelt, jewish refugees, jews, nazis, refugees

SICILIAN BAROQUE

October 30, 2016 by Kenan Malik

In 1693 Sicily was devastated by a great earthquake. The cities of the south-east – Ragusa, Modica, Noto among them – were destroyed completely. In the wake of the disaster came an extraordinary period of reconstruction. Not for the poor, of course, who continued to live in primitive hovels at the edge of cities. But for the nobility, and for the Church, rebuilding the cities became an occasion for the flaunting of wealth. The result was a series of dazzling […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: architecture, baroque, modica, noto, photography, ragusa, sicily

‘I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK’

October 27, 2016 by Kenan Malik

‘I don’t recognize my country’. ‘I want my country back’. These have for many years been the sentiments of those opposed to immigration into Britain. Immigrants, so the critics claim, have taken over ‘our’ country, turning cities into mini-Kingstons or little Lahores, creating, in the words of David Goodhart, former director of the centre-left think tank Demos, ‘an England that is increasingly full of mysterious and unfamiliar worlds’. Or, as the Oxford University demographer David Coleman, a vocal opponent of mass migration, put […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: brexit, david runciman, eu referendum, european union, immigration, populism, racism, working class

IN DEFENCE OF FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

October 24, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is an extended version of the talk I gave at a debate on freedom of movement at the Battle of Ideas conference in London on Saturday. The default position, in discussions such as this, is that immigration controls are the norm and that those advocating free movement have to justify what is seen as an outlandish position. I want to turn this claim on its head. In any public space, humans have, or should have, the right to move as they […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: democracy, european union, freedom of movement, immigration, immigration controls, open borders, refugees, sovereignty