Telos Press

Telos Press Publishing is proud to announce the newest addition to our book list: Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn by Victor Zaslavsky. Available for the first time in English translation, this shocking analysis of the mass murder of thousands of Polish officers and civilians in 1940 is a significant contribution to our understanding of European history.

Revisiting the events of the 1940 Katyn Massacre, in which some 25,000 Polish prisoners of war were shot by the Soviet secret police on Stalin's orders, Zaslavsky explores a paradigmatic and terrifying example of the policy of class cleansing practiced in the Soviet Union and its occupied territories during World War II. By blaming the Katyn Massacre on the Nazis, the Soviets constructed one of the greatest historiographical falsifications of the twentieth century.

Based on secret documents that only became available after the collapse of the Soviet regime, Zaslavsky unearths the methods used to create and maintain the "official version" of what happened at Katyn, a process involving the complicity of Western governments and left-leaning historians, which resulted in the upholding of this falsification until the fall of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps we just were lucky and simply picked the right moment. Perhaps it was the logical consequence of many years of work, gaining experience, and reflecting on many conflicts, including personal ones. Some things need their time and then, perhaps, if we are lucky, we catch hold of the one end of the thread just at the right moment and that leads to the untangling of the web that hides things. At least partially we were successful in this respect with the exhibition "'We just didn't have that': Anti-Semitism in the GDR." Working with 76 youths from 8 cities in Eastern Germany, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation began to research local history in 2006. The Foundation had the results of this research vetted by historians and presented the findings to the public in an exhibition in May of 2007. Most of the participants in the process come from the former GDR. Some of them are also Jewish. Since re-unification we had been trying to encourage a public discussion about anti-Semitism in the GDR: while there had been some interesting scholarly research on the topic, there had been no public engagement with it. The exhibition has unleashed wide ranging discussion on the issue at different events, conferences, and in the media. And the discussion is not only about the former East Germany. It is a debate about a heritage that affects all of Germany, a debate about ideologies, repression and new anti-Semitism.

Jeffrey Herf's "An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany" appears in TELOS 144 (Fall 2008). An excerpt follows below. Click here to read the full article (in PDF format).

It is best to begin with the obvious. This is a series of lectures about murder, indeed about an age of murder.[1] Murders to be sure inspired by political ideas, but murders nevertheless. In all, the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, hereafter the RAF) murdered thirty-four people and would have killed more had police and intelligence agencies not arrested them or prevented them from carrying out additional "actions."[2] Yesterday, the papers reported that thirty-two people were killed in suicide-bomb attacks in Iraq, and thirty-four the day before, and neither of those war crimes were front-page news in the New York Times or the Washington Post. So there is an element of injustice in the amount of time and attention devoted to the thirty-four murders committed by the RAF over a period of twenty-two years and that devoted to the far more numerous victims of radical Islamist terror. Yet the fact that the murders of large numbers of people today has become horribly routine is no reason to dismiss the significance of the murders of a much smaller number for German history. Along with the murders came attempted murders, bank robberies, and explosions at a variety of West German and American institutions. The number of dead could have been much higher. If the RAF had not used pistols, machine guns, bazookas, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), remote-controlled bombs, and airplane hijackings, and if the West German radicals of the 1970s through the 1990s had only published turgid, long-winded communist manifestos, no one would have paid them much attention at the time. I doubt that the German Historical Institute would have decided to sponsor a series about Marxist-Leninist sects of the 1970s.

The philosophical thought of Iris Murdoch proposes that no ethical tradition has ever adequately fashioned a picture of human beings as they truly are, and in the course of her career this was what she used her writing in philosophy and literature to illustrate: a personal vision of man's morality. If we consider ethicists' preoccupations in recent history, we might argue that these have mainly been the examination of moral being to justify why humans choose what they choose in particular circumstances, rather than the development of any concept of a "moral character" that might constitute the essential source of all the moral choices that ordinary human beings make. If we acknowledge that such a character does indeed exist, then it will naturally follow that we as humans have an important inner life characterized by a certain degree of essential unity. In the end, what is certain is that our "moral character" becomes apparent in the moment we act, and is itself the result of something that began long ago. And for Murdoch, this was the importance of virtue.

Telos Press Publishing is proud to announce the newest addition to our book list: Ernst Jünger's On Pain, translated and introduced by David C. Durst and prefaced by Russell A. Berman.

Originally published in 1934, this remarkable essay provides valuable insights into the cult of courage and death in Nazi Germany, but also throws light on the ideology of terrorism today.

From the Anchorage Daily News, Oct. 10, 2008:

One of the nation's best-known retired Army generals, Colin Powell, described Sen. Ted Stevens in court today as a "trusted individual" and a man with a "sterling" reputation.

"He was someone whose word you could rely on," said Powell, secretary of state in President Bush's first term, who self-deprecatingly described himself as someone who retired as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then "dabbled a bit in diplomacy."

As opposition to the Iraq War mounted on the Left, a myth began to circulate about the purported secret influence of the political philosopher Leo Strauss in some of the inner circles of the Bush administration. To explore the origins of the allegation would be an adventure in itself: there is some indication that the thesis was first promulgated by Lyndon LaRouche and then amplified in the mainstream media, in Europe and the United States (Le Monde and the New York Times). Is journalism just serial plagiarism? To be sure, there were some kernels of truth: Paul Wolfowitz did truly study at the University of Chicago, where Strauss taught, and . . . well, that's where the hard evidence abruptly ends and the narration begins. The half-knowledge that Strauss was a conservative thinker (though hardly a "neo-conservative") and that he had something to do with esoteric philosophizing in relation to political power: this was enough to impute the workings of a nefarious Straussian cabal as a red-blooded conspiracy theory of the Bush administration. It was a great story for everyone who preferred not to think. The paranoid style in American politics, the anxiety about secret plots and shadow governments, had finally moved from the kooky right to the center-left.

In an editorial titled "Following [in] Afghanistan's Footsteps," published October 8, 2008 in the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, editor-in-chief Tariq Al-Homayed warned that under Hamas's rule, Gaza was becoming like Afghanistan—a hotbed of poverty, violence and strife among armed factions. He called on the Arabs to take a firm stand against Hamas, saying that it was undermining the Palestinian cause and was also a real threat to Egypt. Following are excerpts from the article, as it appeared in the English-language edition of the paper.

The question is not whether McCain, thanks to the addition of Sarah Palin to the ticket, is going to win the election. That result depends on other variables and is secondary to what her candidacy reveals. Her candidacy is a symptom of a deep mutation in the symbolic order of society—that is, the emergence of a maternal figure to whom the power of the State is offered.

From the first distance, it looks like a faintly lurid overspill from the window above, which is full of scattered lights—as if the fragments of rose glass hadn't quite been able to contain themselves. It hovers over the void below, rather like a flash of Islamic script, perhaps the soft fiery writing of God himself, a muted warning, a tinted fiat. Looking back from the East transept, just glimpsing the pink glint under the Nave bridge, but too far away to make out the words, the bright caption almost looks magisterial, a condensation of the window's eruption.

Islamist terrorism is not disappearing, nor is the challenge to understand its origins. Whenever it began, it catapulted to the forefront of public attention on 9/11 and has been haunting the world ever since. The diversity of its venues makes it a global phenomenon. Successful attacks and foiled plots have taken place in Bali and Bosnia, in China and Indonesia, in Denmark and Germany, in Spain and England, in Israel and Jordan, in Algeria and Argentina, in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and Tunisia—demonstrating the wrongheadedness of that simplistic thinking that blamed the massacres in New York and Washington solely on U.S. policies. What we face is a worldwide threat defined by a willingness to use extreme violence against civilians while justifying it with appeals to Islam. The local pretexts vary widely, the organizational structures are loose, and the technical sophistication is uneven, ranging from hypermodern high-tech capacities to archaic decapitations, sometimes in the same event. This Islamist terrorism will remain a primary security threat in the coming decades, demonstrably able to adapt and evolve and to benefit parasitically from competition and contradictions in the international system.

To anyone familiar with Zimbabwean history, the newly formed government of national unity in Zimbabwe should come as no surprise. In fact, the formation of the GNU should be met with some apprehension: Zimbabwe has a short but recurring history of internal settlements within its political elite. On June 1, 1979, an internal settlement was reached which saw the formation of a government of national unity between the then-illegal white minority government of Rhodesia, led by Ian Smith, and a group of moderate black nationalists headed by A. T. Muzorewa.

Last week's roller coaster on the world's financial markets highlights the extreme volatility that characterizes the current economic system. Volatility is generated not just by uncertain prospects and a lack of trust in existing institutions and practices but also—and perhaps above all—by new forms of risk linked to complex financial instruments such as derivative trading.

While the recently signed ZANU PF-MDC agreement has been advertised in many places as a sharing of power, a close examination of the document shows that it is a mere sham. The document itself is nothing like the rumors that were so skillfully circulated prior to its release. There are none of those highly publicized details about how Tsvangirai and MDC would be in charge of the police. The cold reality is that this agreement hardly chips at Mugabe's established powers, but it goes on to grant him what he most needs at this moment: legality and a rescue form international condemnation.

The Republican National Convention has been interesting if not useful in a major regard: its reliable falsehood.

I find the concept itself striking: what in general can be considered reliable, much less reliably false? To borrow a distinction made by Harry Frankfurt, while bullshit abounds, the number of conclusively identifiable liars who truck in "credible" deceit is comparatively scarce.

...That is why I am sure that Paul is enjoying the Palin candidacy, for she represents many of the qualities he was searching for in his vision of a federal populism: her willingness to tell Washington to go to hell, her unrelenting morality, even against leaders of her party, her easy embrace of Alaska's uniqueness, her relaxed religiosity, and her full participation in life on America's last frontier. That's just the sort of thing Paul wanted, and he would have been delighted that it came from the mother of five.

No amount of spinning is going to make either Barack Obama or his wife average Americans. He is no everyman, and why should he be? He is an extraordinarily gifted member of his generation, who was offered every opportunity for success by the Meritocracy, a system of social promotion of a diverse student body based upon the standardized test.

In 1990, the "Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam," adopted by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, set Sharia as the sole foundation for "human rights." The UN's Third International Antiracism Conference, which took place in September 2001 in Durban, South Africa, amplified the trend: These conferences turned out to be devastating tribunals directed against every democracy, unlimited personal freedom, freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, of the arts and human rights in general. All previous human rights conventions were turned on their heads in Cairo and Durban, and racism was given a new definition. The Durban Conference also taught us that Israel is not only an apartheid state, but is in fact the reincarnation of National Socialism, even though Hitler's Mein Kampf was openly sold at the conference: an ironic twist—and a nightmare!