Aufhebunga Bunga
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/282/ Foreign Fighters, Left & Right (II) ft. Stefan Bertram-Lee
🕑 Added 2022-08-16 13:54:08 +0000 UTC[Patreon Exclusive]
Part two on Syria, Ukraine...and privilege.
We continue our chat with Stefan, who was an international volunteer in Rojava. How much actual difference can foreigners make? What does the future look like in Ukraine - and in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad has outlasted all the Western leaders who tried to oust him?
And we talk about Stefan's research on privilege and status-policing.
Comments
Pier Paolo Tamburelli
Maybe unfair, but at the end I wandered if Bertram-Lee is next J D Vance or next Lawrence of Arabia (and, speaking of this, I would have asked - at least for the fun - whether he is UK spy)
Carson H
What Stephan says about nihilism (or the desire to escape from it) is very interesting to me. The irony, I suppose, is that the feeling of meaninglessness/purposelessness is always on some level an index of its "opposite": a stubborn and desperate *hunger* for meaning/purpose. How, or on what terms, the latter relates to the former in a given instance—how the desire for meaning/purpose confronts the apparent absence thereof—is perhaps worth exploring not just as an existential question, but as a social, historical, and political one. In this connection, I'm reminded of Susan Schneider's recent book, The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism. As she writes, apropos of this episode and this podcast in general, “the Islamic State is worth studying not because it is a threat to 'us' but because its appeal, ideological pillars, and operational rationale has much to teach about political and social crises the world over. In this sense, I regard the Islamic State as a microcosm that highlights the tensions and limitations inherent within neoliberalism—a response that both mimics and negates its underlying rationale. Thus, the individual is central even as individual rights are ridiculed, the community is both theoretically universal and exclusionary in practice, and sovereignty is punitive at the same time that it is disavowed. Perhaps most importantly, examining jihad alongside contemporary social and political formations in the West underscores a common nihilist thread, one characterized by the inability to imagine a different sort of life here on Earth. From this perspective, the [jihadist] apocalypse and the end of history appear less like oppositional projects than different symptoms of a common, and wholly modern, malaise.”
