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Photo: Dennis Jarvis. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0
Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina: the visible signs of the armed conflict of the '90s are everywhere |
Reflecting on genocide: the perspective of victims’ and perpetrators’ descendants
Being caught up in questions of war, empathy and memory I tumbled across Paul Salopek’s recent post from Anatolia. Paul set out on a seven year long pedestrian journey around the world, reporting in a pace slow enough to match the rhythm of walking what he calls Out of Eden Walk and which is published in National Geographic. After crossing much of Eastern Turkey he stopped to contemplate on "What We Talk About When We Talk About Genocide". Instead of analysing state-level gestures of political rhetoric, Salopek takes time to look at the multiple ways local descendants of victims and perpetrators deal with the historical baggage in a landscape still marked by reminders of the conflict.
When Maidan becomes a personal search
Finally, to conclude this somewhat sad reflective series I chose to highlight Peter Pomerantsev’s recent essay in the London Review of Books. Pomerantsev himself has as an ancestry as messy as that of Maidan's and equally difficult to build a singular identity upon. When he tries to understand what is happening in Ukraine he cannot but become entangled in questions about his own identity.
After almost dismissing the possibility of revolutions after the overuse of the term in the last few decades, which reduced the word to a mere ornament of political technology, he hesitantly starts to address the Maidan as the fight for the possibility of a real revolution. Many have said a great deal about the Maidan and Pomerantsev is quick to admit local reluctance to the overabundance of Western ‘understandings’, but what makes his text extremely interesting is not so much the details and well-used perspectives, but his hesitant move from an outsider to someone who cannot but embrace the events and now has to choose his own form of utopia, however reluctant he is to do so.
