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30. January 2024 – Essay: Between Good & Evil
#Extremism
This essay on the mechanisms of radicalization, I wrote some years ago when in Scandinavia and Europe various forms of extremes, such as right wing nationalism and fundamentalist Islamism, still seemed in their infancy. When I still thought they would be easily halted. That didn’t happen. On the contrary, even in the US, the land of the free, this extremism has taken so much root that a former President who tried to make a coup against his own country’s democracy, now is in the running for this Presidency again – by the very institutional means he himself undercut and attacked.
Considering the New Hampshire primary results, I think it’s the right moment to publish it again here. (And on a little personal note: also in exasperation, considering that I am myself subjected since years, to an immense amount of very destructive harassment, the perpetrators of which today I can only liken to terrorizing extremists).
Read here: Between Good & Evil (substack.com)
12. January 2024
Essay: I WISH I HAD WORDS – Ode to a Land
#GazaCeasefire #PalestinePeace #Israel
This Essay – published in the anthology ‘RENDITION: American Authors on Palestine’ by OR Books in 2015 – depicts the background story for the terrible Murder Foretold that we’re currently all watching unfold in Gaza. I wrote it after having travelled through the West Bank, witnessing first hand the destructive impact of the occupation on the Palestinian people.
While anyone of a sane mind can naturally only condemn and deplore the horrors of the Hamas killings of civilian Israelis on 7. October; Anyone sane also has no choice but to condemn and deplore multifold the ensuing, and still ongoing, horrifying evisceration by the Israeli State of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
I hardly had words to describe the kind of destitution and daily undermining of a people, I saw in 2014. As a fiction writer, I knew that sometimes the best way to tell the truth of a situation almost too hard to face, is to put it in the form of a story. So here is the ALPHABET that then I put together for Palestine and her people (and as I see it, it’s also for the soul, and thus the future existence, of Israel). As many others, I also knew that the suppression and suffering I witnessed, without major intervention and policy change, were somehow prescribing a future carnage – the form of which would be anyone’s guess: Only now we know its shape.
The intervention of World Powers didn’t come in the many years before, when it should have.
Let’s hope that now, it will.
Read the Essay in full here: I Wish I had Words (substack.com)
#GazaCeasefire #PalestinePeace
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