★★★★★ Pankaj Mishra Lecture
Last Wednesday evening, we attended the first of the London Review of Books Winter Lectures, Pankaj Mishra's "The Shoah After Gaza." Mishra is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. He has published nuanced books and essays on subjects including mining magnate Gautam Adani’s rise to power; the intellectual history of The Economist; and the risk of framing the war in Ukraine as a symbolic battleground for democracy at large. A few weeks before the talk, the venue was abruptly changed to Saint James Church, Clerkenwell, after the original host, the Barbican, cancelled their arrangement with the LRB when they learned of Mishra’s topic. The Barbican's stated reason was that the timeline meant they "lost the opportunity to properly consider how to hold the events with care" during a period of "deep organisational cultural change." The LRB said this outcome was "disappointing"—to say the least. It struck us as extraordinarily stupid and censorious. Mishra's lecture was packed, with excitable audience members flicking through complimentary copies of that week's LRB that had been left on the pews. Silence descended as he began to speak. Now available online, the lecture is a long, rigorous, and morally searching watch or read about how the Holocaust has, since the 1970s, been deployed by Israeli leaders and their Western allies to justify Palestinian oppression, sometimes to the despair of Jewish people who survived the Nazi death camps. "A powerful Western narrative holds the Shoah to be the incomparable crime of the modern era," Mishra says. "But we find our moral and political consciousness profoundly altered when Israel, a country founded as a haven for the victims of genocidal racism, is itself charged with genocide." When the talk finished, Mishra did not take questions.
★★★★ Nemesis
Nemesis, a three part ABC docu-series outlining the Liberal Party's rule from 2013-2022, tracks the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era as narrated by their colleagues in Canberra: Barnaby Joyce, Michaelia Cash, Christopher Pyne, Erik Abetz, Joshy Frydenberg… the whole ghoulish gang back together! Whatever hateful things you've thought about our former Prime Ministers, their closest friends and allies have thought worse, and are willing to share it in reality TV-style confessionals. It feels like watching The Real Housewives of Parliament House. The only one who maintains his professional persona is Sco-Mo, a true black hole of a man. Turnbull, in his interviews, plays the part of maverick with nothing to lose, but, as always, comes off as a smug jerk. Abbott, wisely, refused to talk, so we’re left with replays of his greatest hits, such as the time he ate a raw onion, or when he said that no man is the suppository of all wisdom. As far as truth-to-power journalism goes, the documentary is slight. It’s basically just gossip interspersed with incredible self-owns from power-addled narcissists. (Barnaby Joyce, for example, pontificates that brains are split up into “three quadrants”: social , academic intelligence, and sporting intelligence.) But it does provide some comic relief, until you remember that these were the people who were ruling the country when we were “turning back the boats,” reneging on gajillion dollar submarine deals, and implementing Robodebt. Inevitably, the question of Fuck/Marry/Kill occurred to us when comparing the three men. By the final episode, the answer was obvious.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Paris End to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.