Share Chancellor’s Professor and Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology and History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, US, Akinwumi Ogundiran, is the author of ‘The Yoruba: A New History.’ The remarkable book, which was published in the last quarter of 2020 by Indiana University Press, provides a new way and style for imagining and writing Yoruba history. The academic shares some findings that challenge extant beliefs and knowledge in this e-conversation about the book. Excerpts:
CONGRATS on the publication of this seminal and interesting work titled ‘The Yoruba: A New History’. Could you please let us into how it came to be? The conception and execution?
NGOs, Antisemitism, and the IHRA Working Definition The Media Line Staff
Many of the NGOs that claim to promote human rights and similar ethical norms have been notably reticent to include antisemitism on their agendas, reports and campaigns. In many cases, these groups have actively contributed to anti-Zionism (rejection of the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state), and to demonization of Israel and its Jewish supporters. In addition, a number of influential NGOs, including many funded by the EU, individual European governments and the United Nations, are actively campaigning to delegitimize the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. In this webinar, we will describe and analyze these processes, the underlying factors that explain this behavior, and the contradictions between the declaratory positions of the funders endorsing the IHRA definition, and the funding processes.
Introduction
The vast majority of Germans belonged to a Christian church during the Nazi era. In 1933 there were 40 million Protestants, 20 million Catholics, and small numbers of people adhering to other Christian traditions. The German Evangelical Church (the largest Protestant church) and the Roman Catholic church were pillars of German society and played an important role in shaping people’s attitudes and actions vis-à-vis National Socialism, including anti-communism, nationalism, traditional loyalty to governing authorities (particularly among Protestants), and the convergence of Nazi antisemitism with widespread and deep-seated anti-Jewish prejudice.
Within the German Evangelical Church the pro-Nazi “German Christian” (
Deutsche Christen) movement emerged in the early 1930s. It attempted to fuse Christianity and National Socialism and promoted a “racially-pure” church by attacking Jewish influences on Christianity. This attempt to nazify the primary Protestant chu
Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia by Alexander Bogdanov.
Aleksandra Djurasovic is an independent researcher with academic interests in urbanism, ecology, and post-socialist, neoliberal, and war-to-peace transitions in Southeast Europe, among other topics. Milan Djurasovic is a published author of two books of fiction and numerous articles on politics, psychology, literature, and art.
Alexander A. Bogdanov’s novel
Red Star was published in 1908 as an attempt to reenergize the dejected revolutionaries whose efforts had been crushed during the 1905 Russian Revolution. The protagonist, Leonid, is a Russian revolutionary chosen, in the midst of the revolution, by the Martian expedition to visit their planet and learn about the centuries-old advanced form of communism there. Since the triumph of communism in Russia was the cause to which Leonid had decided to devote his life, he agrees to visit Mars so that he can absorb their ideas and principles.