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Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build
motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no
longer exist. We’re converting our planet from a natural one to
an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects –
houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on – now exceeds
the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to
decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of
man-made objects is growing faster than ever. We’re on a
treadmill to disaster. To get off this treadmill, argues Harald
Welzer, we need to learn how to stop: as individuals and as
societies, we need to stop doing what we’re doing and say
‘enough’. We find it hard to do this because our culture has
trained us to regard endless escalation as desirable, and we’re
reluctant to surrender the material benefits of growth. But as long
as the expansive cultural model continues to prevail, there will be
no change of course in favour of sustainable and climate-friendly
practices and lifestyles. We need a cultural model in which the
beauty of stopping is given the recognition needed for the project
of civilization to continue. Optimizing processes that are heading
in the wrong direction only makes matters worse. Stopping is
imperative: it is a human cultural technique that we must re-learn.
Only then can we achieve a new beginning.
A Westerner's travels among the persecuted and displaced Christian
remnant in Iraq and Syria teach him much about faith under fire.
Gold Medal Winner, 2018 IPPY Book of the Year Award Silver Medal
Winner, 2018 Benjamin Franklin Award Finalist, 2018 ECPA Christian
Book Award Inside Syria and Iraq, and even along the refugee trail,
they're a religious minority persecuted for their Christian faith.
Outside the Middle East, they're suspect because of their
nationality. A small remnant of Christians is on the run from the
Islamic State. If they are wiped out, or scattered to the corners
of the earth, the language that Jesus spoke may be lost forever -
along with the witness of a church that has modeled Jesus' way of
nonviolence and enemy-love for two millennia. The kidnapping,
enslavement, torture, and murder of Christians by the Islamic
State, or ISIS, have been detailed by journalists, as have the
jihadists' deliberate efforts to destroy the cultural heritage of a
region that is the cradle of Christianity. But some stories run
deep, and without a better understanding of the religious and
historical roots of the present conflict, history will keep
repeating itself century after century. Andreas Knapp, a priest who
works with refugees in Germany, travelled to camps for displaced
people in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq to collect stories of
survivors - and to seek answers to troubling questions about the
link between religion and violence. He found Christians who today
still speak Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
The uprooted remnant of ancient churches, they doggedly continue to
practice their faith despite the odds. Their devastating eyewitness
reports make it clear why millions are fleeing the Middle East.
Yet, remarkably, though these last Christians hold little hope of
ever returning to their homes, they also harbor no thirst for
revenge. Could it be that they - along with the Christians of the
West, whose interest will determine their fate - hold the key to
breaking the cycle of violence in the region? Includes sixteen
pages of color photographs.
Contemporary capitalism produces more and more money, debt, and
inequality. These three trends have a common cause: the privilege
of private banks to create money by means of accounting - by the
stroke of a key. Why was this privilege not addressed politically
for so long - and who benefited from it? At the heart of the answer
lies the realization that the power to create money has been hidden
by the way we commonly think and talk about capitalism. The book
traces the omission of money creation from theories of capitalism
and maps its consequences. By expanding the manoeuvring space for
the banks to use their privilege, the capitalist countries have
financed a transformation of the economy known as financialization.
As a result, the real economy and private households became a debt
supplier to a monetary system whose returns accumulate at the top.
It is not simply "the markets" but money itself that transfers
economic benefits from the masses to a minority. Increasing
inequality of income and wealth can therefore only be combated if
one does not only correct distributive results of
markets-redistribution-, but addresses predistribution: the
modalities of money creation.
Historians have mainly seen the ghettos established by the Nazis in
German-occupied Eastern Europe as spaces marked by brutality,
tyranny, and the systematic murder of the Jewish population.
Drawing on examples from the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos, Dance
on the Razor's Edge explores how, in fact, highly improvised legal
spheres emerged in these coerced and heterogeneous ghetto
communities. Looking at sources from multiple archives and
countries, Svenja Bethke investigates how the Jewish Councils, set
up on German orders and composed of ghetto inhabitants, formulated
new definitions of criminal offenses and established legal
institutions on their own initiative, as a desperate attempt to
ensure the survival of the ghetto communities. Bethke explores how
people under these circumstances tried to make sense of everyday
lives that had been turned upside down, bringing with them pre-war
notions of justice and morality, and she considers the extent to
which this rupture led to new judgments on human behaviour. In
doing so, Bethke aims to understand how people attempted to use
their very limited scope for action in order to survive. Set
against the background of a Holocaust historiography that often
still seeks for clear categories of "good" and "bad" behaviours,
Dance on the Razor's Edge calls for a new understanding of the
ghettos as complex communities in an unprecedented emergency
situation.
Historians have mainly seen the ghettos established by the Nazis in
German-occupied Eastern Europe as spaces marked by brutality,
tyranny, and the systematic murder of the Jewish population.
Drawing on examples from the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos, Dance
on the Razor's Edge explores how, in fact, highly improvised legal
spheres emerged in these coerced and heterogeneous ghetto
communities. Looking at sources from multiple archives and
countries, Svenja Bethke investigates how the Jewish Councils, set
up on German orders and composed of ghetto inhabitants, formulated
new definitions of criminal offenses and established legal
institutions on their own initiative, as a desperate attempt to
ensure the survival of the ghetto communities. Bethke explores how
people under these circumstances tried to make sense of everyday
lives that had been turned upside down, bringing with them pre-war
notions of justice and morality, and she considers the extent to
which this rupture led to new judgments on human behaviour. In
doing so, Bethke aims to understand how people attempted to use
their very limited scope for action in order to survive. Set
against the background of a Holocaust historiography that often
still seeks for clear categories of "good" and "bad" behaviours,
Dance on the Razor's Edge calls for a new understanding of the
ghettos as complex communities in an unprecedented emergency
situation.
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