"Swords into plowshares!" Religion & politics in Southeast Europe & Turkey. Books on nationalism, peacebuilding, Balkan Muslims, women in Orthodox Christianity.
Joined September 2012
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
Jun 11
Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958) surprised people by explaining the idiotic world they were living in, where bloated private consumption of things they often absolutely don't need goes hand in hand with the destruction of public space, from schools to hospitals. Galbraith explained how advertising teaches people to buy endlessly, and corporations make them work so they can buy again — consumption as the engine of the social system.
But someone should soon write a book about how The Affluent Society ended — and a new era began. An era where most people no longer have to work, because there's no work, and the elite doesn't need buyers. The main theme is no longer production and consumption but access to resources: those who have capital, infrastructure, data, and protection — and those who never will.
Roughly like in the colonies: the overseas masters make sure local groups fight each other enough not to interfere with the guards around the cobalt mine, where a few lucky ones dig up resources with their bare hands for a dollar a day.
Oh wait — no digging needed. Robots will dig.
The population is seen by the power only as a politically dangerous element of the system.
That world might look like one of those strange civilizations the Star Trek crew encountered on its voyages: a small techno-elite amid wonders and abundance, the majority somewhere below — in degrading spaces, in despair and horror.
Who'd want to live in a world like that? Well, maybe the Star Trek crew will fly over and sort it all out for us?
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Epic.
HAPPENING NOW 🇦🇱 Thousands of Albanians are marching under a single banner: Albania Is Not for Sale.
They are facing down the full weight of a government that rewrote its own laws to hand the coastline to Donald Trump’s son-in-law: Jared Kushner.
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
This summer, across Europe, from Italy to Finland, Bavaria to Brussels, London to Vienna, a broad coalitions of anti-war movements are holding coordinated protests, marches and conferences to halt and reverse Europe's descent into arms races, militarism and war. 👇🏼
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
Jun 3
Out now: My new book on the PKK & how it survived Ocalan’s capture, won & lost armed control of the Kurdish regions of Turkey & Syria, & is now testing peace talks with Ankara. Based on firsthand interviews.
Amazon: a.co/d/0aasHRtO
NYU Press: nyupress.org/9781479865369/r…
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
May 25
An Art Nouveau Icon of the the Protection of the Mother of God (Pokrov), 1911
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
"The dead Ukrainian kids, the ruined cities, the destroyed families — that’s not a price the West is paying. It’s a price Ukraine is paying so that politicians in Warsaw, Tallinn, and Brussels can feel important."
May 26
The hard truth many do not want to admit:
The longer this goddamn Russian war drags on, the more people in Ukraine die. Period. Full stop.
Every single one of the laptop warriors screaming that Ukriane meeds to continue the war — while safe in their European capitals or American think tanks — would never, ever actually live in the country they’re so eager to keep bleeding. Not for a second.
Look at Kaja Kallas — the Estonian prime minister turned EU foreign policy chief. She struts around with this giant Napoleon complex, wrapped in the flag of “defending democracy in Ukraine.” Give me a break. This has nothing to do with Ukrainian sovereignty or freedom. It’s about racking up political points on the corpse of a country. She’s betting on the image of democratic Zelensky, which is already crumbling because the reality on the ground has less and less to do with actual democracy.
These people don’t care about Ukrainians. They care about their own status, their media profiles, and their pathetic little power games. Every heroic speech they give costs another hundred lives and another chunk of Ukraine’s future.
The cold reality? The only victory Ukraine can still achieve right now is to end this war, stop the slaughter, and start rebuilding — the economy, the institutions, whatever is left of real democracy. Everything else is just cynical, blood-soaked grift by people who will never pay the price themselves.
The dead Ukrainian kids, the ruined cities, the destroyed families — that’s not a price the West is paying. It’s a price Ukraine is paying so that politicians in Warsaw, Tallinn, and Brussels can feel important.
Enough. Time to stop pretending this is noble. It’s grotesque. And the longer it goes, the more obvious it becomes.
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
Pope Leo XIV in his first encyclical citing Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism to warn AI risks producing the exact condition Arendt identified as the prerequisite for totalitarian domination by destroying people's ability to discern between fact and fiction.
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
May 25
Beauty is vanishing from our world becaue we live as though it did not matter.
-- Roger Scruton
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
May 23
revisiting this Mary Oliver poem. or it’s revisiting me.
ALT Don’t Hesitate If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
“who told you that this or that would last forever?”
— Stanisław Barańczak
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
May 17
#New: What does Öcalan’s “democratic integration” really mean?
Joost Jongerden writes on Öcalan’s call to move beyond armed struggle, the limits of Turkey’s “terror-free Turkey” framing, & the Kurdish search for democratic politics beyond the nation-state.
theamargi.com/posts/longread…
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
May 10
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
— Haruki Murakami
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
May 8
Peace begins in the human heart, passes through relationships, takes root in neighborhoods and peripheries, and expands until it embraces the entire city and the world. Peace is built by promoting a culture that rejects violence, through daily gestures, education, and practical acts of justice. #PastoralVisit #Naples
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
— Jane Austen
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Apr 28
Happy to share my article on Islam in Southeast Europe, just published in Spanish in AFKAR-IDEAS: iemed.org/publication/el-isl…
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Pope Leo says those who wage war are thieves stealing away our peaceful future reut.rs/48RfYFW reut.rs/48RfYFW
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Ina Merdjanova retweeted
Apr 24
Does no one else see in these videos the most terrifying premonition for all of human civilization?
Apr 21
Drone warfare has reached such a level that many fighters have lost hope of escaping or resisting. For example, the final strike on the barracks is terrifying.
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