[lbo-talk] JungleWorld

Angelus Novus fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com
Sun Jul 27 03:56:10 PDT 2008


Doug,

until very recently, I would have called it my favorite weekly newspaper. They semi-regularly publish Michael Heinrich, and their regular correspondent for all things French, Bernhard Schmid, is great as well (Schmid is a member of the LCR and reflects their rather distinguished views). They also publish interesting dossiers from time to time by the leading lights of the intellectual far-left, people like Sergio Bologna, Daniel Bensaid, etc. And my absolute favorite music critic, Felix Klopotek, is also a regular contributor (often writing about things other than music, for example this article: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/klopotek160807.html )

It was always a very uneasy coalition of pop-leftists, post-structuralists, Anti-Germans, autonomists, council communists, and hip poseurs. During the run-up to the Iraq war, the post-structuralist faction seems to have been significantly marginalized, and the quarterly supplement Subtropen (think "Futur Antérieur " or "Multitudes") was folded, while the worst sort of pro-war assholes were given ample space to promote their views.

They took a real beating for this, with people canceling subscriptions or threatening to do so, and as a result the worst of the Anti-Germans were put on a leash (Uli Krug of Bahamas, for example, seems to only be allowed to write about music these days).

But recently they have done something which I consider to be inexcusable. They have begun publishing "satire" pieces by a fictional correspondent Bayram Karamollaoglu, a vicious racist stereotype of a Berlin Turk, with phonetically spelled Turkish-accented German contributions.

They have really gotten slammed for this, and instead of doing the right thing and admitting how rotten this sort of racist "humor" is, they basically published a cute response where they accused critics of being racists for picking on their "correspondent".

Given that the stars of the European far-right are meeting in Cologne for an Anti-Islam conference in September, this sort of thing is really out of place. I won't be spending another penny on this newspaper until they apologize. Until then, the contributions worth reading can be read online for free: http://www.jungle-world.com



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