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EL ESPECTADOR

How The Far Right Usurped The Tools Of Leftist Counterculture

Poland's Janusz Korwin-Mikke
Poland's Janusz Korwin-Mikke
Carlos Granés

-OpEd-

BOGOTÁ — There is a curious new twist to a longstanding political phenomenon, and we see it popping up around the world. Provocation and outrageous behavior is switching sides.

Crossing the line has been a part of culture since poets like Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, with their disheveled hair and shabby clothes, used to challenge the bourgeois customs in the 19th century. Avant-garde visual artists and political activists alike have used their skills to mock the establishment, whether it was Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, a master of undermining the status quo, or the Yippies who fielded a pig as a candidate for the 1968 U.S. presidential elections.

Counter-culture messages were always easy to spread when there was agitation in the air. Anything making waves or changing the natural order of things is news, and the media would naturally gaze, in fascination or horror, at these phenomena that shock our routines. It wasn't surprising then that cultural rebels were always in the news.

But while these strategies of provocation used to be a tool for the Left, they have now been usurped by the far-right.

I am thinking of that gray member of the European parliament, Poland's Janusz Korwin-Mikke, someone we would never have heard of were it not for his Nazi salutes in the chamber and his primitive remarks about women. Or take the Spanish Catholic group, HazteOír (Make Yourself Heard), of dubious far-right provenance, which has about 50,000 local fans after plastering anti-transgender messages on a traveling bus. Or the polemicist Milo Yiannopoulos, a kind of muse for the Trump era, who was until recently a regular guest at gatherings of conservative student societies where he would put his reality TV skills on show, speaking his mind and its misogynist and racist inanities.

The angle from which far-right parties are mounting their attack.

This shift in roles shows that Western societies have changed. Those who used to need to make noise to be heard are now running museums, universities, parliaments and media companies. They won the cultural war against moral rigidity but have left the field wide open for loud provocation and political diatribe that the far-right has usurped.

It is no coincidence that various xenophobic European parties bear the word "Freedom" in their names. The Left's cultural triumph has given legitimacy to sexual freedom and have censored expressions of contempt for difference. That's precisely the angle from which far-right parties are mounting their attack. Their discourse, left out of mainstream political debate and institutions, is charging back with counter-culture slogans and by lambasting the establishment.

But at this moment, let us remember a central lesson of the past and not give in to the temptation to use censorship against the tactics of provocation.

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Society

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

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