Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Books, History, Russia, Ukraine

Book Review: Overreach

RUSSIA-UKRAINE

Intro: Owen Matthews is a writer with close family ties to Russia, but a disturbing portrait of the Russian president’s propaganda is swallowed whole by his own people. The Russian despot’s lies are working. Overreach is the inside story of Putin’s war against Ukraine

READERS of foreign affairs’ news will know the name of Owen Matthews, a veteran Moscow correspondent, from articles and pieces he has written about Russia and Ukraine.

But his book on the war now raging between those two countries – an act of pure and vicious choice by President Putin – reveals for the first time the depth of his own family’s involvement in the complex background of conflicting national identities.

Or as he puts it: “We all like to believe that we think with our rational minds. But a little bit of us, a deep bit, thinks with our blood.” For Matthews’ mother, Lyudmila Bibikova, was born in Kharkiv, a predominately Russian-speaking city, at the heart of the Ukrainian territories Putin is determined to annex; and her own parents were both born in what is now, legally, Ukrainian land.

Yet as Matthews goes on to explain: “The Bibikov family did not consider themselves Ukrainian. For two centuries the Bibikovs played a significant role in Russia’s imperial role in Ukraine, first as servants of the Tsars and later as loyal lieutenants of Soviet power. Whether I like it or not my family history – my blood – is intimately linked not only to Ukraine and Russia but to the history of the Russian Empire.”

Although Putin is widely regarded as being highly motivated by a desire to reassemble the Soviet Union – and the secession of Ukraine in 1991 marked the end for the USSR – the Russian president sees himself as the heir to Catherine the Great, who brought most of Ukraine under the Kremlin’s rule.

And, as Matthews recounts, his ancestor, Captain Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bibikov, was “one of the Russian officers who accompanied the empress on her first imperial progress through the newly conquered lands of south and west Ukraine”.

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Arts

Camouflaged appearance

IS THIS WHO YOU ARE?

HE was a big, heavy man. His camouflage jacket was buttoned tightly around him. The hat, decorated with skulls, was pulled low on his forehead. The bandana across his face left just enough space to see the glitter of his eyes.

He might just have been wrapped up against the cold, but everything about his dress and demeanour said, “Stay away! Don’t talk to me.”

There were six concrete steps between the car park and the pavement. As I walked down, he stepped up purposefully, and was breathing heavily by step three.

“You’ll get there,” I said, speaking as if I had every right to.

“Oh, I’m getting too old for this,” he replied.

“I know that feeling,” I said with a little laugh.

At the bottom I looked over my shoulder. He stopped at the top and turned. He raised his hand in a sort of salute, and said “Happy New Year, mate.”

For a second we were more than the camouflage we habitually wear; we were fellow travellers on the same difficult journey.

I could have taken his appearance at its word and said nothing, but how we look is so rarely who we are.

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Arts, Culture, Human Rights, Politics, Society

Book banning in the US is inspiring educational censorship elsewhere

CENSORSHIP

BOOK BANNING is spreading at an alarming rate in school districts across the United States. PEN America recently documented more than 2,500 books that have been banned stemming across 32 different states during the 2021-22 academic year.

These bans are not isolated incidents, but part of a coordinated assault on public education that’s taking aim at the teaching of race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities and US history.

Demands to ban books in American schools is not new. But book banning now has erupted into a national movement. Coordinated and highly organised activist groups have transformed school board meetings into political battlegrounds, threatening educators and undermining the freedom to learn.

These efforts to censor books are an affront to the core principles of free expression and open inquiry that US democracy swears by. Equally worrying, however, is the fact that these patterns of attacks on public education in the US appears to be inspiring similar efforts in other countries, even though such censorship campaigns haven’t had as much success there yet.

In the UK, officials are raising the spectre of critical race theory in schools – an issue that was not previously a topic of debate or concern – to try and stop the teaching of histories that explore systemic racism. That’s part of what authors have described as a mood ‘shift’ in the UK – a budding ‘culture war’ that is leading to the censorship and removal of books from school shelves. Books being removed are often children’s books that look at institutional racism, diversity and LGBTQ+ identities.

Echoes of US-based group tactics are also manifesting in Canada, with parental groups asking school boards to ban certain books – again with LGBTQ+ content – and seeking to change curricular topics that they see as being part of the teaching of critical race theory.

The book banning movement has also gained the attention of politicians. Australia’s Senate voted against the inclusion of critical race theory in the country’s school curriculum in 2021.

Of course, educational censorship laws and book bans, particularly aimed at silencing certain peoples, religions, or viewpoints, are tactics that have long been used by governments.

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