Archive: Arena Quarterly #5

Letter from London: Viral Internationalism

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Gerry Simpson

Mar 2021

…for the first time in my adult life, we Amero-Europeans ceased to gaze out at the world with our usual mixture of transient humanitarianism and inactive charitableness and instead became the subject of a sorrowful gaze from elsewhere.

Sham Diagnosis

Arena Quarterly no. 5

David Ferraro

Mar 2021

...denial of care to a particular group of patients is not the application of some apolitical, medical procedure. It is thoroughly reactionary, and continues the worst traditions of psychiatric care, updated for the neoliberal age.

On Capitol Hill

Arena Quarterly no. 5

John Hinkson

Mar 2021

…we should not take too seriously the portrayal of Biden as a leader deeply formed in the experience of grief…he is also a Cold War warrior, with a demonstrable inclination to pursue the Democrats’ hawkish orientation towards war where it encounters resistance.

After Trump?: Cancel culture and the new authoritarianism

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Simon Cooper

Mar 2021

After the failed insurrection at the US Capitol building, an event irreconcilably both absurd and frightening, Donald Trump, for so long a master of the attention economy, finally got ‘cancelled’. While many of his Republican colleagues made a last-minute decision (motivated by self-interest) to dump him, the real blow for Trump was the response by corporate America. Facebook and Twitter blocked the president’s social-media accounts, Shopify terminated stores affiliated with him, YouTube removed channels questioning…

Yi Hak-nae and the Burma–Thailand Railway

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Gavan McCormack

Mar 2021

In 1946–47, Australia conducted twenty-three war-crimes trials in Singapore, with sixty-two defendants. It found eighteen guilty and sentenced them to death, acquitted eleven, and sentenced an additional thirty-three to varying prison terms.

The Trump Mediation

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Bruce Kapferer, Roland Kapferer

Mar 2021

What Sinclair Lewis had warned in It Can’t Happen Here—a Hitler-esque rise to power at the centre of the democratic world—anticipated by all sides from the early days of Trump’s apotheosis, seemed actually to be materialising.

COVID Among the Palestinians

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Micaela Sahhar

Mar 2021

As the pandemic raged, it appeared that Israel’s disregard for Palestinian life, an institutionally entrenched position, would be costly not only for Palestinians but for Israelis themselves.

Editorial, Arena no. 5: Political Mutations

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Alison Caddick

Mar 2021

Liberalism and neoliberalism, and thus unthinking economic and cultural globalisation, see only a larger, albeit more diverse, pond over which liberal governance can expand.

Alan Roberts Prize Essay: The Limits of Science Communication

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Chloe Ward

Mar 2021

Knowledge and scientific understanding could have been a democratic inheritance... Instead the West—that is, a powerful, liberal consensus in the West—doubled down on an elitist, technocratic politics, inattentive to social need or the growing crisis of democratic representation...

‘Except by Chance’: The Christchurch Inquiry

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Faisal Al-Asaad

Mar 2021

...we might consider how, with unerring though likely unwitting proficiency, the report essentially acts as an endorsement of Countering Violent Extremism…

Money Turns Abstract: A history of money and the emergence of Bitcoin

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Hernán Gabriel Borisonik

Mar 2021

Is blockchain a weapon that serves to emancipate people, or to emancipate money? Is it a way back to money used as a means to an end, or the ultimate expression of its fetishism?