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CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of literal torture and domestic violence, and metaphorical sexual violence. No graphic description of either, but discussion of both.


I had promised a podcast transcript which I thought I would post last Friday, but it was long and I could not finish it off then. Then as I was transcribing it I started to sour on it. This is an interview done by Volodymyr Yermolenko, who is a Ukrainian philosopher and host of this Explaining Ukraine podcast, of Marci Shore, who is an associate professor at Yale where she is teaching modern European intellectual history. Shore is Timothy Snyder's wife, the Yale history prof who teaches about the Holocaust and Modern East European history. I have just finished listening to his Ukrainian history course's lectures. His whole teaching is wrapped around imperialism though it's not particularly Marxist, but it's really good. I'll make a post about that series later. I've also listened to Shore on a number of podcasts and she's always giving the same interview, which is a summary of her 2014 book Ukrainian Night. It's about how she fell in love with the partly failed Ukrainian revolutions of 2004 and 2013, where both times Ukrainians managed to push back against Viktor Yanukovych and Russian influence, but not against oligarchs and corruption. (She also guest-lectured in her husband's course where she taught the same course/interview.)

So here Shore gives more of her back story of how she, an American bougie suburban Jewish woman became an East European scholar. I enjoyed it but I don't particularly recommend that you listen to this hour-long interview. However there was this striking conclusion which kind of blew my mind, and then later on made me really annoyed. She thinks it's a great feminist gotcha that Belarusians discuss President Lukashenko as a metaphorical perpetrator of sexual violence on the population through his authoritarian reign. There is a liberalism to her that really gets under my skin, it's hard to put a finger on it but it's more salient here. Amusingly though unintentionally, the host debunks this, saying that this politics as sexual violence discourse is routine in Eastern Europe. Maybe I missed the point. But anyway I still thought it was interesting, though more about authoritarianism in Russia, and I'm still struggling to figure out how and why she made the transition from authoritarianism to torture and domestic violence, but it's intense. She is big on Hannah Arendt, who I haven't read, so maybe that makes sense to other people. I've slightly edited this to eliminate repetitions and remove some of the "hum" type sentences of spoken word.

( The Interview )

This interview: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/150292985

Shore's lecture on the Maidan: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/149147534

Another interview where she expands on the same discussion as this post, in case it grabs you: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/145505577

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#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy. Copy this footer so people don't start recommending whole podcasts. :P

An updated list of Polanski supporters

At this point it would be easier to make the inventory of who isn't there. Sigh.

Although I find her writing highly entertaining, I'm far from being a big fan of Rosie DiManno. I've stopped reading the Star so I don't read her regularly, but I do read Antonia Zerbisias' blog, Broadsides. In this entry, she juxtaposes the "courage" of the American teabaggers with that of the Afghan women who protested Hamid Karzai's proposal marital rape law. In there, she reposted Rosia DiManno's most recent article. I would like to bring the following passage to your attention:

In the West, the outrage has arisen primarily over a section of this negotiated legislation that would make rape within marriage legal. Frankly, I do not understand the fixation among religious scholars – from all faiths – with sexual matters, intimacy and procreation.

But the hysteria in the West over the marital rape provision has been disingenuous. It was only 16 years ago that Oregon became the first U.S. state to make marital rape a crime – and just this year Oklahoma became the 50th state to follow suit. In Canada, the Criminal Code was amended in 1983.

Afghanistan is one of the most medieval societies on Earth. Disabusing Afghan men of the idea they can demand sex at least once every four days – as the law stipulated – will require a cultural shift of tectonic proportions.

They are not, in fact, so far behind the worldwide learning curve on this issue. It isn't, forgive me, a deal-breaker.

Far more worrisome is that part of the legislation that would return women once again to sequestered isolation, forbidding Shia females from venturing outside the home unless accompanied by a male relative.

This was a core commandment of the fanatical Taliban and must in no way gain a toehold again. Women all over Afghanistan today go out, alone and in groups. They walk their children to school. They shop. They work. They seek medical treatment. They do it in Kabul and they do it in Kandahar city.

NATO countries and donor nations have the right to draw a line, here.