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In a video exclusive for World Israel News, an antisemitic, anti-Zionist man was filmed stamping out the Israeli flag with his feet while hurling invectives and swearing at passersby – including young children – who stood up for Israel.
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Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov. (Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images)
Very little has been written in the West about Georgii Plekhanov, although he was a key figure of the Russian and international socialist movement, performing the roles of philosopher, historian, and propagandist of Marxism. He was also one of the founders of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the precursor of the Russian Communist Party.
In matters of Marxist theory, Vladimir Lenin regarded him as the ultimate authority. Although Lenin and Plekhanov ended up as bitter political antagonists, with the latter strongly opposing the October Revolution of 1917, the leaders of the new Soviet state published the works of Plekhanov on Marxist theory, which they saw as a vital educational tool.
Plekhanov may be a largely forgotten figure today. Yet some of the mistaken or polemical views that he expressed about the ideas of Karl Marx, or the history of Russia’s revolutionary movement, still shape our understanding of those questions today.
Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov was born in 1857 in the village of Gudalovka in the Tambov province of central Russia. His family belonged to the minor landowning nobility, his father being a retired army officer. His mother, who was much younger than her husband, was a well-educated woman, and it was from her that Plekhanov received his early education.
Plekhanov was a key figure of the Russian and international socialist movement, performing the roles of philosopher, historian, and propagandist of Marxism.
Initially intending to follow his father’s profession, Plekhanov studied at the military academy in Voronezh and the Konstantinovskii Artillery School in St Petersburg. He decided, however, that he was not cut out for a military career. In 1874, he enrolled in the St Petersburg Mining Institute.
While he was a student at the Mining Institute, Plekhanov first came in contact with members of the Russian revolutionary movement, and he himself began to conduct propaganda among the St Petersburg workers. In December 1876, Plekhanov organized and took part in Russia’s first revolutionary demonstration, which was held at the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg.
Several participants were arrested, but Plekhanov himself escaped and began his life as a dedicated revolutionary. The following year, he went abroad, spending several months in Paris and Berlin. On his return to Russia in 1877, Plekhanov became a leading member of the revolutionary organization Land and Liberty.
The members of Land and Liberty were inspired by the ideas of the Russian anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin. They believed that the peasants were inherently communist since they lived in village communities, so it was sufficient to conduct agitation among them in order to stir them up in rebellion against the state.
Also in accordance with the ideas of Bakunin, members of Land and Liberty held that it was futile to engage in political activity in bringing about the social revolution, as this was a distraction from the essential purpose of the organization. Land and Liberty excluded the use of terrorism as a form of political action, though the group considered that it might be justified as a reprisal against the authorities.
This position began to change in response to the failure of the “going to the people” movement to induce the peasants to rebel. There was also a growing conviction among revolutionaries that the assassination of the tsar was necessary as the first step in the radical transformation of Russia’s social and political structure. In 1879, Land and Liberty split, giving rise to two new organizations: People’s Will, which favored the use of terror, and Black Repartition, led by Plekhanov, which eschewed any type of political action — terror in particular.
In January 1880, Plekhanov began his exile in Geneva with the small group of followers constituting Black Repartition. The group never enjoyed the popularity of People’s Will, especially after the latter group organized the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.
In 1883, Plekhanov launched a new group, the Emancipation of Labor, whose standpoint he elaborated in the pamphlet Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883). He argued that People’s Will had been in the right on the question of political tactics, including terrorism. But it had gone too far in the opposite direction and aimed to take power by conspiracy, behind the backs of the people.
More momentous was Plekhanov’s contention that the revolution in Russia would not take the form of a peasant rebellion but would rather be a proletarian revolution as envisaged by Karl Marx. By making this argument, Plekhanov turned his back on the mainstream of the Russian revolutionary movement.
Lev Tikhomirov replied to Plekhanov’s pamphlet on behalf of People’s Will, predictably objecting that the social class on which Plekhanov proposed to base the revolution still barely existed, which meant postponing the revolution into the distant future. Plekhanov answered Tikhomirov in the pamphlet Our Differences (1885), in which he further condemned the ideology of People’s Will. Plekhanov claimed that the peasant village community on which the organization pinned its hopes for the establishment of a socialist society in Russia was in the process of advanced disintegration.
Plekhanov could count among his acquaintances and correspondents such figures as Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, and Rosa Luxemburg.
In exile, the Emancipation of Labor organization remained a small sect, isolated from the revolutionary movement in Russia. On the other hand, Plekhanov’s social democratic stance led him to gravitate toward the West European socialists. He could count among his acquaintances and correspondents such figures as Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, and Rosa Luxemburg.
Plekhanov attended the founding congress of the Second International in Paris in 1889. There he gave a speech ending with the declaration that the Russian revolutionary movement would either triumph as a proletarian movement, or it would not triumph at all.
Plekhanov published articles in the German socialist press, some of them taking the lead in criticizing Eduard Bernstein’s attempts to revise the main tenets of Marxist doctrine. By doing so, he enhanced his reputation as one of the leading Marxist theoreticians in Europe.
By the start of the twentieth century, events had turned in Plekhanov’s favor. In the wake of the tsar’s assassination, People’s Will had been almost completely eliminated. Under Alexander III, industry developed rapidly during the 1880s and ’90s, which meant that there was now a significant number of industrial workers in several urban centers in Russia. In St Petersburg, Moscow, Vilna, and other towns, workers’ social democratic groups began to appear from the late 1880s onward, some of which made contact with Emancipation of Labor.
In 1900, Plekhanov joined forces with Lenin, Julius Martov, and others to publish the newspaper Iskra (the Spark). This was intended to serve as a focus bringing together local social democratic groups into a single unified organization. From this effort, there emerged the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), which at its second congress in 1903 split into Bolshevik and Menshevik fractions.
At the 1903 congress, Plekhanov supported Lenin and the Bolsheviks against the Menshevik wing led by Martov. He subsequently changed affiliations and sided with the Mensheviks. However, Plekhanov’s individualistic personality meant that he was never entirely at ease in any political grouping, resulting in conflicts with the Menshevik leadership.
Plekhanov’s individualistic personality meant that he was never entirely at ease in any political grouping.
The Russian revolution of 1905 gave Plekhanov the opportunity to formulate the tactics of the Social Democrats in the long-anticipated situation. These turned out to be at variance with the opinions of the more radical RSDLP members.
Plekhanov’s reasoning was that since the proletariat was small in numbers, it needed allies. The peasants could not serve this purpose, since, as his own experience had shown, they had no revolutionary inclinations. It followed, therefore, that the best ally for the proletariat would be the bourgeoisie and the liberal intelligentsia.
Plekhanov was convinced that in a revolutionary situation, this group would prove to be a formidable opponent of the autocracy. In the event, the Russian bourgeoisie did not live up to Plekhanov’s expectations and capitulated to the government, while the peasant movement proved to be a major element in the revolution.
In the years following the 1905 revolution, a “Liquidationist” current appeared within Menshevism, arguing that there was no longer any need for an underground party organization in the new conditions. Plekhanov joined with the Bolsheviks in denouncing this as heresy. Between 1907 and 1910, he also cooperated with Lenin in a campaign against the current of Russian socialist philosophy represented by Alexander Bogdanov, which was viewed as a threat to Marxist orthodoxy.
However, Plekhanov’s accord with the Bolsheviks collapsed after the outbreak of World War I. Unlike most members of the RSDLP, who either regarded the war as one that should be purely defensive, or, like Lenin, desired Russia’s defeat, Plekhanov was an ardent advocate of an Entente victory over the Germans.
He maintained this position even after he returned to St Peterburg in April 1917, contributing pro-war articles to the newspaper Edinstvo (Unity). He regarded the revolution in October 1917 as a Bolshevik conspiracy and condemned it out of hand. By now in poor health, Plekhanov was moved from Russia into Finland, and spent the last months of his life in a sanitorium in Terijoki. He died on May 30, 1918.
Biographies of Plekhanov invariably present his early intellectual evolution as a transition from “Narodism” (or populism) to Marxism. In fact, even at the start of Plekhanov’s revolutionary career, Marx was a major intellectual influence upon him. His earliest theoretical article, for example, which was published in the journal Land and Liberty in 1879, makes reference to a number of influences including Mikhail Bakunin, Auguste Comte, and Karl Marx.
It is important to note how the members of Land and Liberty used the term “Narodnik.” They held that the function of revolutionaries was to strive to achieve the concrete aspirations of the common people. The term to describe a revolutionary of this kind was “Narodnik.”
The slogan that Plekhanov considered to be the best embodiment of the Narodnik principle was as follows: “The emancipation of the working class is the affair of the working class itself.” These were the opening words of the constitution of the International Workingmen’s Association and had been written by Karl Marx himself.
In the pamphlet Socialism and the Political Struggle, Plekhanov emphasizes that he has not abandoned the Narodnik principle. On the contrary, he argues, it is the People’s Will organization that has betrayed it by adopting conspiratorial methods. In Our Differences, on the other hand, Plekhanov uses the term Narodnik in quite a different way: he now applies it to the adherents of People’s Will and claims that Narodism is a doctrine that postulates the uniqueness of Russia’s historical and economic development, rooted in the Slavophilism of the 1840s.
Plekhanov was writing at a time when few of Karl Marx’s works other than Capital were known.
Plekhanov performed this move to turn the tables on his opponents. At that time, the Emancipation of Labor group was a tiny sect on the fringes of the Russian revolutionary movement, whereas People’s Will represented its mainstream, the product of its historical evolution to date. By designating the whole of the Russian revolutionary movement, apart from Emancipation of Labor, as Narodnik, Plekhanov could create the impression that he and his group espoused the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels while his opponents were adherents of a peculiar ideology with nationalist connotations.
Plekhanov was writing at a time when few of Marx’s works other than Capital were known. His interest in philosophy led him to be a pioneer in unearthing the Hegelian origins of Marx’s system. He was encouraged in this direction by the publication of a memoir by Engels titled Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, on which he wrote a commentary. Although Marx himself had used Hegelian terminology extensively in the first edition of Capital of 1867, he had largely eliminated this in the second edition of 1872, and purged it completely from the French edition of 1872–75.
In 1889, Plekhanov made use of his knowledge of Hegelian philosophy in a polemical essay against Tikhomirov, who had argued that social change came about gradually. In reply Plekhanov asserted that Hegel’s philosophy taught that development took place in “leaps,” which Plekhanov considered to be the essence of dialectics.
In the article “For the 60th Anniversary of Hegel’s Death,” published in German in 1891, Plekhanov first gave currency to the term “dialectical materialism” — one that neither Marx nor Engels ever used themselves — to characterize Marx’s philosophical method. He elaborated on the term in his book On the Question of the Development of a Monist View of History, in which he argued that “dialectical materialism” was a synthesis of classical German philosophy and the French materialism of the eighteenth century.
Plekhanov first gave currency to the term ‘dialectical materialism’ — one that neither Marx nor Engels ever used themselves — to characterize Marx’s philosophical method.
Plekhanov’s final major work was his History of Russian Social Thought, which he began in 1909. The first volume, which was published in 1914, contained a sketch of Russian history that attempted to explain Russia’s autocratic government and its tendency to expand its territory by colonization. The work, however, remained unfinished at Plekhanov’s death.
Although Plekhanov had little influence as a politician at the time of his death, he still commanded respect as a Marxist theoretician, and Lenin recommended that his writings should be thoroughly studied. His collected works, edited by David Riazanov, were published between 1923 and 1927 in twenty-four volumes.
Until 1924, when the Lenin cult became all pervasive, Plekhanov was regarded as the ultimate authority on Marxist theory. In the Stalin era, Plekhanov was denounced as a Menshevik and an opponent of Lenin. After Stalin’s death, however, he was rehabilitated, and his philosophical works were republished. In Russia today, Plekhanov is esteemed as a pioneer of Marxist thought in the country.
However, Plekhanov is not a reliable guide to Marx’s ideas. All of Plekhanov’s Marxist writings are polemical, and directed at proving that his political adversary is in the wrong. His approach to Marxist texts is purely utilitarian, and this does not preclude altering them if it suits his purpose.
Plekhanov’s coinage of the term “dialectical materialism” is based on a misapprehension about Marx’s intellectual evolution, and his idea that the essence of “dialectics” consists of “leaps” from quantity to quality shows a misunderstanding of Hegel’s system. Yet Plekhanov’s coinage has passed into general usage, and his version of Russian intellectual history with its “Narodnik” current has been widely accepted. His influence has extended well beyond the times in which he lived.
The Putin regime’s wobble has stoked fears that Russia’s remaining Jews could be scapegoated for its failures.
By Ben Cohen, Algemeiner
The leaders of Iran and Qatar expressed full support for Vladimir Putin during separate phone calls with the Russian President on Monday, following a weekend of unprecedented instability for his regime.
During his conversation with Putin, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi confirmed his “full support” for his Russian ally, according to an official readout of the call from the Kremlin. Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, also confirmed his backing for Putin just four days after his foreign minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, lauded the Gulf emirate’s “long-standing friendly ties” with Russia during an in-person meeting with Putin in Moscow.
The solidarity calls represent a minor boost for Putin, whose 23-year rule was sorely shaken on Saturday by an abortive mutiny led by the Wagner Group, a private mercenary organization led by Putin’s one-time ally Yevgeny Prigozhin. On Monday, Prigozhin recorded an 11-minute audio message from his new base in Belarus in which he repeated earlier claims regarding the incompetence of Russia’s military leadership, insisting that the invasion of Ukraine launched in Feb. 2022 would have succeeded had Wagner been in control of operations on the ground.
The Putin regime’s wobble has stoked fears that Russia’s remaining Jews could be scapegoated for its failures, with the two Jewish clerics who are each described as Ukraine’s Chief Rabbi warning in separate media interviews that the community could be targeted with violence.
In an interview on Monday with Ukraine’s Telegraf news outlet, Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman admitted that he was “frankly afraid” that Russian Jews could confront “pogroms” if the country’s dire internal situation persists.
Azman said he had “turned to the Jews of Russia” several times during the course of the war in Ukraine.
“I didn’t have a platform for this, I just tried to tell them through social networks: get out of there, because it might be too late,” he said. “Many left, many stayed. They are used to living there, it is difficult to leave home.”
In a separate interview with Ukraine’s NV Radio, Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich — who also carries the title “Chief Rabbi” in the wake of a 2005 intra-communal dispute — claimed that despite Putin’s public warmth towards the Jewish community, his regime had persecuted its religious leaders.
“Putin has been president or prime minister in Russia for 23 years. Over the years, he expelled 16 rabbis from Russia. That is a fact,” Bleich said. “And, thank God, in the 33 years that I have been working here, not a single rabbi has ever been expelled from Ukraine.”
Bleich added that “as Putin says that he loves Jews so much, I have a question: if you love Jews, why have this attitude towards rabbis and towards the community? Why is there often such antisemitism from the Russian authorities?”
Russia’s leaders have strayed into antisemitic rhetoric on several occasions during the last eighteen months while arguing at the same time that Ukraine’s democratically elected government, led by its Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky, is composed of neo-Nazis. Last August, the authorities launched a legal bid to shutter the Russian operations of the Jewish Agency, which assists Jews wishing to emigrate to Israel, claiming that the agency violated Russian law by allegedly maintaining a database of Russian Jews planning to make Aliyah.
Bleich noted that “since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, about 16,000 [Jews] from Ukraine have left for Israel, while around 65,000 have done the same from Russia. There is a large movement of Jews from Russia who are leaving. Many of them, after receiving an Israeli passport, returned to Russia, as they needed a passport so that one day they could leave. But it seems to me that it is now most dangerous for Jews in Russia, far more so than in Ukraine. And what will happen if Russia now loses the war? Whom will they blame? It seems to me that it would be very easy to say that the Jews were responsible.”
According to the Jewish Agency’s assessment in Jan 2022, 145,000 Jews were living in Russia. Their fate has increasingly become a point of contention in Israel, where on Monday an opposition member of parliament accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government of failing in its responsibilities.
“The Israeli government has abandoned the Jewish community in Russia,” Oded Forer — a Knesset member representing the Yisrael Beytenu Party and the chairman of Israeli legislature’s Absorption and Diaspora Affairs committee — declared.
Forer protested that “the Israeli government has not changed anything in view of what happened [in Russia] over the weekend. The committee believes that there is no match between the conduct of the government and the situation on the ground.” He called on the Jewish Agency “to prepare an array of dedicated airplanes” to ferry Russian Jews to Israel “before it’s too late.”
The post Iran, Qatar express support for Putin as fears grow for Russian Jews appeared first on World Israel News.
Netanyahu is under suspicion of graft and breach of trust for accepting lavish gifts in return for favors.
By World Israel News Staff
Hollywood billionaire Arnon Milchan testified remotely from a Brighton courthouse on Monday in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial, acknowledging that he had given hundreds of thousands of shekels worth of gifts to the Israeli premier and his wife Sara, but seeming to maintain that the gifts were given in the spirit of friendship.
Known as Case 1000, Netanyahu is under suspicion of graft and breach of trust for accepting lavish gifts in return for favors, including helping Milchan with his US visa troubles.
Milchan’s detailed account of his interactions with Netanyahu reveals an intricate exchange of favors. On one occasion, Milchan arrived at the prime minister’s Balfour residence bearing gifts of champagne and cigars, and inquired about his visa status. Netanyahu, in response, directed his former chief of staff, Ari Harrow, to look into the matter.
However, Netanyahu was not the only notable figure whom Milchan reached out to regarding his visa complications. The businessman also contacted former Israeli ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, and US ambassador Dan Shapiro when he had to wait for months for his American visa. Milchan’s efforts eventually yielded fruit, as he received extensions on his visa.
Milchan’s interactions with Netanyahu and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid also extended to discussions about a potential tax exemption law extension. Lapid had previously worked for Milchan in Los Angeles, and the two were also close.
Throughout his testimony, Milchan maintained that his relationship with Netanyahu was always on a legally unimpeachable footing. The businessman argued that the gifts he gave to Netanyahu did not influence their friendship, and he said the two men were like “brothers.” He did, however, acknowledge that once police investigators contacted him, he began thinking that the gifts were “excessive”.
When pressed on what he thought might happen if he refused to gift Netanyahu, Milchan claimed that he never wanted to turn him down due to their friendship. Defense attorney Amit Haddad dismissed as speculative a hint that Michan’s invitations to the prime minister’s Balfour residence were in peril if he chose to become more selective about showering the couple with gifts.
Milchan, of “Pretty Woman” fame, was in good spirits throughout and even made several wisecracks.
The post ‘I gave him gifts, asked for visa help’: Hollywood mogul testifies in Netanyahu trial appeared first on World Israel News.
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Jennifer Lawrence as Maggie in No Hard Feelings. (Netflix)
Jennifer Lawrence is a terrific comic actor. Look no further than American Hustle in which she was so fantastic I expected to see her cast in one rowdy comedy after another. But that was ten years ago now, and it hasn’t happened. Not even Lawrence’s many witty interviews have led to the all-out comic roles she was clearly born to play.
So I went to see No Hard Feelings to finally see Lawrence do a straight-up comedy. Film and TV writer-director Gene Stupnitsky (Jury Duty, Bad Teacher, The Office) wrote the lead role in No Hard Feelings with Lawrence in mind, so he gets points for that, at least. Because she’s great, as expected, though the movie is not.
Like so many films these days, it goes off the rails badly after a promising start. In hard times like these, it seems especially awful that almost nobody can do a decent comedy anymore. Hard to believe that Hollywood once had such a great comedy tradition, with slapstick geniuses led by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin dominating the silent film era and the incredible triad of directors — Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder — churning out brilliant films for thirty-some years in the studio era.
You’d never know it now. Seems like almost every comedy writer-director now suffers from Woody Allen syndrome and desperately wants to make serious, poignant, socially significant films that sacrifices the laughs, as if a film comedy that’s funny as hell can’t also be serious and significant in its ideas.
Anyway, No Hard Feelings is being marketed as a kind of throwback to the raunchy summer comedies of yore, yore being about a generation ago when American Pie (1999), Road Trip (2000), Wet Hot American Summer (2001), Super Troopers (2001), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Knocked Up (2007), Superbad (2007), and Pineapple Express (2008) were part of a big popular wave of movies reviving the raunchy sex comedies of a generation before that, like Porky’s (1981), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Losin’ It (1982), Risky Business (1983), and Weird Science (1985). Overall, few of them set a high cinematic standard, but at least they generally tried to be funny throughout.
But the pervasively prim sexual anxiety of our times means that there’s a lot of predictable hand-wringing over the horrors of raunch, leading to headlines like Slate’s “Is Jennifer Lawrence’s New Rom-com with a High Schooler As Creepy As It Seems?”
Not to worry, everyone! Civilization is saved! Turns out the movie deals extensively with how wrong it is for a thirty-two-year-old woman to attempt to seduce a nineteen-year-old man. Lawrence’s character is regarded as a perverted old crone any number of times — you’d think she was Mrs Methuselah literally robbing the cradle. In one party scene, teenagers make faces registering their revulsion as she passes by, though of course she looks hotter than blazes.
Still from No Hard Feelings (Netflix)
Note to the world: better pull Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) — and probably a lot of other worthy films — from circulation, now that any age-gap between sexual partners is regarded as so taboo you should go blind looking at it.
At least No Hard Feelings has an admirably class-conscious premise. It’s about a woman named Maddie (Lawrence) in desperate financial straits, whose car gets repossessed in the opening scene, meaning she won’t be able to work her second job as an Uber driver. That in turn means she won’t be able to pay the IRS the back taxes she owes on her late mother’s house in the Long Island resort area of Montauk, which has gentrified at such a terrifying rate that she’s one of the last owners of a reasonably sized middle-class property amid the mansions.
Threatened with losing her house and having to roller skate miles to her main job as a bartender serving the rich tourists she despises, she resorts to desperate measures. She answers a strange Craigslist ad, placed by wealthy helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) seeking a twenty-something women willing to date their shy, sheltered, nerdy teenage son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). He’s barely willing to leave his room, yet he’s scheduled to go off to Princeton University in the fall.
At the job interview in their expensive geometric monstrosity of a home, the parents make it clear that they actually want Maddie to bring virginal Percy out of his shell by having sex with him. The directive is to “date his brains out.” Maddie, whose pragmatic approach to sex involves casual hookups with a variety of locals, takes the idea in stride. It’s romantic commitment that makes her squeamish. She routinely ghosts guys she’s been involved with, including the tow truck driver who takes a glum, vengeful satisfaction in repossessing her car (Ebon Moss-Bachrach of The Bear).
Willing to do almost anything for the used Buick Regal Percy’s parents are dangling before her, Maddie goes after Percy aggressively, but soon discovers that this romantic, sensitive, anxious shut-in “may actually be unfuckable.” His one activity is volunteering at a local dog rescue, and when Maddie shows up in a tight minidress and spike heels, pretending not at all persuasively to want to adopt a dog while coming on to him with scary determination, he rejects her application, telling her, “You’re the type of person we’d usually be taking a dog from.”
She manages to maneuver him into her vehicle — a serial-killer-looking van borrowed from her friends — and is still so strident in her approach, Percy becomes convinced she’s abducting him with possible rape and torture in mind. As soon as she makes a move toward him, he maces her in the face.
Despite this unpromising start, Maddie persuades Percy to go out with her, figuring a few dates will do it. The funniest scene in the film involves a skinny-dipping interlude at the end of their first date that goes violently wrong. Lawrence is doing a lot of press about her scene of full-frontal nudity:
Everyone in my life and my team is doing the right thing and going, “Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?” Lawrence said while promoting the film alongside Feldman. “I didn’t even have a second thought. It was hilarious to me.”
When three smarmy teenagers mock the skinny-dipping Maddie and Percy from the shore and attempt to make off with their clothes, Maddie — still up to her chin in the surf — warns them they’d better not try it. Then she comes storming out of the ocean, striding in formidable Terminator-like fashion and lays into them fearlessly, punching, shoving, kicking. Returned punches only make her come back with increased ferocity, and something about a naked woman winning a one-against-three fight is a hilarious thrill.
But that’s the high point. From there on, the movie gets more and more solemn and talky and full of lesson-learning. Maddie’s inability to commit and class-warrior rage comes from her painful childhood as the unacknowledged daughter of a rich man who deserted his girlfriend, buying Maddie’s mother the house as a final kiss-off. Maddie and Percy bond over their traumas — he was bullied in school and his parents are so overprotective they’ve stifled his growth. She’s a case of emotional arrested development. Together they try to restage the prom experience they both missed in high school, and it all gets very sticky and sensitive and awwww-inspiring.
The writing gets slacker as the laughs dry up. Maddie and Percy become more and more supportive friends and work out their differences, forgetting about the sex altogether. It’s one of those dreaded “sensitive coming-of-age films” by the end.
As the tempo slows, you have time to wonder about things in an idle way. There’s Broderick, for example, once quite a cute comedy star himself in such films as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and The Freshman (1990), now looking paunchy and puckish as Percy’s father. He always seems about to say or do something funny, but he’s never given any material to work with. Why did Broderick, who’s also had a successful stage career (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, The Producers), take on such an inert role? He can’t possibly need the money — he’s married to Sarah Jessica Parker. Is the director a friend of his?
And the ugly financial realities that underlie the comedy make less sense as the movie winds its way to the end. For example, it’s posited that Maddie will fulfill her youthful dream and move to California once she leaves less and less unaffordable Montauk, one of the busiest resort locations in the Hamptons. But nobody moves to California to find an affordable life that’s also full of promise! But on the other hand, where can the film name as Maddie’s hope-filled destination? What place in America stands for “California” now?
No Hard Feelings definitely isn’t prepared to get that serious or significant, so “California” it is.
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Donald Tusk delivers a speech during a march organized by Civil Platform on June 4, 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. (Omar Marques / Getty Images)
On June 4, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Warsaw to protest the destruction of democratic institutions. Denouncing the record of the national-conservative party that has been in power since 2015, it was Poland’s largest single protest since the women’s demonstration against the de facto ban on abortion in fall 2020. So, with parliamentary elections due by November, is this a breakthrough in Polish politics? Not exactly.
The Warsaw march responded to the call of Donald Tusk, prime minister from 2007 to 2014, a veteran European official, and today chairman of the largest liberal opposition party, Civic Platform (PO). Although the march was officially supported by other opposition parties, from the center-right Third Road coalition to the social democrats of the New Left, Tusk was widely perceived as the main figure behind it. The ideological face of the demonstration was similarly defined: the politicians who spoke focused exclusively on threatened democratic norms and the need to restore the rule of law in Poland. To this end they drew parallels between the right-wing, Catholic authoritarianism of today’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) and Poland’s pre-1989 “actually existing socialism.”
These are hazardous comparisons, to say the least, given the social and economic structure of today’s Poland and the one before 1989. Yet it is true that PiS has been undermining the rule of law in Poland since its first year in power. Back in 2015, PiS violated the procedure for electing the Constitutional Court in order to secure a majority of judges openly sympathizing with the government. In 2016, it controversially merged the posts of minister of justice and prosecutor general, making the prosecution — the opponents of the government claim — a politicized institution. In the next step, the government introduced two new judicial chambers to the Supreme Court. One of them, the Disciplinary Chamber, has been packed with former prosecutors loyal to Zbigniew Ziobro, the present justice minister and prosecutor general, with a more or less clear intention to monitor the judges and, potentially, suspend those who do not work according to the government’s wishes.
Another example of PiS’s authoritarian practices was the suppression of women’s protests in 2020–2021, when peaceful gatherings were surrounded by the police and forced to stay in one place, and some of the participants were beaten up or taken to a faraway police station under the pretext of violating COVID-19 safety policies. PiS leaders are quite outspoken about their intention to build a “healthy society based on traditional values.” This focus on Catholic values, family-based social structure, and strong centralism has nothing in common with socialist ideology or even rhetoric, with its support for publicly owned industry and mass politics.
But while Law and Justice’s Poland is authoritarian and hostile toward opponents and minorities, it offers a limited social policy that was deemed impossible in the neoliberal Polish state before 2015. Hence, while it is absolutely right to speak about how PiS has been violating democratic procedures, the neoliberals comfortably forget that for millions of voters, a focus on returning to what went before does not sound so promising.
Surely, there were also younger supporters of left-wing policies in the crowds on June 4, demanding a “social, not authoritarian Poland,” as well as activists of the feminist movement. And yet, their voices had little impact on the event’s ultimate message. The liberal opposition simply demanded that PiS be removed from power, without promising that its own future government would introduce something radically different from the austerian “cheap state” of the transition era and Tusk’s rule.
Speaking to the crowds gathered in the center of Warsaw, Tusk exclaimed that this is where the “real Poland” is. A cheering political assessment — but far from the reality. While the liberals and their allies were mobilizing their supporters, Law and Justice did the same with its own. The right-wing media wrote for weeks about the “march of the crooks” and suggested that Tusk, if given the chance to return to power, would drive Poles into poverty (from which, by implication, they had already begun to recover thanks to PiS) and pursue policies in the interests of Germany, not his own country.
The government’s supporters do not take to the streets, but polls leave no doubt: Law and Justice’s hard-core electorate is not shrinking.
It should be recognized that this right-wing discourse is not falling on deaf ears. The government’s supporters do not take to the streets, but polls leave no doubt: Law and Justice’s hard-core electorate is not shrinking. In the first poll after the march, Tusk’s Civic Platform did come out on top, but with a minimal lead over the ruling party (32 percent to 31 percent). At the same time, the smaller opposition parties lost, so it was their voters, not disillusioned PiS supporters, who joined Civic Platform’s electoral base. There is virtually no movement of voters from the conservative-nationalist camp to the liberal side.
Civic Platform seems to have energized its core voters in response to Law and Justice’s antidemocratic moves: the attack on the independent judiciary, and more recently, the project to create a commission to investigate Russian influence in Poland, which would have the power to exclude any politician from public activity for ten years, if it deems that the politician has acted under Moscow’s influence — vaguely defined — in the past.
However, for millions of Law and Justice voters, especially the working-class and small-business voters living far from the main cities, Tusk and his party are not symbols of anything good. Voters remember that under his government, employment contracts were massively replaced by “junk contracts” depriving people of basic social guarantees, and laborers’ wages of around five to six zloty per hour (0.20 to 0.30 euros) were not infrequent. PiS — which raised the minimum wage more than twice, established children and elderly allowances, and exempted those under twenty-six from taxes — for these people remains a benefactor. Destroying the Constitutional Court or independent courts, in the face of undoubted improvements for personal budgets, are really unimportant details, especially when the ruling party constantly addresses “ordinary Poles” and “hardworking families” and promises to work on their welfare.
While Law and Justice’s Poland is authoritarian and hostile toward opponents and minorities, it offers a limited social policy that was deemed impossible in the neoliberal Polish state before 2015.
Law and Justice is also extremely skilled and aggressive in propaganda: the national broadcaster, TVP, is controlled by the party faithful, and systematically broadcasts the government’s point of view, accuses its critics of working for Putin and/or Germany, and turns up the heat against LGBTQ people or — as during the protests around abortion — women. One only has to read the statements of Law and Justice supporters on social media to see that such a narrative is successfully applied to the June 4 march as well: it is presented in pro-government media either as a deplorable rally of hooligans or as an event that served “German influence.” Mentioning Germany in this context, PiS revives a fear that was present in Polish society for decades and only recently began to fade away — that Germany never accepted its territorial losses after World War II and would be glad to conquer back East Prussia, Lower Silesia, or Western Pomerania. A historically based mistrust of Germany or a feeling that good, neighborly relations are never possible between Germans and Poles is particularly widespread among PiS voters, while neoliberal circles are eager to strengthen economic ties with Germany and even consider it to be a model state administration.
PiS has no intention of explaining itself for its violation of democratic principles, because its voters simply tend not to care. The opposition, on the other hand, is unreliable in their eyes when it argues that in the course of the struggle for democracy and against PiS, the social gains of the party’s rule will not be eradicated. It’s hard to do otherwise, after all, since among the advisers and vocal supporters of Tusk are economists who cocreated Poland’s capitalist transition, headed by the infamous Leszek Balcerowicz, the architect of “shock therapy.”
The June 4 protests mainly proved that Polish political life still revolves around the clash between national, partly Eurokceptic, strongly Catholic conservatives and pro-European economic liberals.
Thus, the march mainly proved that Polish political life still revolves around the clash between national, partly Euroskeptic, strongly Catholic conservatives and pro-European economic liberals (a liberalism less strong in their statements on, for example, women’s rights). If anyone can be a potential “third force” in Poland, the best chance goes to the extreme free-market, ultraconservative Confederation. The party did not support the June 4 march, and has unambiguously hinted that after the elections it could become a coalition partner for either PiS or PO. Recent polls give the Confederation as much as 15 percent support, won thanks to extremely primitive pro-free-market slogans, suggesting, among other things, that the total elimination of taxes will increase universal prosperity. This boundless enthusiasm for business freedom is the key element that makes the Confederation different from PiS, which, though it surely does not attack capitalism, does offer a limited set of social policies and speaks positively about state interventionism “when historically necessary.”
In other areas, the Confederation stands for the traditional family (openly praising subordinating wives to their husbands), advocates national pride instead of “cosmopolitanism,” and takes up Western-style right-wing ranting against “cultural Marxism,” “multiculturalism,” and “depravity” caused by LGBTQ people. Most of Confederation’s voters are young men, based in both big and middle-sized cities, with varying levels of education, often running a small company. The Confederation is hardly visible outside of urban circles or indeed among older voters, and tends to be extremely unpopular among women.
The Confederation’s advance does not mean some unprecedented rise of the far right, a characterization that could equally be applied to the ruling party itself. Polish national conservatives, as Law and Justice calls itself, have already exploited the most disgusting Islamophobic arguments and portrayed LGBTQ people as a danger to Polish families and society to mobilize voters against imagined threats. While PiS’s words and deeds can be seen as a part of wider trend in European politics (the right-wing parties benefited almost everywhere from both the refugee and COVID-19 crises), the Polish party could be seen as a trendsetter. Indeed, right-wing parties from Spain (with Vox cooperating permanently with PiS) to Romania have praised Law and Justice’s way of running the state as a model they strive toward.
The Confederation’s advance does not mean some unprecedented rise of the far right, a characterization that could equally be applied to the ruling party itself.
It is also PiS that erected a barrier on the border with Belarus and keeps pushing back desperate refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and various African countries. The pushback policy, polls show, has the support of more than half of the public, whom PiS has successfully convinced that refugees going through Belarus are tools of aggressive Russian policy against Poland, and should thus be treated as a threat to public safety. The completely different reaction to the arrival of a much larger group of refugees from Ukraine, who were generously welcomed in Poland, has not led to any rethinking on this score — all the more so because the pushbacks on the Polish-Belarusian border are basically taking place with the approval of Brussels, in line with the policies of Fortress Europe, closing the community’s external borders to the influx of migrants. The EU, while rightly criticizing Poland for intervening in the judicial system, has never come out with equally harsh criticism of the violations of asylum law that — confirmed also by the rulings of Polish courts — occur at this border.
It can be expected that the ruling party will use xenophobic or anti-refugee slogans throughout the remainder of Poland’s long election campaign. The problem for Polish authoritarianism is not the mobilization of the liberal electorate, which, as polls show, is unable to cross a certain threshold of support. The real problem is inflation and Poles’ deteriorating living conditions. These issues may make people who have so far been grateful to PiS for social transfers feel disappointed. The government will therefore do everything to avoid discussing the problems of everyday life, the cost of living, the housing issue (while lack of affordable housing is perhaps the most pressing problem facing young Polish adults), or public services. On these topics, the undoubted negligence is criticized by the social democratic left (the liberals are not really interested in social issues, as one might have guessed), but its discourse is barely heard. The Polish left’s yearslong neglect of building its own media has unfortunately led to a situation in which even the most accurate arguments of the social democrats — although obviously limited to proposals for correcting capitalism — only reach the already convinced.
Meanwhile, the Law and Justice government intends to make the most of Poland’s unexpected rise to prominence in NATO and the EU following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Poland has taken in the largest number of refugees and has become the main hub through which Western military aid reaches Ukraine. Along with the Baltic states, Poland has also been a key advocate of continued unconditional support for Ukraine in the EU, acting in full accord with the position of its ally, the United States, on this issue (although it is fair to say that the belief that Ukraine should be supported until victory is almost a consensus in Polish public debate).
While the war in Ukraine has brought a certain boost to Poland’s role in NATO structures, the conflict with the EU over the rule of law is unlikely to end.
The EU’s harsh course and successive sanctions packages against Russia led the Polish government to believe that Brussels would turn a blind eye not only to pushbacks on the border with Belarus, but also to the counterreform of the judicial system and violations of the rule of law. However, this was a rather illusory assumption — on June 5, the EU’s Court of Justice assessed that Poland had failed to comply with its obligations under the Treaty on European Union. The verdict stated that the Disciplinary Chamber of Poland’s Supreme Court, established at the inspiration of the government, “does not meet the requirement of independence and impartiality,” and that the changes made to the Polish judiciary after December 2019 violated EU law. This means imposing further financial penalties on Poland. So, while the war in Ukraine has brought a certain boost to Poland’s role — or rather, to the entire so-called eastern flank — in NATO structures, the conflict with Brussels over the rule of law is unlikely to end for PiS. And the party probably doesn’t even want it to, since convincing voters that the “German-controlled EU” is oppressing the Polish government is another method of mobilizing the electorate.
The decisive clash in Poland’s parliamentary elections this fall will therefore play out along similar lines to those of four years ago — between the conservative, sometimes prosocial, always antidemocratic, minority-hating right-wing party and . . . another right-wing party, this time a neoliberal one, which has only partially understood why it lost power in the first place, and why any kind of social program should be offered. The far right, taking free-market dogma to the point of nonsense and, like PiS, a strongly anti-LGBTQ force, is emerging as a third player. The Left — even the social democratic and “compromising” one, is struggling to break through with its demands. In addition, even moderate proposals, such as turning attention to the lack of affordable housing or calling to increase the powers of trade unions, are immediately labeled “extreme” or “harmful to the economy” in the stifling anti-communist atmosphere of Polish public debate.
It’s hard to resist the impression that the prescription for the basic social problems of Poles would be a left-wing program — it’s just that millions of voters won’t even hear of its existence. Again, they will choose what they consider the lesser of two evils.
On the evening of June 25, 2023, terror struck Gröna Lund amusement park in Sweden as a roller coaster partially derailed, killing one person and injuring nine others, sending them all to the hospital. Three of those that were injured were children. The unfortunate accident occurred at about 20-25 feet high.
Witnesses reported the scene with shuddering detail. Jenny Lagerstedt, a journalist there with her family, heard a metallic noise and saw the track shaking before the tragedy. Though panicked, her husband saw a roller coaster car with people falling to the ground, and her children were naturally scared.
The coaster opened in 1988 before being renovated in 2000. Spanning 2,600 feet, it reaches around 98 feet at its highest point and can reach speeds of 56 mph. As a result of the accident, local authorities opened a criminal investigation while Gröna Lund was closed for seven days to investigate the site.
It goes without saying that safety should be the number one priority of any amusement park. A spokesperson from the park issued a statement noting their commitment to safety, assuring the public that everything is and will only be opened with confidence in its safety.
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