Claire Berlinski

Tuesday

Claire Berlinski

The Czarist image of mass shootings

Let’s retire the term ‘gun violence,’ or reserve it for jealous husbands who shoot their wives. What happened in El Paso is terrorism; more properly, it is a nihilist insurgency.We should pause to consider the origins of this phenomenon in late Czarist Russia, the cradle of modern terrorism. There is an eerie similarity between America’s shooter culture and the sinister and contagious form of violent nihilism that emerged between 1861 and 1866 in Russia. A number of young men seemed to decide that it would be fine to kill a large number of people. No one knows why. The killer in El Paso scribbled a lunatic alt-right manifesto; the Dayton murderer, to judge from his Twitter feed, was drawn to far-left bromides.

nihilism

Thursday

Claire Berlinski

Turkey’s agony – how Erdogan turned a peaceful protest into a violent nightmare

From our UK edition

  Istanbul By now, everyone has heard of the brutal suppression of protests all over Turkey, which began with a peaceful sit-in in Istanbul to protect a hapless apology for a park from demolition. Right by the city’s unofficial centre, Taksim Square, Gezi Park had been slated to become yet another one of the ruling AKP’s signature Ottoman-cum-Disneyland construction projects. It was hardly much of a park, by London standards, but it was one of the last remaining places in the area with a few trees and a bit of room to stroll around. The protesters found the idea of losing that tiny refuge from Istanbul’s urban chaos unbearable.

Saturday

Claire Berlinski

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Dealing with the aftershocks

From our UK edition

By chance, my father and I were together when we heard the news. We had both just flown to Washington DC - he from Paris, I from Istanbul - to care for my grandmother, who¹d had a heart attack. Before the words "major earthquake in Haiti" came over the car radio, we were already under the impression that we were living through a serious family emergency.  But after those words filtered through, the family emergency became far, far more serious. My brother Mischa and his wife Cristina have been living in Haiti for nearly three years. Cristina, an Italian lawyer, has been working for the Justice Section of MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. My brother is a novelist and journalist. Their first child, Leo, was born ten months ago.