Racism and the Canadian State

The practices and official discourse of a variety of state institutions in Canada have reflected a new level of race consciousness during the past five years. A notable development within the Canadian state has been the emergence at all levels of administrative and parliamentary institutions of new race relations and visible minority committees, liaison and consultative structures, programs, and commissions. Following a series of racially-motivated attacks within Toronto subways directed principally at South Asians, the Metropolitan Toronto Police and the Toronto Transit Commission jointly established a system designed to intercept attackers and prevent further incidents. A growing number of municipal councils and boards of education in Metropolitan Toronto and other major cities such as Vancouver and Ottawa have established standing committees on racism or multiculturalism (with race relation components ). A Police Ethnic Relations Unit and Liaison Group on Law Enforcement and Race Relations became well-publicized adjuncts to the Metro Toronto Police Force

Онтолого-политический аспект в учении Хайдеггера

The article provides the ontological context for a possible Heideggerian solution of a politi-co-philosophical problem. Both the ontological issue and the politico-philosophical issue share the same problematic structure of the relation between the general and the particular. The general is the cause and the particular is the effect. Hence, this issue is the ontological issue of causality. The article demonstrates that how the Heideggerian thought of Being dwells on the issue of cause, and how the introduction of the ontological difference, and in-terdependence, of being and Being can shed light on the political aspect of thought. The article provides the ontological context for a possible Heideggerian solution of a politico-philosophical problem. This problem is rooted in the context of the history of Being, namely, at the end of the history of metaphysics which allows and demands transforming its ground. At the end of the history of metaphysics, Being has revealed itself as Subject. Both the ontological issue and the politi-co-philosophical issue share the same problematic structure, that of Gestell as well as of the relation between the general and the particular. The general is the cause and the particular is the effect. Hence, this issue is the ontological issue of causality. The article demonstrates that how the Heideggerian thought of Being dwells on the issue of cause, and how the introduction of the ontological difference, and interdependence, of being and Being can shed light on the political aspect of thought. First, the article indicates that both Subject and Dasein are variants of the fundamental self-revelation of Being as ὑποκείμενον. The metaphysico-historical conclusion of the latter is Subject, or Gestell, but its Heideggerian transformation is Dasein. The time of Gestell is characterised by a strict, yet reciprocally supportive, opposition between the one (the general) and the many (the particular) whereas Dasein is characterised by the ontological circle and unity between the one and the many, based on an original interpretation of ancient Greek thought. Second, the article demonstrates that Subject, or Being as Subject, is the causal principle which governs the modern time. Everything has to do with the causal principle. Thus, the transformation of the fundamental structure of our time has to do with the trans-formation of this causal principle, that is, of transforming subject into self-concealing Being. Third, the article shows that the analysis of causality is rooted in the description of the ready-to-hand in Being and Time, which is subsequently reintegrated in the reinterpretation of pre-Socratic thought (here, of the thought of Anaximander), that is, in the course of transforming the ground of Western thought into self-concealing Being. It freshly reveals the structure of ontological difference as that of the relation between the one and the many, or the general and the particular, where the general is no more con-ceived as a being but as Being. Finally, the very ontological unity of the one and the many is shown to be embedded in causality itself. This unity, as exhibited already in Being and Time, with the help of the principles exposed by Aristotle and Kant, is equiprimordial, or ontologically synonymous, with the ontological relation between Being and time

Значение рациональности в философии Хайдеггера

The article traces Heideggerian thought back to its pre-conceptual origin and demonstrates how thus a transformation of the notion of rationality has been achieved in his philosophy. The thinker focuses his investigation on the ontological basis of Western rationality. He also develops the structure of his own thought by reinterpreting this ontological basis as expressed in Aristotle and Plato, in particular, and the Greek thought of presence in general. Heidegger rediscovered the crucial link between thinking and finitude, hence, his early musings on pre-conceptual origins of logical, or conceptual, thought later, in his mature pe-riod, culminated in the thinking of pain as the ontological difference

Svarbi studija apie dingusį ir atrastą litvakų pasaulį

Rec.: Šarūnas Liekis, Antony Polonsky, Chaeran Freeze (eds.), Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry: Jews in the Former Grand Duchy of Lithuania since 1772, Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013, 509 p.

HOLOKAUSTAS LIETUVOJE: ŽVILGSNIS Į VAKARŲ ISTORIOGRAFIJOS DISKURSĄ

The main aim of this article is to discuss the Holocaust in Lithuania as it appears in the discourse of Western historiography. This aim and the structure of this article have two goals: first, to discuss the Western historiographic perspective on the Holocaust during the period of the Cold War; second, to review the shifts in the historiography after the Cold War and the Fall of the Soviet Union. The first chapter of this article underlines that during the first period, the historiography of the Holocaust was mainly based on the sources of the Trials of the Major War Criminals (the Nuremberg Trials) and the legal proceedings during the subsequent years. This provided the foundation for historians to write studies about the Holocaust. However, these studies focused mainly on the criminal character of the Nazi party, the military and security forces, while the voices of the victims were silenced – at least until the Eichmann Trial; in addition, the question about the collaboration of locals in the Final Solution during the German occupation was also kept out. It should be underlined that this narrative was quite suitable for those Lithuanians who lived in Western Europe or the US, as it mainly stressed the guilt of the Nazi Germans. The Fall of the Soviet Union initiated a significant shift in the research of the Holocaust in Lithuania. The main factor of this shift was the opening of the archives in Eastern Europe, which provided the conditions to carry out research on the Holocaust in Lithuania. These studies made new conclusions about the relations between Lithuanians and Jews, anti-Semitism in Lithuania, the anti-Soviet underground and its anti-Semitic attitudes, the first pogroms in German-occupied Lithuania during the first days of the War against the Soviet Union etc. This shift pushed the topic of the Holocaust in Lithuania to the top of the priorities of the agenda of Western historians and, in the broader sense, of the whole research centered around the persecution and eradication of the European Jews.Straipsnyje siekiama išanalizuoti esamą Vakarų istoriografijos atliktų holokausto Lietuvoje tyrimų būklę. Pirmoje straipsnio dalyje daugiausia dėmesio yra skiriama pokario ir Šaltojo karo laikotar­pio istoriografijai. Nors šis laikotarpis nepasižymėjo būtent Lietuvai skirtų tyrimų gausa, jis turėjo didelę reikšmę holokausto suvokimui, jo istoriniam, teisiniam, moraliniam vertinimui bei pagrindinių sąvokų, tyrimo metodų, kurie vėliau buvo pritaikyti ir vertinant holokaustą Lietuvoje, suformavimui. Antroji straipsnio dalis skirta apžvelgti Vakarų istoriografijos pokyčius, įvykusius pasibaigus Šaltajam karui ir sugriuvus Sovietų Sąjungai. Būtent šis laikotarpis, prasidėjęs XX a. paskutiniame dešimtmetyje, Vakarų istorikų dėmesį nukreipė į Rytų Europą, o Lietuvą padarė vienu iš svarbiausių holokausto tyrėjų vykdomų tyrimų objektu

PASIVAIKŠČIOJIMAS ŠIAURĖS JERUZALĖS PĖDSAKAIS

Rec.: Аграновский Г., Гузенберг И. Вильнюс: по следам Литовского Иерусалима: памятные места еврейской истории и культуры: путеводитель. Вильнюс: Государственный еврейский музейим. Виленского Гаона, 2011, 655 p

1941 m. KOVO 19 d. LAF ATSIŠAUKIMAS: PROVOKACIJA, FALSIFIKATAS AR TIKRAS DOKUMENTAS?

This article concerns the leaflet of the Lithuanian Ac­tivist Front, dated 19 March 1941. The leaflet, titled Dear enslaved brothers! has two different versions. One version has a sentence which calls that “The trai­tor will be pardoned only provided he proves beyond doubt that he has killed one Jew at least”. Another version of this document does not have the same sen­tence, but holds a remark that it is a multiplied copy of the document. Archival resources show that the version of this leaflet with the already mentioned sentence was found in the house of anti-Soviet activist Osvaldas Žadvy­das during rummaging. The interrogations of the par­ticipants of the anti-Soviet underground movement in Lithuania show that the leaflet came from Berlin to Lithuania on 23 March 1941. This leaflet was mul­tiplied and circulated in various places of Lithuania. The interrogation of one of the major LAF signalmen Mykolas Naujokaitis underlines that all documenta­tion and leaflets were sent from Berlin to Lithuania by an active Voldemarist and Head of the LAF Com­mission of Relations with Lithuania Stasys Puodžius. This article underlines that the authorship of the leaflet with the mentioned sentence belongs to the le­adership of the LAF Berlin branch and the fraction of Voldemarists.Straipsnyje analizuojamas 1941 m. kovo 19 d. atsišaukimas „Brangūs vergaujantys broliai!“, kurio yra išlikę keli skirtingi variantai. Viename jų yra sakinys: „Išdavikams bus tik tuomet dovanota, jei jie tikrai įrodys, kad likvidavo nors po vieną žydą.“ Straipsnyje pateikiama istoriografinė šio dokumento analizė, atskiras dėmesys skiriamas archyviniams duomenims, kurie leidžia atkurti galimus šio doku­mento atsiradimo ir platinimo Lietuvoje kelius

The extraordinary statelessness of Deepan Budlakoti: The erosion of Canadian citizenship through citizenship deprivation

As part of the larger trend towards "securitization" of citizenship, citizenship deprivation in Canada is becoming increasingly normalized, resulting in some cases in statelessness. In this article, I pursue a sociology of statelessness by examining its localized production and connections to a broader network of social and material relations. I do this through a case study of Canadian-born Deepan Budlakoti, who at age 22 was informed that he was in fact not Canadian, and lacking any other citizenship, was rendered stateless. Actor-Network Theory is employed to trace how it is that legal documental and heterogeneous networks of humans and things (e.g., a "legal technicality") have been enrolled to produce a legal decision declaring that Budlakoti, despite his Canadian birth certificate and passports, was never a Canadian citizen. Yet because he has not exhausted all avenues to acquisition of some citizenship (e.g., in India or Canada), he also has failed to secure recognition of his statelessness. A particular innovation in this analysis is the exploration of the exemption in the Canadian Citizenship Act from jus soli citizenship for children born to foreign diplomatic staff. Networks of immigration tribunal and court judgements, and documents treated as evidence have connected and translated into establishing Budlakoti's fit with this exemption, despite countervailing evidence and a lifetime of documented and state-assisted reproduction of his Canadianness. While robbed of his legal and social identity, and suffering the egregious consequences of statelessness, Budlakoti continues to campaign for restoration of his right to have rights within his country of birth