Mediaboss Marketing

As both demolition and construction continue, Tiranas denizens continue to live in the physical and aesthetic vestiges of its political history.

Tirana is a city of contradictions, juxtapositions, and construction. The city is one of the densest in Europe, but there is green everywherestreets are shaded by mature trees and balconies overflow with vines that spill down apartment blocks into the messy net of wires that hang above everystreet.

Indeed, electrical wires are precariously zip-tied to signposts at neck height outside even the newest of glass buildingsa sight that would give safety inspectors a minor stroke in many countries but is commonplace in Tirana.

Cranes and skyscrapers abruptly punctuate the courtyards housing traditional, shingle-roofed Balkan homes that fill the side streets connecting the boulevards radiating out from Tiranas centre: Skanderbeg Square.

Albanias history of Ottoman and Italian occupations, then decades of communist rule, is visually apparent throughout the city, but nowhere is it more prominent than in Skanderbeg Square, named for thenational hero who successfully repelled multiple Ottoman sieges.

In its southeast corner sits the citys landmark clock tower and the Ethem Bey Mosquecovered inside and out by ornatefrescoes of beautiful natural scenery. Both the tower and mosque werebuilt by the Ottomans in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The south of Skanderbeg Square meanwhile is flanked by museums and government ministries housed in yellow and red Renaissance Revival buildings that appear to have been airlifted from Naples.

Italian colonisation of and influence on Albania preceded Benito Mussolinis 1939 invasion and occupation, and much of the layout of Tiranas city centre dates back to the work of Italian urban planners and architects in the 1920s and 1930s.

The grand Dshmort e Kombit Boulevardalso designed by Italians and flanked by Romanesque umbrella pinesruns from the Renaissance Revival portion of Skanderbeg Square south to Mother Teresa Square. Before it was named for Albanias best-known nun, the square was named for the Italian king Victor Emmanuel III, and it is still flanked by Italian fascist-era architecture that now houses the University of Arts, Polytechnic University of Tirana, and National Archaeological Museum.

The socialist architecture of the Enver Hoxha regime fills the remainder of Skanderbeg Squareand much of the rest of the city. The Palace of Culture of Tiranaencompassing both the National Library and the National Theatre of Opera and Balletstands in the squares east and the National History Museum occupies its north.

The brutalistPyramid of Tiranaformerly the Enver Hoxha Museum, then a NATO base during the Kosovo War, then a nightclublies to the south of Skanderbeg Square along Dshmort e Kombit Boulevard. The Pyramid is now under renovation and will house an IT and cultural hub offering free afterschool software, robotics, animation, and music classes to teenagers.

The Blloku neighbourhood lies to the southwest of Skanderbeg Square. Once home to the residences of Albanias politburo, ordinary Albanians were restricted from entering the area under communism, but like the Pyramid, Bllokuis now reclaimed. Boutiques, restaurants, and cafes fill its streets, and tourist guides often cite it as the 2022 European Youth Capitalsliveliest district.

Since the economic and social upheaval of the 1990s, the migration of Albanians from rural areas to work either abroad or in the capital has intensified. Tirana grows by around 30,000 people each year, and Tiranas metropolitan area is now home to a third of the countrys population.

That growth has manifested increased sprawl. There used to be small parks all over the city, one father playing with his son at a playground in the Grand Park of Tirana tells me. But the small parks all got developed. Now, we have to come here,into the city centre, for my son to play.

Private car ownershipbanned for decadesskyrocketed after the fall of communism,and commuting through the sprawl by car contributed to hazardous levels of air pollution.

You would find some new neighbourhood built without proper planning and often the existing roads would get jammed because of the sudden rise of population in that area, Enejdi Zeqo, a 28-year-old resident of Tirana, tells Emerging Europe.

The citys government has made it a priority to re-concentrate construction into the central core and promote alternatives to car use. Skanderbeg Square, which had become a congested roundabout to accommodate drivers, was made a pedestrian zone in 2017, and bike lanes are now common through the city centre.

Almost every main road now has bicycle and bus lanes, making these better choices to get around the city, Zeqo says. Some of the most important schools and roads are being reconstructed and with better conditions than before. And the green areas of the city are more usable, such as the Grand Park, with more walkways, bicycle lanes, sports courts and a better infrastructure overall.

Tiranas Mayor Erion Veliaj has installed over 30 playgrounds across the cityincluding one in the Grand Park, which is the largest of its kind in the region.

In 2016, the city launched its Tirana 2030 initiative. We wanted to create a small, very dense urban centre and preserve as much as possible of the suburban and rural territory, Joni Baboci, an advisor to Veliaj on planning and architecture, said in 2021. So the plan pretty much forbids development for residential reasons outside of the core, and incentivises people to build in the centre.

Now, new towers ring Skanderbeg Square, with more under construction, making what Zeqo calls a weird and absurd contrast to the immediately adjacent historical buildings. Much of Tirana 2030s vision was designed by Italian architect Stefano Boeri and includes the planting of millions of trees in an orbital forest set to encircle the city.

However, in order to realise the plan and make way for new construction, many older buildings will or have beendemolished. This has brought the city a great deal of criticism.

When the modernist National Theatre, built during the Italian occupation, was slated for demolition, protesters occupied it for over two years in the hope of saving it. Artists, academics, and architects signed petitions and the Danish architecture firm engaged to work on the theatres successor withdrew from the project.

Some of my friends participated in the protests, Zeqo says. But the problem was that there was no proper information about what was going to happen and the protests were mostly organised by the opposition. There was a lot of doubt if it was all happening for the right motives or if it was just a political excuse to oppose government projects.

Eventually, police used pepper spray to forcibly remove demonstrators and destroyed the landmark in the dead of night during a Covid-19 curfew in May 2020. While Albanias Prime Minister Edi Rama (once mayor of the city) supported the demolition, then-president Ilir Meta called it,a moral crime that cannot be granted amnesty. The EU delegation to Tirana, which had called for dialogue between protesters and authorities,criticised that the demolition went ahead without this meaningfully occurring.

As both demolition and construction continue, Tiranas denizens continue to live in the physical and aesthetic vestiges of its political history.

They have reclaimed Bllokus social space, and their vining plants and electrical cables continually reclaim the citys walls and streets.

Even if unable to give sufficient input prior to megaprojects, those who call Tirana home will no doubt continue to make it home through their own means.

Overall, it seems like Tirana is going in the right direction, but there is still a lot that could be done to make it better, Zeqo concludes.

Unlike many news and information platforms,Emerging Europeis free to read, and always will be.There is no paywall here.We are independent,not affiliated with nor representing any political party or businessorganisation.We want the very best for emerging Europe, nothing more, nothing less. Your support will help us continue to spread the word about this amazing region.

You can contributehere. Thank you.

Link:
The changing face of Tirana - Emerging Europe

Presentation by Dr. Valerie Bunce, Political Scientist and Professor Emerita of Cornell University Research

Valerie Bunce is the Aaron Binenkorb Professor Emerita of Cornell University.She is a political scientist who began her career as a specialist on the political economy of the Soviet bloc.Once communism fell and the Soviet, Yugoslav, and Czechoslovak states dismembered from 1989-1992, her teaching focused on transitions to democracy and dictatorship and U.S. democracy assistance in Russia; Ukraine; the Caucasus; Poland; and Hungary.

She is the author and co-author/co-editor of five books with a sixth one currently under review that addresses challenges to democracy in Europe; the U.S.; Asia; and Africa.She has taught at Lake Forest College; Northwestern University; University of Chicago; Cornell University; University of Zagreb; and Central European University. She retired from Cornell in 2019.

The event is sponsored by The History Club of Ithaca College and the Departments of History and Politics.

Read more here:
The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Presentation Wed., April 19, 2023 ... - Ithaca College

On April 11, 1963, John XXIII issued the encyclical Pacem in Terris, a powerful call for a world in which there were neither victims nor executioners that cemented the pontiffs reputation as Good Pope John. With the world having teetered on the brink of nuclear war during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, a papal appeal for peace on earth was well received everywhere, including the Soviet Unionalthough the view in some Vatican quarters that the masters of the Kremlin took the encyclicals message to heart was rather naive.

What, then, did Pacem in Terris teach? And how does its analysis of world affairs look, six decades later?

John XXIII taught that the world had entered a new historical moment, characterized by the widespread conviction that all men are equal by reason of their natural dignity. That conviction implied that the classic Catholic social doctrine principle of the common good had a global, not only national, dimensionwhich in turn meant that peace on earth had to be pursued through the establishment of a worldwide public authority. That global authority ought to make the protection and promotion of human rightswhich Pope John defined expansivelyits fundamental objective.

As for communist states, they, too, ought to be enfolded within the global political community, for communist movements, whatever their false philosophical teachings, might nonetheless contain elements that are positive and deserving of approval. Finally, Pacem in Terris taught that the arms race was a snare and a delusion; universal disarmament was a moral imperative demanded by right reason, for, in an age such as ours, which prides itself on its atomic energy, it is contrary to reason to hold that war is now a suitable way to restore rights which have been violated.

For all that John XXIIIs grand vision inspired hope that the world could find its way beyond the knifes-edge stalemate of the Cold War, the lacunae in the encyclical that friendly critics pointed out after it was issuedits lack of attention to the realities of power in world politics, its misreading of the intrinsic linkage between Marxist ideas and totalitarian politics, its seeming indifference to the enduring effects of original sin in the political spherewere, in the retrospect of sixty years, deficiencies indeed.

The Cold War ended, not because trust (another key theme in the encyclical) had been established between imperfect democracies and pluperfect tyrannies; it ended thanks to what William Inboden (in The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and the World on the Brink) describes as the strategy of negotiated surrender devised by the United States and supported by its Western allies. And while an arms race did, in the 1980s, intensify the dangers of nuclear war at several moments, it also broke the capacity (and will) of the Soviet Union to continue the competition.

As for the encyclicals proposal for the development of a universal public authority capable of addressing issues of global import, the incapacities and corruptions displayed by the United Nations since Pacem in Terris was issued, not least in the defense of basic human rights, have raised serious questions about both the feasibility (even desirability) of any such enterprise.

John XXIIIs welcome stress on human rights as an important issue in international public life was validated by the revolution of consciencethe human rights revolutionthat his third successor, John Paul II, ignited in East Central Europe in 1979: a revolution that was another key factor in the nonviolent collapse of European communism. But neither the Church nor world politics has been well-served by the tendency in Pacem in Terris to label as a human right virtually every political, social, and economic desirable: a tendency that has subsequently become an irresistible temptation for the Holy See in its address to world politics.

In his commentary on the encyclical, the great Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray argued that John XXIIIs notion of the ideal political communitywhat Murray described as the free man under a limited governmentwas drawn from Thomas Aquinas. Yet if Pacem in Terris drew part of its inspiration from the Angelic Doctor, where in the encyclical did one find echoes of Augustine, that other great master of classic Catholic political theory? Was the pope, some asked, sufficiently aware of the expansiveness of human political folly, and the dangers of tyranny embedded in utopian visions of human perfectibility, as Augustine surely was?

An inspiring and noble vision, an inadequate analysis of the obstacles to that visions realization: that seems a reasonable judgment on Pacem in Terris at its sixtieth anniversary.

George Weigels column The Catholic Difference is syndicated by theDenver Catholic,the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

George Weigelis Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

First Thingsdepends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Clickhereto make a donation.

Clickhereto subscribe toFirst Things.

Photos by Levan Ramishvililicensedvia Creative Commons. Image cropped.

Read the original here:
Pacem in Terris After 60 Years | George Weigel - First Things

Harlan Crow, a Republican megadonor who has secretly taken U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on luxury vacations, has given $53,000 to the Republican Party of Wisconsin and Republican members of the states congressional delegation over the last 20 years.

ProPublica reported last week that Crow had flown Thomas on his private jet to expensive vacations sailing on Crows super-yacht across Indonesia and allowed Thomas to stay at his secluded luxury resort in upstate New York. Thomas had not reported the gifts on ethics filings.

Crow has given millions of dollars to conservative causes, groups and political figures. ProPublica reported that hed given $10 million in publicly disclosed contributions, yet that does not include donations to dark money groups that do not need to be reported.

The Texan also has a collection of Nazi paraphernalia, including two paintings by Adolf Hitler, a signed copy of Mein Kampf and in his garden are statues depicting 20th century dictators, including Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin. Crow has said he collects these items because he hates communism and fascism.

Campaign finance reports from the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) show that Crow has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Wisconsin Republicans in recent years.

The Republican Party of Wisconsins financial relationship with Crow began in 2004 when he gave $5,000. Since then he gave contributions of $10,000 to the party in 2016 and 2020.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has received $11,200 in donations from Crow since 2015, Green Bay-area Rep. Mike Gallagher has received $11,100 since 2018 and La Crosse-area Rep. Derrick Van Orden has received $5,700 since 2020.

Spokespeople for the state party, Gallagher, Johnson and Van Orden did not respond to requests for comment.

More here:
GOP megadonor who took Justice Thomas on luxury trips has given ... - Wisconsin Examiner

A screenshot shared in a tweet by Andrew Bridgen (a former Conservative MP who currently sits as an independent after having had the whip withdrawn earlier this year) purports to show a list of Communist Rules For Revolution. Mr Bridgen shared it with the words: These rules were written in 1919. Over 100 years later people have intrinsically not changed that much. We should all read and study this, it must be resisted at all cost.

This list dates back several decades, and has been widely labelled a hoax.

The screenshot, which has also been shared a number of times on Facebook, says:

In May, 1919 at Dusseldorf, Germany, Allied forces captured a very significant document: Communist Rules For Revolution. As you read these Rules now 50 years later keep in mind what you are reading and hearing every day via news media.

A. Corrupt the young: get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial; destroy their ruggedness.

B. Get control of all means of publicity, thereby:01. Get peoples minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books, and plays and other trivialities.02. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance.03. Destroy the peoples faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter up for contempt, ridicule, obloquy.04. Always preach true democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.05. By encouraging governmental extravagance, destroy the credit, produce fear of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.06. Promote unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of the government toward disorders.07. By specious argument cause the breakdown of the old moral virtues, honesty and sobriety.

C. Cause the registration of all fire arms on some pretext with a view to confiscating them and leaving the population helpless. [sic]

This document has been shared in various forms, primarily in the United States, over more than half a century. But theres little evidence to suggest that it is a genuine Communist document, and its origins have been repeatedly debunked by various sources over the years.

An article published in the New York Times in 1970 described the list as one of the more durable frauds popular among far right and antiCommunist organisations, and found that, despite it having been re-printed in several regional newspapers over the years, The National Archives, the Library of Congress and the libraries of the nation's universities have no copy or trace of the [original] document.

According to the article, the FBI and CIA had both also been unable to authenticate the document, while then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover reportedly said of it: We can logically speculate that the document is spurious.

An article published in the Washington Post, also in 1970, reported that the list had been used as evidence that a Communist plot was responsible for civil disorders, sexual permissiveness, pornography or even gun control legislation, and the rules also featured in a book titled The Hoaxers: Plain Liars, Fancy Liars, and Damned Liars, published in the same year, which says there is no question that the list is a fraudulent concoction.

These articles were challenged in 1973 by Ashley Halsey Jr., then-editor of the National Rifle Association magazine American Rifleman, who claimed in an article that the document was obtained and translated by a US Army captain, who passed it to New World Newsthe magazine of the Moral Re-armament religious movementwhere it was published in 1946.

While we cant verify the claims made in this article, it stands at odds with the findings of several other reputable sources mentioned in this fact check.

More recently, fact checkers Snopes wrote that it appears far more likely this list was compiled by Americans in 1946 than by Russians in 1919, citing the fact the the earliest known versions of the document appeared around the same time as Winston Churchills 1946 Iron Curtain speech, in which he called on Western nations like the US and the UK to unite to prevent the spread of Communism.

If an MP makes a false or misleading claim on social media, they should correct this quickly in a clear and transparent manner, including on the same platform where the claim was made. Weve contacted Mr Bridgen about his tweet and will update this article if he responds.

Image courtesy of Chris McAndrew

See the article here:
List of Communist Rules for Revolution has been widely debunked - Full Fact