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Fascism denied the very nature of democracy, the legitimacy of democratic procedures and their electoral outcomes. Its proponents claimed that votes were only legitimate when they confirmed by referendum the autocratic will of their leader.
Populists, in contrast, have used elections to stress their own democratic nature even when they advanced other authoritarian trends. These differences matter today as wannabe fascist populist like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and others, deny the electoral legitimacy of their opponents.

The more we know about the past fascist attempts to deny the workings of democracy, the more worried we should be about present post-fascist and populist forms.

Federico Finchelstein is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research at the Eugene Lang College in New York City. He is the author of several books, including Fascist Mythologies, A Brief History of Fascist Lies, From Fascism to Populism in History, Transatlantic Fascism, and The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War. He contributes to major American, European, and Latin American media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, CNN, Foreign Policy, Clarín, Corriere della Sera, Nexos, and Folha de S.Paulo.

After his undergraduate education at the University of Buenos Aires, he received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He has previously taught at Brown University.

Just before the coronavirus pandemic, Bernard-Henri Lévy’s reporting took him to eastern Ukraine, as part of an eight-part journey to cast light upon human rights abuses in global hotspots that have escaped international attention or active response.

Now, with the Ukraine crisis making global news headlines, Lévy recounts his experience in a dispatch from eastern Ukraine, as reported in his new book The Will To See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope (Yale University Press, 2021). In a chapter he calls, “Donbass: Trench Warfare Lives on in Europe,” Lévy shares what he witnessed in 2020. And he will connect how that period foreshadowed what the world is paying close attention to today.

Bernard-Henri Lévy will be in conversation with Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ), co-chair of the bipartisan Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (formerly known as the Congressional Human Rights Caucus) and former Representative Steve Israel, director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.

Speaker

Bernard-Henri Lévy, French philosopher, filmmaker, activist, and author

Moderators

Rep. Chris Smith, Senior Member on the Foreign Affairs Committee and Ranking Member of its Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations Subcommittee (R-NJ)

Steve Israel, Director, Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University and former U.S. Representative (D-NY)

About the book

The Will To See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope
Blurb: An unflinching look at the most urgent humanitarian crises around the globe, from one of the world’s most daring philosopher-reporters. Over the past fifty years, renowned public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy has reported extensively on human rights abuses around the world. This new book follows the intrepid Lévy into eight international hotspots—in Nigeria; Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan; Ukraine; Somalia; Bangladesh; Lesbos, Greece; Libya; and Afghanistan—that have escaped global attention or active response.

In a deeply personal introduction, Lévy recounts the intellectual journey that led him to advocacy, arguing that a truly humanist philosophy must necessarily lead to action in defense of the most vulnerable. In the second section, he reports on the eight investigative trips he undertook just before or during the coronavirus pandemic, from the massacred Christian villages in Nigeria to a dangerously fragile Afghanistan on the eve of the Taliban talks, from an anti-Semitic ambush in Libya to the overrun refugee camp on the island of Lesbos. Part manifesto, part missives from the field, this new book is a stirring rebuke to indifference and an exhortation to level our gaze at those most hidden from us.

Kyle Anderson, assistant professor at SUNY Old Westbury, will give a talk on his recently published book "The Egyptian Labor Corps: Race, Space, and Place in the First World War" (University of Texas Press, 2021).

In-person attendance is open to current Cornell students, faculty and staff. The public is invited to attend via Zoom.

Book synopsis:

This history sheds new light on Egypt’s involvement in World War I by telling the story of the Egyptian Labor Corps and how the treatment of these primarily rural workers influenced the 1919 Egyptian Revolution.

During World War I, the British Empire enlisted half a million young men, predominantly from the countryside of Egypt, in the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC) and put them to work handling military logistics in Europe and the Middle East. British authorities reneged on their promise not to draw Egyptians into the war, and, as Kyle Anderson shows, the ELC was seen by many in Egypt as a form of slavery. The Egyptian Labor Corps tells the forgotten story of these young men, culminating in the essential part they came to play in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution.

Combining sources from archives in four countries, Anderson explores Britain’s role in Egypt during this period and how the ELC came to be, as well as the experiences and hardships these men endured. As he examines the ways they coped—through music, theater, drugs, religion, strikes, and mutiny—he illustrates how Egyptian nationalists, seeing their countrymen in a state akin to slavery, began to grasp that they had been racialized as “people of color.” Documenting the history of the ELC and its work during the First World War, The Egyptian Labor Corps also provides a fascinating reinterpretation of the 1919 revolution through the lens of critical race theory.

Sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies with support from Critical Ottoman & Post-Ottoman Studies, Comparative Muslim Societies Program, Institute for European Studies, Department of History

The Lingua Mater competition invites students to translate Cornell's Alma Mater into a different language and submit a video of the performed translation. The inaugural Lingua Mater student competition took place in 2018 as part of Cornell's Global Grand Challenges Symposium. The top three videos received cash prizes.

2022 competition details

Can you translate Cornell’s Alma Mater into your mother tongue (or a language you are learning/have learned at Cornell) and sing it? We invite you to translate “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” and submit a video of you (and your friends!) performing it somewhere on any of Cornell’s campuses.

Translations do not need to be exact or perfectly in meter but should capture the feel and tune of our university’s Alma Mater. As is customary, include the first verse, refrain, second verse, and refrain in your video submission (for guidance, listen to a performance and read the lyrics).

Video submissions need to be MP4 files at 1920 x 1080 (1080p), in landscape mode with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Please ensure that you have copyright permission for any images/videos you use.

Entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges. Submissions will be judged equally on the translation, the musical quality, and the creativity in visual presentation.

The top three entries will win cash prizes.

Winners will be announced during International Education Week (November 14-18, 2022) and the top three videos will be posted online that week.

Entries may be submitted by any registered Cornell student or group of students.

Submission deadline: Sunday, November 6, 2022

SUBMIT YOUR VIDEO AND LYRICS HERE

Please contact Angelika Kraemer, Director of the Language Resource Center, if you have any questions.

The Lingua Mater competition is co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center and the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs.

Ambassador William B. Taylor served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. In 2019, he served as chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv. Currently, he is the Vice President for Russia and Europe at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Taylor visits the Cornell community to discuss diplomacy and the latest developments in the Ukraine-Russia crisis.

Speaker

Amb. Bill Taylor, Vice President, Russia and Europe at the U.S. Institute of Peace

Moderators

Prof. Nicholas Rostow, Visiting Professor of Law at Cornell Law School

Steve Israel, Director, Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University and former U.S. Representative (D-NY)

Organizers

This event is co-sponsored by the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

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Zar, a constellation of belief and therapeutic response to spirit winds, has long been considered a ritual trace attesting to the movement of African slavery in the Indian Ocean world. This talk considers representations of the spirit healing ritual zar in Iranian ethnographic filmmaking in the 1960s and 70s. In attending to the abstraction of zar as it travels across one Iranian filmmaker’s oeuvre, I interrogate the model of historicity opened up by Indian Ocean slavery’s enigmatic archival legacy.

Parisa Vaziri is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. Her research explores the legacies of Indian Ocean slavery from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her book project, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran’s Media Archive, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press and explores Iranian cinema as a site of historical transmission for the legacy of slavery in Iran.

This event is presented in part of CO+POS' Black History Month programming.

Cristina Florea is an Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University. She is interested in the interactions between German and Russian power (their competition for territory and influence) across this space, as well as the consequences these interactions have had for the people living in between. Her research focuses on the importance of imperial legacies in modern European history, and the centrality of imperial competition to East European politics and societies.

This conversation is part of the spring seminar series with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).

Register here

In accordance with university event guidance, all campus visitors who are 12 years old or older must also present a photo ID, as well as proof of vaccination for COVID-19 or results of a recent negative COVID-19 test. If you are not currently participating in the Cornell campus vaccination/testing program, please bring proof of vaccination or the results of a recent negative test.