https://openresearch.amsterdam/nl/page/77950/woningcrisis
The main problem is that the University of Amsterdam saw itself forced by the political establishment in The Hague to become more commercialized, and so it tries to get as many students from abroad for especially their Faculty of Humanities which ranks a shabby number 62 on the World University Rankings List of 2026, far behind the Anglo Saxon ivy league universities, and for instance the ETH Zurich, now considered among one of the world's most prestigious universities in science and technology, ranking number 12 in World University Rankings 2027.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/eth-zurich
"Those forces are one step to make us stop and become introspective, think and look within ourselves to see who we are and where we are going. Exactly this is what any totalitarian state seeks to crush. And yet, we kind of blissfully have checked out.
Precisely as a result of collective escapism, humanities scholars can allow themselves to be hired without hesitation by the rich and powerful, as I tried to demonstrate in the previous episode using, among others, the compilers of the report *Politics and Social Media Manipulation*, which was commissioned by the Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Kajsa Ollongren with the aim of censoring social media. One of the compilers is Professor Dr. Richard Rogers, affiliated with New Media and Digital Culture at the Faculty of Humanities of the same University of Amsterdam where Ms. Van Leeuwen of the AIVD taught ‘Modern Transatlantic Relations,’ commissioned by the Atlantic Commission. Now that even Atlanticists realize that the end of the American empire is in sight, one thing can be stated with great certainty: there is a lot at stake, namely: the hegemony of the five-century-long civilization of the white man, now that China has emerged as a world power on the geopolitical stage. Moreover, Russia refuses to obediently accept the course charted by Washington and Wall Street, which is understandable given that in 2015 the world-renowned ‘geopolitical advisor,’ Henry Kissinger, warned that under President Obama ‘Breaking Russia has become an objective,’ whereas ‘the long-range purpose should be to integrate it.’ That same year, it was also revealed that ‘Obama Backs Biggest Nuclear Arms Buildup Since Cold War,’ as this American president "has backed investment in new nuclear delivery systems, upgraded warheads, resilient command networks, and industrial sites for fabricating nuclear hardware that, when added to the expense of maintaining the existing arsenal, will cost $348 billion between 2015 and 2024.
The total renewal of America’s nuclear arsenal is estimated at more than one trillion dollars, a million times a million. The renowned American business magazine Forbes therefore noted that 'This isn't what most observers expected from Obama. A longtime supporter of nuclear disarmament, he gave a speech shortly after being inaugurated in 2009 highlighting ‘America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.’"
The violent American interventions over the past two decades, have created an extraordinarily dangerous situation in which a Third World War is one of the possibilities. The current status quo, and the consensus regarding it, could vanish in the blink of an eye. What seems normal suddenly turns out to be completely abnormal. In this regard, Hedges warns that:
"Most people have no concept of how fragile the environment is. There is a kind of emotional incapacity to understand a collapse, even when it is facing you. The nature of illusion is that it is designed, at least for the moment, to make you feel good about yourself, about your country, about where you are going. In that sense it functions like a drug. And those who question the illusions are challenged not so much for the veracity of what they say, but for puncturing these feelings.
An attempt to get up and question where we are going and who we are, and immediately the critique will be that you are such a pessimist, such a cynic, that you are not an optimist. Optimism becomes a kind of disease, what created the financial meltdown (of 2008), where you have this kind of cheerful optimism in the face of utter catastrophe, and you plow forward, based on an optimism which is no longer rooted in reality.
If hope becomes something you express through illusion, it is not hope, it is phantasy. The cult of the self is, in biblical terms, a form of adultery, everything is about you, whether it is the worship of power, money, it all goes back to the self, it is all creating little monuments to yourself, it all is investment into a particular goal of self-aggrandizement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpk5WG-arRE&t=529s&ab_channel=UNM
"repeated the patterns that past civilizations in collapse underwent: an elite that is no longer connected with the real, that retreats into their bubbles, like the Forbidden City or Versailles, and yet has total economic and political power, the crumbling of the infrastructure — when civilizations decay cities always go first, we have already done that — the retreat into illusion.
The danger is that this time, while we go down, the whole planet is going with us. The corporate state has made a war against critical thinking, and in particular the humanities, because the humanities at their best are about teaching people how to think, rather than what to think. They are about teaching people to challenge assumptions and structures. The discipline of the humanities is subversive, is meant to be subversive.
But this insight is completely ignored by the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. There the 'humanities' are not taught as 'subversive' but rather as law-abiding. The humanities serve a power that is becoming increasingly totalitarian, a fact which almost all great thinkers since the nineteenth century have pointed out. That is why Marianne van Leeuwen, formerly of the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD), taught there as professor of ‘Modern Transatlantic Relations’ on behalf of the NATO-affiliated "Atlantic Commission at the UvA, where Professor Richard Rogers wrote a report in 2019 for Minister Ollongren, under whose purview the AIVD falls, to provide her with a ‘scientific’ substantiation for her fight against social media freedom. Another example of the dogmatism of the UvA Faculty of Humanities is that Dr. Ruud van Dijk teaches at the same Faculty, that is to say, indoctrinates his students with political dogmas as:
"Washington [still] strives for a world in which individual freedoms — fundamental human rights — are the norm. For us in the EU, it is no different. America is still the indispensable nation," as a result of which:
"one of the most important objectives of European and Dutch policy must be to prevent America from no longer wanting to be responsible for the functioning of the international system. For us in Europe, a constructive, activist American role is meanwhile essential." This so called ‘value-free’ scientist anxiously conceals that "the international system of Washington and Wall Street has led, in the US alone, to what former President Jimmy Carter labeled an "oligarchy," in which "unlimited political bribery" has created "a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors." Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, "look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves."
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/jimmy-carter-u-s-oligarchy-unlimited-political-bribery/
Dr. R. (Ruud) van Dijk PhD - Universiteit van Amsterdam
Van Dijk does not make clear why Europe must fear that the aggressive American oligarchy "no longer wants to be responsible for the functioning of the international system." This can only be explained by the knowledge that the U.S. elite has ensured that the currently most heavily armed nation in the history of mankind has been at war for 93 percent of its existence since 1776, and still is. The question, therefore, is why such an ideological lecturer is allowed to propagate his views—which are by no means scientific—at the Faculty of Humanities at the UvA? Is this propaganda the best the University of Amsterdam has to offer? This explains why the UvA ranks only 62nd in The World University Rankings 2020, 49 places lower than the Swiss ETH Zurich, which is ‘now considered’ as one of "the world’s most prestigious universities in science and technology," a university that "has produced over 20 Nobel Prize Laureates, including the father of modern physics and the inventor of the general theory of relativity Albert Einstein." In this respect, too, the UvA pales in comparison with only 7 Nobel Prize winners, certainly compared to the university in Zurich, Switzerland, a nation with only 8 million inhabitants—half the population of the Netherlands. Which proves once again that ideology and science are incompatible. In short, how can it be explained that the Faculty of Humanities at the UvA is so ideologically oriented?
Naturally, it is unsettling that the ‘humanities’ at the UvA are so obedient to authority, but by no means incomprehensible. Precisely as Hedges notes, the deregulated ‘corporate state’ has been at ‘war’ with "critical thinking, and in particular with the humanities"—certainly since the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1970s—specifically "because the humanities at best teach people how to think, rather than what one ought to think."
And still the ideological oriented University of Amsterdam keeps trying to lure as many Johanna's of Eastern Europe to Amsterdam.
Naturally, it is unsettling that the the Faculty of humanities of the UvA is so obedient to authority, but by no means incomprehensible. Precisely as Hedges notes, the deregulated ‘corporate state’ has been at "war" with "critical thinking, and in particular with the humanities," certainly since the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1970s, "because the humanities at best teach people how to think, rather than what to think. They teach people to question assumptions and structures," whereby the "humanities are subversive, and ought to be." But in the Netherlands, with its so called "poldermodel," it holds true that "Hypocrisy and Pharisaism assault the individual and the community here!" as the historian Johan Huizinga articulated a century ago, subsequently concluding "it cannot be denied that the Dutchman, once again in a certain bourgeois buoyancy, tolerates a slight degree of bungling or favoritism of cronyism without protest." That "slight degree" has, just like everything else in the past century, increased awe-inspiringly. Today, the poldermodel stands for a self-satisfied know-it-all attitude that leads to a corrupt way of life, without the Dutchman taking issue with it. After the reformist 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, the Dutch regents, who had briefly lost their grip on social innovations, managed to regain power. The vast majority of my colleagues in journalism immediately conformed to the changed zeitgeist, out of fear of losing their newly acquired privileges. Thus, my old friends exchanged their pacifism for a bellicose attitude towards the Russians. The intellectual corruption that unfolded before my eyes was as bewildering as it was inevitable. Within this context, the extreme opportunism of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam can be explained. This new reality has far-reaching and life-threatening consequences, as demonstrated by the current campaign against the nuclear superpowers Russia and China. The politics of ‘peaceful coexistence’ has completely disappeared. To illustrate this, I quote a passage from Henry Kissinger’s book *On China.* Regarding President Richard Nixon’s conduct in Beijing, Kissinger wrote as his Secretary of State:
Nixon acknowledged that his principles had previously led him, like many of his countrymen, to support anti-Chinese policies. But the world had changed, and now American interests required Washington to adapt to these changes:
‘My views at the time, because I was in the Eisenhower administration, were the same as those of Dulles (John Foster Dulles, hawkish US Secretary of State. svh). But the world has changed since then, and the relationship between the People’s Republic and the United States must change as well. As the Prime Minister has already said in a conversation with Dr. Kissinger, the helmsman must follow the waves, otherwise the waves will crash over him.’
Nixon proposed basing foreign policy on the reconciliation of interests. If the national interest were clearly marked and the mutual interest in stability were taken into account, that would bring predictability to Chinese-American relations:
"Now that we are sitting here talking, the Prime Minister and I both know that friendship, which I feel exists on a personal level, cannot be the foundation upon which a newly created relationship can rest. […] As friends, we could agree on fine words, but unless it is in our national interest to implement agreements drafted in those fine words, that would mean very little."
In this approach, candor was a primary condition for genuine cooperation. As Nixon said to Zhou: ‘It is important that we be completely candor, realizing that neither of us will do anything unless it is in our interest.’"
Kissinger emphasizes in his book that "President Nixon maintained in Beijing that geopolitical obligations transcended ideology. His mere presence in Beijing was proof of that.’ Kissinger and Nixon, as well as Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, acted here as ‘Realpolitikers,’ that is to say: as statesmen who ‘viewed the costs and benefits of a particular policy in a sober manner,’ leaving ‘ideology, political-philosophical considerations, or ethics aside."
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik
"Thanks to the policy of ‘peaceful coexistence,’ both parties gradually knew where they stood with each other during the First Cold War, preventing resentments from playing a decisive role. It goes without saying that precisely this policy is a primary requirement in an era of weapons of mass destruction to avoid a nuclear Armageddon. This was why William Perry, US Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1997, stated to journalists in mid-January 2019 that "he was less worried about the number of nuclear warheads left in the world than by the return of cold war talk about such weapons being 'usable.'
The belief that there might be tactical advantage using nuclear weapons — which I haven't heard that being openly discussed in the United States or in Russia for a good many years — is happening now in those countries which I think is extremely distressing,' Perry said. ‘That’s a very dangerous belief.’
And, just this month, as the US broke ground on a future missile defense site in Poland and formally activated a missile defense site in Romania, Putin said: 'Now after the placement of these missile defense elements, we have to think how to neutralize the threats for the security of the Russian Federation…'
'No one I have known, or have even heard of, has the management experience and the technical knowledge that William Perry brings to the subject of nuclear danger. Few have his wisdom and integrity. So why isn't anyone paying attention to him? Why is fear of a nuclear catastrophe far from the minds of most Americans? And why does almost all of official Washington disagree with him and live in nuclear denial? Perry himself may provide the answer:
"Our chief peril is that the poised nuclear doom, much of it hidden beneath the seas and in remote badlands, is too far out of the global public consciousness. Passivity shows broadly. Perhaps this is a matter of defeatism and its cohort, distraction. Perhaps for some it is largely a most primal human fear of facing the “unthinkable.”
For others, it might be a welcoming of the illusion that there is or might be an acceptable missile defense against a nuclear attack. And for many, it would seem to be the keeping of faith that nuclear deterrence will hold indefinitely — that leaders will always have accurate enough instantaneous knowledge, know the true context of events, and enjoy the good luck to avoid the most tragic of military miscalculations.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/07/14/a-stark-nuclear-warning/
Meanwhile, the true cause of the collective lethargy regarding weapons of mass destruction remains the foolish fact that the commercial mass media do not really take ‘the subject of nuclear danger’ seriously, and therefore pay no structural attention to it. My old friend Ian Buruma may well state that ‘Dictators and demagogues have always tapped the consuming resentments of people who feel that life has treated them badly,’ but in doing so, he only depoliticizes current politics, which took its definitive form after the First World War. In his book A History Of Bombing (2001), the author and former Swedish cultural attaché in China, Sven Lindqvist, points out that, when push comes to shove, power does not choose the interests of its own people. Lindqvist wrote:
"1918. Several months later when the war was over, a demand was made that the German pilots who had bombed London be brought to trial as war criminals. The British Air Ministry protested. Trials of that sort 'would be placing a noose round the necks of our airmen in future wars.' Since the aim of the British air attacks against German cities had been 'to weaken the morale of civilian inhabitants (and thereby their 'will to win') by persistent bomb attacks which would both destroy life (civilian and otherwise) and if possible originate a conflagration which should reduce to ashes the whole town,' the application of the Hague Convention in these cases would defeat the very purpose of bombardment.
This was top secret. Publicly, the air force continued to say something quite different, just as the navy had done throughout the 19th century. This was the best tack to take, wrote the air staff in 1921: 'It may be thought better, in view of the allegations of the “barbarity” of air attacks, to preserve appearances by formulating milder rules and by still nominally confining bombardment to targets which are strictly military in character... to avoid emphasizing the truth that air warfare has made such restrictions obsolete and impossible.'
This strategy, anxiously concealed by the ‘corporate press,’ is still in effect. The official attitude of those in power, even in a — formally speaking -- democracy, can therefore be called, without exaggeration, extremist, totalitarian, and terrorist, at least if one uses the definition of the American Army Handbook, in which terrorism is described as 'the deliberately planned use of force or threat of force to achieve goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature.' Since the First World War, the aim of bombing the civilian population has been -- I quote the British authorities involved --
to weaken the morale of the civilian population (and thereby the ‘will to win’) through sustained bombing raids that both destroy life (of civilians and others) and, if possible, cause a firestorm that will reduce an entire city to ashes"
It can be assumed without exaggeration that the NATO strategy of 'Shock and Awe' is deliberately aimed at applying terror as massively as possible 'to weaken the morale of civilian inhabitants.' And what one power can do, the other can do too, with the result that policymakers in both a so-called democracy and the political elite in a dictatorship sacrifice their own populations with a view to achieving a Pyrrhic victory. This telling fact forms the background to the unconditional support for state terror that the ‘liberals’ of the ‘establishment’ are also willing to give time and again. And indeed, the mainstream opinion maker Ian Buruma is right: "For an alliance to work, you need a common enemy,' to which I would only like to add: and a so-called 'free press.' Following the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the Dutch author Harry Mulisch therefore wrote in his book *De Zaak 40/61*, published in 1961:
‘The belief that there might be tactical advantage using nuclear weapons — which I haven’t heard that being openly discussed in the United States or in Russia for a good many years — is happening now in those countries which I think is extremely distressing,’ Perry said. ‘That’s a very dangerous belief.’
Since the book’s publication, the dangers identified by de Amerikaanse have only intensified (under Obama. svh)the latest US defense budget proposes spending $1 trillion: on nuclear modernization over the next several decades. This modernization plan contemplates a complete update of our nuclear triad, including new cruise missiles, (with multiple nuclear war heads. svh), and bombers. The Russian defense minister recently announced in response that Russia will ‘bring five new strategic nuclear missile regiments into service.’ This comes after President Putin revealed that Russia will add more than forty new intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear arsenal.
And, just this month, as the US broke ground on a future missile defense site in Poland and formally activated a missile defense site in Romania, Putin warned: ‘Now after the placement of these missile defense elements, we have to think how to neutralize the threats for the security of the Russian Federation…’
No one I have known, or have even heard of, has the management experience and the technical knowledge that William Perry brings to the subject of nuclear danger. Few have his wisdom and integrity. So why isn’t anyone paying attention to him? Why is fear of a nuclear catastrophe far from the minds of most Americans? And why does almost all of official Washington disagree with him and live in nuclear denial? Perry himself may provide the answer:
"Our chief peril is that the poised nuclear doom, much of it hidden beneath the seas and in remote badlands, is too far out of the global public consciousness. Passivity shows broadly. Perhaps this is a matter of defeatism and its cohort, distraction. Perhaps for some it is largely a most primal human fear of facing the 'unthinkable.' For others, it might be a welcoming of the illusion that there is or might be an acceptable missile defense against a nuclear attack. And for many it would seem to be the keeping of faith that nuclear deterrence will hold indefinitely — that leaders will always have accurate enough instantaneous knowledge, know the true context of events, and enjoy the good luck to avoid the most tragic of military miscalculations."
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/07/14/a-stark-nuclear-warning/
Therefore I will quote the late Hungarian author
Imre Kertész, one of the greatest post-war Jewish writers of Europe. He noted: “Once, man was God’s creation, a creature with a tragic fate that needed redemption. This solitary being was first molded into a mass by ideological totalitarianism, then confined within the walls of a closed state system, and subsequently degraded into a lifeless part of its machinery. Now it no longer needs redemption, for it no longer bears responsibility for itself. Ideology has deprived it of its cosmos, but also of its loneliness, the tragic dimensions of the human fate. It was squeezed into a deterministic existence, where its fate is determined by its ancestry, its classification into a race or a class. Along with its fate, human reality was also taken from it, as well as the pure experience of life.”This view gives the background to understanding Joanna’s flight forward, into the ever-unknown and, today, dark future. Because she was pursuing a course of art at the University of Amsterdam, I told her what the Jewish Hungarian Kertész had written in his 2005 book "De verbannen taal." In it, he set out that “It is the task of art to set human language against ideology, to restore the imagination and to remind man of his origins, his true situation, and the human destiny. The artist’s choice can therefore be nothing other than radical.” Suddenly, she reacted sharply, saying she had had enough of my contemporaries and their hypocrisy.
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security Money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They will get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later because they own this fucking place! It's a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club!”
George Carlin said this after the neoliberal Western elite and the former communist elite in the Eastern Bloc were in power in the early 1990s. But the public behind the Fallen Wall had never been told that, since their own elite had no interest in it, and the Western media, in the service of a small group of “billionaires,” would not dream of seriously informing the public in the Eastern Bloc. The journalistic euphoria following the fall of the East Berlin Wall was too great to warn the -- in the meantime -- unemployed factory workers that the Western model is built on illusions. And as for the Joanna's who had not experienced real-life communism, they are now too busy looking as Western as possible, in fact becoming as invisible as possible. They didn't get the chance to develop their own individuality.
This is how Joanna M. wanted to present herself to the public. This is what the West taught her. As a disguised person, she herself became invisible. She imitates the western petty-bourgeois advertisements in the glossy magazines. This was the result of having visited universities in the U.S. and Western Europe. After casting a single glance at her, I realized why intellectuals in both West- and East-Europe will always lose.
“To be richer? Happier? No. The aggressiveness of violence is perfectly uninterested, unmotivated; it wants only its will; it is the purely irrational. Kafka and Hasek confront us... with this colossal paradox: during the era of the Modern Age, Cartesian reason destroyed one by one all values inherited from the Middle Ages. But at the moment of the total victory of reason, the purely irrational (violence that wants no more than its will) takes possession of the world stage, because there is no longer a single accepted value system that could stand in its way.”
Thanks to this insight, it becomes understandable that mainstream journalism does nothing but engage in propaganda for whatever system is prevailing. Commercial journalists generally function as priests of a so-called progressive ideology, which cannot exist without an image of an enemy. And in this regard, it is “not so important that different political interests are expressed in the various organs of the media. Behind the outward difference, one and the same spirit prevails. You only have to look through American and European opinion papers, from the right as well as the left, from Time to Der Spiegel: in all those papers you find the same view of life, reflected in the same order in which their table of contents is structured, in the same sections, the same journalistic approach, the same choice of words and style, in the same artistic preferences, and in the same hierarchy of what they consider important and insignificant. The common state of mind of the mass media, which lies hidden behind their political diversity, is the spirit of the times.”
"Some eighty years after Flaubert conceived his Emma Bovary, in the 1930s (nineteenth century. svh), another great novelist, Hermann Broch, would speak of the heroic efforts of the modern novel resisting the wave of kitsch, but ultimately being floored by it."
While reading, I was reminded of the description by the late British author John Berger that: “Consumption and communication are nowadays united in a diabolical company, and through this company exists that which we know as the media. First and foremost, the media represent an economic contract whereby everything that happens in the world is linked to the mechanism of sales.”
There are countless truths for which no direct solution exists. The word ‘solution’ does not touch upon the tragic. We must come into contact with the tragic and allow ourselves to be moved by it. We might be changed by it if we named it. Even named, the tragic remains tragic, but it would not become bad news. Only from that perspective is realistic politics possible.
And because making a profit is the holiest article of faith for neoliberalism, Berger speaks of "the dealers of the Free Market and their corollary, the Mafia,' who know that “they now have the world in their pocket. They have. But to maintain their confidence they have to change the meaning of all the words used in languages to explain or praise or give value to life: every word, according to them now, is the servant of profit. And so they have become dumb. Or, rather, they can no longer speak any truth. Their language is too withered for that. As a consequence they have also lost the faculty of memory. A loss which one day will be fatal.”
Към сватбата
John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a college text.
Later he was self exiled to continental Europe, living between the french Alps in summer and the suburbs of Paris in winter. Since then, his production has increased considerably, including a variety of genres, from novel to social essay, or poetry. One of the most common themes that appears on his books is the dialectics established between modernity and memory and loss,
Another of his most remarkable works has been the trilogy titled Into Their Labours, that includes the books Pig Earth (1979), Once In Europa (1983) Lilac And Flag (1990). With those books, Berger makes a meditation about the way of the peasant, that changes one poverty for another in the city. This theme is also observed in his novel King, but there his focus is more in the rural diaspora and the bitter side of the urban way of life.
Към сватбата
Джон Питър Бергер е английски арт критик, романист, художник и писател. Романът му „G.“ печели наградата „Букър“ през 1972 г., а есето му за арт критиката „Начини на виждане“, написано като съпровод към сериал на BBC, често се използва като учебник за колеж.
По-късно той е самоизгнан в континентална Европа, живеейки между френските Алпи през лятото и предградията на Париж през зимата. Оттогава творчеството му се е увеличило значително, включително разнообразие от жанрове, от роман до социално есе или поезия. Една от най-често срещаните теми, които се появяват в книгите му, е диалектиката, установена между модерността, паметта и загубата.
Друго от най-забележителните му произведения е трилогията, озаглавена „В техните трудове“, която включва книгите „Свинска земя“ (1979), „Веднъж в Европа“ (1983) и „Люляк и знаме“ (1990). С тези книги Бергер размишлява върху начина на живот на селянина, който заменя една бедност с друга в града. Тази тема се наблюдава и в романа му „Крал“, но там фокусът му е по-скоро върху селската диаспора и горчивата страна на градския начин на живот.
Kŭm svatbata
Dzhon Pitŭr Berger e angliĭski art kritik, romanist, khudozhnik i pisatel. Romanŭt mu „G.“ pecheli nagradata „Bukŭr“ prez 1972 g., a eseto mu za art kritikata „Nachini na vizhdane“, napisano kato sŭprovod kŭm serial na BBC, chesto se izpolzva kato uchebnik za kolezh.
Po-kŭsno toĭ e samoizgnan v kontinentalna Evropa, zhiveeĭki mezhdu frenskite Alpi prez lyatoto i predgradiyata na Parizh prez zimata. Ottogava tvorchestvoto mu se e uvelichilo znachitelno, vklyuchitelno raznoobrazie ot zhanrove, ot roman do sotsialno ese ili poeziya. Edna ot naĭ-chesto sreshtanite temi, koito se poyavyavat v knigite mu, e dialektikata, ustanovena mezhdu modernostta, pametta i zagubata.
Drugo ot naĭ-zabelezhitelnite mu proizvedeniya e trilogiyata, ozaglavena „V tekhnite trudove“, koyato vklyuchva knigite „Svinska zemya“ (1979), „Vednŭzh v Evropa“ (1983) i „Lyulyak i zname“ (1990). S tezi knigi Berger razmishlyava vŭrkhu nachina na zhivot na selyanina, koĭto zamenya edna bednost s druga v grada. Tazi tema se nablyudava i v romana mu „Kral“, no tam fokusŭt mu e po-skoro vŭrkhu selskata diaspora i gorchivata strana na gradskiya nachin na zhivot.
