I’m very happy today because I have managed to work a reference to Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity into the Introduction of my book. You’ll ask how Ukraine is relevant to a discussion of Spain’s literature of the crisis, but when there is a will, there is a way.
There is a generalized feeling that profound societal changes are occurring, and that feeling leads people to use the word “crisis” obsessively even in situations where it doesn’t really apply. I mean, how often did we hear about “the Ukraine crisis” when there was no crisis and, instead, there was a revolution and then a war?
And now it’s all about “the refugee crisis” which is a misleading term if there ever was one. A crisis is a short moment in time that has a definitive beginning and a specific ending. Is anybody envisioning an ending to the so-called refugee crisis? Obviously not. This isn’t a crisis, just like the “economic crisis of 2008-12” was not a crisis. These are transformations that are not going anywhere. It’s a new world that is in the process of getting born. And labor pains are not “a crisis.”
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Excellent! Looking forward to reading it!!! 🙂 🙂
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“… just like the ‘economic crisis of 2008-12’ was not a crisis. ”
Actually, the run on the repo (or repurchase) markets was unprecedented, and at the time it was very much a crisis …
http://www.nber.org/digest/dec09/w15223.html
However, it wasn’t a five-year crisis as you’ve mentioned — the crisis itself was clearly limited to 2007-2008, the years during which repo markets were extremely low on funds.
Nobody talks about the “Hundred Years’ Crisis” when referring to European history, so perhaps we should treat any mention of a “crisis” of more than a few years as entirely hyperbolic …
BTW, the risk of another run on the repo markets is still there — nothing has changed.
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My point is that there is no crisis and there was no crisis. Instead, there is one massive transformation that nobody is discussing because, like blind people palpating an elephant, we are all noticing isolated manifestations of the phenomenon.
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Exactly!
Huge changes are underway in Ukraine, and calling them ‘crisis’ instead of analyzing the reasons and the consequences is ridiculous.
But to understand all that, the knowledge of Ukrainian history and culture, such as literature, is a must. Like any other country, Ukraine is similar to the rest of the world and differs from it.
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