Gordon Karel Weiss
Gordon Karel Weiss
Bio brief
I joined the UN for two decades of service focused on multi-faceted peacekeeping, political, and humanitarian crises in some of the world’s most fragile zones. I was boots-on-the-ground in theatres of seminal and open conflict and disaster, often in isolated conditions in Africa, India, former Soviet Central Asia, the Western Balkans, the Caribbean, the Caucasus, South-East Asia, and the Middle East.
Personal
I'm a father to two girls, and the son of an immigrant who became an early female judge in Australia,
and a Czech refugee whose 57-member family was killed during the Holocaust. I currently live between
Prague and Sydney, to which the highland Scots part of my family immigrated in the 1820s.
Recent media
September 2020
Watching mob violence in the streets of America, I recalled an encounter in Kosovo in 1999. Driving through the country one day in a UN vehicle, I stopped at the house of a man who, some months before, had been dragged from his house by Serbian paramilitaries and made to kneel on the dusty road and was poised for execution in front of his seven daughters.
October 2020
‘When small men begin to cast big shadows’, wrote the Chinese intellectual Lin Yutang, ‘it means the sun is about to set.’ It is a dictum that, like many, functions neatly in reverse. When small countries stand up to the great, it might well be a sign of a new day.
November 2020
A billboard firm cleverly lures clients with a simple slogan on an otherwise blank canvas—unsee this.
Its genius rests on a human trait: we can’t unsee, unhear or unsmell anything. Our senses are primordial devices programmed to extract millions of data points every second, most of it, at some level, novel. Yet the brain can sort and analyse only around 50 points per second in order to assess a possible response.
Photojournalism
The points of light project
