It’s one thing to remove a PM from office, as happened to the former cricketer in 2022. But it’s another thing to try to eradicate the most famous person in Pakistan’s history Osman Samiuddin Just so we’re clear, the following is a fact. Not opinion, not a point of view, not a hot take. Fact.… Read More Prisoner number 804: the plot to erase Imran Khan
A stiff drink is recommended It is a well-established fact that the universe has a sense of humour. It is less well-established, but increasingly obvious, that the humour is of the kind best enjoyed from a great distance, like, let’s say the moon. Three weeks into the Iran war, reality has passed through the looking… Read More Gold and Geopolitics – March, 19-21: God is a comedian
The Trump administration is embracing violence for the sake of violence Jan-Werner Müller It appears that members of Trump’s cabinet get chosen not despite their endorsements of violence, but because of them. Pete Hegseth was primarily known as a dapper TV host willing to defend war crimes. Markwayne Mullin is apparently still proud of challenging… Read More Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death
Governments that mutely line up behind the US as it prosecutes a sinister, illegal war that threatens to destroy their citizens’ ability to cook and eat aren’t rational actors, they are lemmings… Narendra Modi and his partymen are attracted to Israel’s fanatical, anti-Muslim Zionism because it has achieved the disenfranchisement and apartheid that Hindutva aspires… Read More A grey silence
I bow out of my role for the organisation at a perilous time for the international law. There are consequences not just for Palestinians, but the wider Middle East.. It is incomprehensible that a UN entity has been allowed to be crushed as Unrwa has, in violation of international law, with total impunity, and with… Read More Israel has crushed Unrwa in Gaza – and the rest of the world has done nothing
NB: ‘Lebensraum’ as national policy; racism, genocidal complicity amongst vast sections of the Western population; total contempt for both morality and international law; limitless expansion of territory by force; the politics of permanent emergency (as per Carl Schmitt); the embrace of bloodlust and cruelty as markers of virtue rather than emblems of evil – all… Read More Tearing up the map
Under Modi, India has chosen dependence as a strategic choice. But from Nehru to Manmohan Singh, India displayed a fiercely independent foreign policy and autonomy. Bharat Bhushan As Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s global image erodes, he cannot as easily dodge accountability for domestic governance as he did earlier by projecting his larger-than-life capers on the world stage.… Read More Limits of spectacle: Modi’s foreign policy contradictions exposed
Christopher Caldwell Having Donald Trump as President probably resembles being a heroin addict: you undergo regular episodes of sweating terror and mortal danger, the end result of which is to get you – at best – back to normal. A year ago, the Liberation Day tariffs nearly caused the American economy to seize up, before… Read More The end of Trumpism
By JOSEPH FRONCZAK One long century ago, on June 9, 1917, not quite halfway between the February Revolution and the October Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt. The lifelong communist died only five years ago, in 2012 at the age of ninety-five. He spent his final years placidly convinced that socialism belonged still… Read More Eric Hobsbawm’s Long Century
Alfred W. McCoy ( Tomdispatch.com ) – In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.” Among the “antique legends” most helpful in… Read More Imperial Decline in the Straits of Hormuz
After the truth-shower 