On 27 February, three days after Russian tanks rolled into his homeland, the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa resigned from the European Film Academy. Loznitsa, an ebulliently professorial figure who moved with his family to Berlin in 2001, was furious that the EFA had issued a statement of solidarity with Ukraine that he saw as too “neutral,… Read More Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukrainian film-maker who refuses to be cancelled
The governments now sanctioning Russian oligarchs forget to mention that it was the free-market policies of the ’90s that created them. In order to regain the initiative after misreading Russia’s aggression, the Left needs to point out how the war for democracy in Ukraine is part of its own struggle for global justice in the… Read More Eirik Leivestad: The war for democracy
Even as Ukraine faces extraordinary devastation, a new world disorder is becoming apparent. The United States has to do the balancing act of providing a strong response to Russia. But it is also hemmed in by the fact that it is dealing with an armed nuclear power and needs to avoid direct confrontation. Whether this balancing act… Read More P.B. Mehta: Ukraine invasion has revealed a new world disorder
Jawaharlal Nehru restlessly sought to provide Indian democracy with a firm and unshakeable base. The Constitution supplied the framework, Parliament and State legislatures stood as the superstructure, and adult suffrage ensured the possibility of universal participation. But this edifice lacked an institutional foundation in the villages. Should the top falter, the base would subside. That… Read More Madhavan Palat: Nehru talked of panchayats as if they were bureaucracies, imagining them as elected civil servants rather than political leaders
Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities presented its recent discoveries on Saturday which include five tombs belonging to a pharaonic necropolis complex at Saqqara, just outside the capital Cairo. The tombs, which are believed to have housed senior officials from the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate period of ancient Egypt, date back to as long ago… Read More Egyptian archaeologists discover five tombs at Saqqara
NB: Let us salute Russia’s war resisters, who continue a glorious humanist tradition of international peace and solidarity. Let us never forget that the Russian Revolution that began on International Women’s Day in 1917 was a mass anti-war protest of workers and soldiers, which hastened the end of the bloodletting of the Great War of… Read More May the horror and shame unite us. A statement by the editors of the Russian journal ‘New Literary Observer’
Julien Benda’s classic book on the toxic mix of intellectuals and power is its own paradox Treason of the Intellectuals by Julien Benda Reviewed by Gustav Jönsson The title of Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs – The Treason of the Intellectuals – has become a synecdoche for a tradition that upholds truth in the face of moral… Read More Treason of the Intellectuals
James – Waltzing Along (Live) Help comes when you need it most I’m cured by laughter Mood swings not sure I can cope My life’s in plaster May your mind set you free (chorus: opened by the wonderful) May your heart lead you on May your mind let you see through all disasters (chorus: opened… Read More James – Waltzing Along (Live)
The bombing campaign targeting Baghdad, a civilian city of 6 million, constituted indiscriminate fire, which is a war crime. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a direct result of events kicked off by the US invasion. Millions were wounded. Four million lost their homes, with a million and a half exiled abroad… Brown University’s Costs of… Read More JUAN COLE: The US would be on firmer ground declaring Putin a War Criminal if George W. Bush had been Tried / Aditya Chakrabortty: Western values? They enthroned the monster who is shelling Ukrainians today
… like Ulysses, I drive myself forward,… but move, as before, backward – Joseph Brodsky, “I am like Ulysses” IT TOOK ODYSSEUS 20 years to return to Ithaca, and James Joyce’s Ulysses had to wait 67 years before reaching the Russian reader. In both instances, a war contributed to the delay. In the novel’s case, it was the… Read More José Vergara’s “All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature”
After the truth-shower 