NB: What enables someone who has been a communist all his life become an ultra-chauvinist overnight? What lies beneath the slippery nature of ideology, and what is the difference between political philosophy and ideology? Why do Leninist parties in power enforce single-party dictatorships? What is the communist understanding of law and justice – is it… Read More Multipolarity, the Mantra of Authoritarianism
To excel as a contemporary academic philosopher is a matter of the quality of one’s analytic and argumentative skills, especially in their negative use to expose failures in the distinction-making of others by Alasdair MacIntyre I was already fifty-five years old when I discovered that I had become a Thomistic Aristotelian. But I had first encountered… Read More On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the 20th Century
Letter from church source in anti-Hitler resistance reporting 6,000 daily killings undercuts Vatican’s claims of lack of knowledge Newly discovered correspondence suggests that the second world war-era Pope Pius XII had detailed information from a trusted German Jesuit that up to 6,000 Jews and Poles were being gassed each day in German-occupied Poland. The documentation… Read More Letter suggests Pope Pius XII knew of mass gassings of Jews and Poles in 1942
As Julian Assange continues to fight extradition to the United States to face prosecution under the Espionage Act, a growing chorus of voices is rising to demand an end to his persecution. Hounded by US law enforcement and its allies for more than a decade, Assange has been stripped of all personal and civil liberties… Read More Chris Hedges: Craig Murray on the ‘Slow Motion Execution’ of Assange
Dalya Alberge A young Australian who joined the French Resistance, worked undercover for British intelligence, and helped to save thousands of lives in war-torn France was guillotined by the Gestapo in 1943 after he was betrayed by a British double agent. Yet Corporal Bruce Dowding’s bravery and ultimate sacrifice have been largely forgotten because France’s attempt to… Read More The forgotten Australian hero who saved thousands from the Nazis crimes
Iranian authorities detained the father of Mahsa Amini on the one-year anniversary of her death Saturday, Iranian journalists and rights groups have said. Amini was killed in the custody of the morality police on September 16, 2022, after being arrested for allegedly failing to wear her headscarf properly. Her death triggered protests throughout Iran. Safin Hamid/AFP/Getty Images… Read More Mahsa Amini’s father detained by Iranian authorities on anniversary of daughter’s death
There are some things that cannot be explained, not because they are unintelligible, but because they are more intelligible than any explanation: Stanley Rosen; Squaring the hermeneutical circle; The Review of Metaphysics Vol 44 # 176 You could not search out the furthest limits of the soul, even if you traversed all of the ways, so… Read More Socrates, the soul and the cosmos
Majid Tavakoli says protesters should have had more help from abroad but the west doesn’t understand what Iran has become The majority of Iranians wish for a “normal life and for a government similar to the governments based on the liberal democratic system”, one of Iran’s most prominent political activists has said, as he prepares… Read More ‘It is not possible to organise in Iran’: jailed activist warns of totalitarianism after Mahsa Amini protests
Vic O’Sullivan Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression,” was, according to the poet WB Yeats, how he persuaded the playwright John Millington Synge to discover his muse – the desolate beauty of the Aran archipelago. Whatever was the… Read More Ocean views and authors lost: a literary tour of Ireland’s wild west coast
Patrick Wintour When the climate crisis meets a failed state, the outcome is the kind of disaster that Libya is witnessing in Derna. Any city would have struggled with the extraordinary level of precipitation that Storm Daniel visited upon Libya’s northern coast. In its earlier, milder form, the storm caused severe damage in Greece before it crossed the Mediterranean.… Read More Libya’s floods are result of climate crisis meeting a failed state
After the truth-shower 