Stalin through the journalism of his time: H.R. Knickerbocker’s interview with Ekaterina Geladze; Gareth Jones’s exposé of the Holodomor; W.E.B. Du Bois’s homage to a freedom fighter; and Raymond Aron’s optimism in 1956. Internazionale Storia 5 (2023) On the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s death, a special issue of Internazionale looks at the life and significance of the… Read More ‘The end of the big lie’
Sihem Bensedrine I was relieved when Hervé, a young man from Ivory Coast who occasionally helps me around the house, finally called. It had been four agonising days of radio silence. Since his landlady had evicted him, he had been wandering the streets of Raoued, a suburb of Tunis, trying to avoid the marauding gangs.… Read More A poisonous dictatorship has been built in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab spring
Nick Dearden A few months into his presidency, Joe Biden signed an executive order to promote competition in the American economy saying: “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power […] I believe the experiment failed.” While those might seem unlikely words from the once centrist champion of corporate… Read More Breaking corporate monopolies is the only way to save democracy
Thomas Rowley The day started with Russian law enforcement searching the homes of nine senior members of the country’s oldest human rights organisation, Memorial. Apparently, there was reason to believe that these Nobel Prize-winning historians and rights defenders had been “rehabilitating Nazism”. Investigators had allegedly found that three names on Memorial’s list of historical “Victims… Read More Russia targets its oldest human rights group, Memorial
The Dream of Karabakh, about a woman’s attachment to her village, is rooted in personal memories that cannot be moved, unlike borders Lucia De La Torre I first met Shushan in February 2021. The mother of five was living in Landjazat village, near Armenia’s barbed-wire border with Turkey. The house, which belonged to some of… Read More New film focuses on love – not war – in Nagorno-Karabakh
JUAN COLE Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Vanuatu, a set of South Pacific islands, is not what you would call a prominent international player. The small country of a little over 300,000 people has nevertheless made history, according to UN News. It presented a resolution to the UN General Assembly asking the UN’s International Court of… Read More Tiny Islands of Vanuatu Convince UN to seek Int’l Court Ruling on Harms of Climate Emergency
Jan-Werner Müller Trump sycophants like Elise Stefanik and Andy Biggs complain that the country is becoming authoritarian and like “the third world”. Never mind the underlying racism of such pronouncements – the absence of spectacle proves that they are wrong, as does that fact that countries who fare far better on global democracy rankings than the US have not… Read More What does Donald Trump’s indictment say about US democracy?
Eric Moses Gurevitch Two recent books force us to rethink what knowledge is, where it is located, and how it moves. Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science – James Poskett From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World – Pamela H. Smith According to a familiar story,… Read More How Not to Tell the History of Science
The long century of Ernst Jünger On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger, translated from the German by Tess Lewis Ernst Jünger is the intractable land mine of German literature. Demolition squads of scholars have stencil-brushed the casing and every wire of the corpus; warning tape encircles the mother lode of fifty books, which are still… Read More History’s Fool by Thomas Meaney
On honesty as an attitude Both of these writers took the view that truthfulness was more important than ideological allegiance and metaphysics, that the facts should be derived from the real world, rather than the world of ideas. They were similar stylistically too: both wrote candidly, clearly and prolifically. William Fear A war still raged… Read More Orwell, Camus and truth
After the truth-shower 