Red Army blues :: Waterboys When I left my home and my familymy mother said to me“Son, it’s not how many Germans you kill that countsit’s how many people you set free” So I packed my bagsbrushed my capWalked out into the worldseventeen years oldNever kissed a girl Took the train to Voronezhthat was as… Read More Red Army blues
The following is excerpted in shortened form from Chapter 9 of Notes on Resistance by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, published by Haymarket Books David Barsamian: What we are facing is often described as unprecedented — a pandemic, climate catastrophe and, always lurking off center stage, nuclear annihilation. Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Noam… Read More Noam Chomsky: Optimism of the Will
First posted December 29, 2011 The Third George J. Wittenstein Lecture To ‘resist’ from the Latin resistere, means to stand fast, to uphold principles against pressure to abandon them. Claudia Koonz discusses the Nazis’ mandate to “Love only the neighbor who is like thyself.” Using examples from visual and print media from the 1930s, Koonz… Read More Professor Claudia Koontz’s lecture: Hitler’s Assault on the Golden Rule (February, 2008)
First posted April 05, 2015 NB: This is a short piece about the German carpenter Johann Georg Elser. It was written in 2001, as an appendix to a public lecture. Now a film is being released about this little-known hero. Read the BBC report below this story: The man who missed killing Hitler by 13… Read More In Memory of Johann Georg Elser, the carpenter who nearly prevented the Second World War
As demonstrations against the death of Mahsa Amini enter their third week in Iran, a protest song by one of Iran’s most popular musicians has become the soundtrack to the biggest civil uprising for decades, channelling the rage of Iranians at home and abroad. The lyrics to Baraye by Shervin Hajipour are taken entirely from messages that… Read More Iran arrests musician as anthem for protests goes viral
by Blake Smith REVIEW ESSAYNot Thinking Like a Liberal by Raymond Geuss Raymond Geuss, Cambridge philosopher, is a prominent critic of liberalism and neoliberalism, and of the tradition of anglophone analytic political philosophy that he sees as their ideological prop. His scholarship, since the 1970s, can be read as an attempt to model another form of… Read More An Illiberal Life
Kian Tajbakhsh NB: For state officials to beat a young woman to death for showing too much hair under her hijab is positively Kafkaesque for its surreal brutality. We need to think about what religion means. Is this the will of God at work? Or the demented egos of old men with long beards? Eternal… Read More Iran’s first feminist uprising
”How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause,” Sophie said. ”Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go… but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” Margie Burns At… Read More Sophie Scholl and the White Rose
First posted February 09, 2012 A photo of a lone man with his arms folded as hundreds around him perform a salute in Nazi Germany has resurfaced. The snap was taken in Hamburg in 1936, during the celebrations for the launch of a ship. In the crowd, one person refuses to raise his arm to… Read More Ordinary people. The courage to say NO
First posted June 19, 2014 Martin Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte; Black Notebooks – 1931-1941 – first published March 2014 Reviewed by Richard Wolin In the anti-philosophical arguments of the Black Notebooks, Heidegger views reason, individualism, and democracy through the prism of modern humanity’s utter and wholesale “abandonment by Being.” His obscure point of departure leads to equally obscurantist forms… Read More National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks
After the truth-shower 