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
Andrew Roth It took Alina three goes at the local conscription centre to get her husband out of Russia’s war in Ukraine. She knew the local officials managing the mobilisation in her town south of Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, she said. So when her husband, who has health problems because of his weight and served… Read More Kremlin attempts to calm Russian fury over chaotic mobilisation
Patrick Wintour Worldwide protests were being held on Saturday in solidarity with the growing uprising in Iran demanding greater freedom and protesting against the death of Mahsa Amini following her arrest by Iranian morality police. Demonstrations under the slogan “Women, life, liberty” took place in many major cities, including Auckland, London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Rome, Seoul,… Read More ‘Women, life, liberty’: Iranian civil rights protests spread worldwide
First posted October 10, 2016 Thinkers are supposed to be idealistic, moral defenders of the highest values of civilization; fascists are brutal, barbaric, appealing to humanity’s lowest instincts. Nazis burn books; philosophers write them. But Heidegger did both. In 1927, he published one of the most influential books in the history of philosophy, Being and Time;… Read More Adam Kirsch: Heidegger Was Really a Real Nazi
First posted June 10, 2019 NB: I was sent this by a friend who saw it on Facebook. I post it without permission of the author as I am sure he will not mind. It is meant for us all to read. It is one of the most beautiful stories I have read in many years.… Read More SECULARISM IN A HOUSE OF GOD
More than 50 Russian draft centres have been targeted in arson attacks since the invasion of Ukraine Olya Romashova There have been 18 attempts to set fire to draft centres and state administrative buildings across Russia since the Kremlin announced that it was mobilising Russian citizens to fight in Ukraine last week. They are the… Read More ‘I won’t go and kill my brothers!’: Russians set fire to draft centres
First posted July 20, 2013 The life-impulse can exist without fascism, but fascism cannot exist without the life-impulse. Fascism is the vampire leeched to the body of the living, the impulse to murder given free rein, when love calls for fulfilment in spring.. Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933): The essays below are part of a… Read More The law of killing: A brief history of Indian fascism / Arthur Rosenberg: Fascism as a Mass Movement / Kannan Srinivasan: A Subaltern Fascism?
