First posted June 02, 2017 NB: Comrade Satyapal Dang (1920-2013), a stalwart communist, was one of the tallest figures of modern India. At the height of the Khalistani movement he and his wife comrade Vimla stood fast in the CPI’s trade union office in Ekta Bhavan, Amritsar, despite the threats to their lives. They upheld secular values and… Read More Comrade Satyapal Dang: Lessons of Punjab have relevance for Kashmir
Lord Acton writes to Bishop Creighton in a series of letters (1887) concerning the moral problem of writing history about the Inquisition. Acton believes that the same moral standards should be applied to all men, political and religious leaders included, especially since, in his famous phrase, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”: I… Read More Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility: Lord Acton
First posted July 17, 2013 Political Resolution of the Annual Convention of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan, (Movement Against Communalism) Delhi, March 1992 NB –This document is being placed in the public domain as a beginning to an archive. The SVA was an anti-communal civic campaign floated by concerned citizens in the post 1984 period. It carried on… Read More Political Resolution of the Annual Convention of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan, Delhi, March 1992
First posted July 17, 2013 A Brief History of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan (1984-1993) NB – This history has been prepared by some activist participants, and may be liable to correction, revision and improvement over time. It is presented here after having been placed on Facebook about a year ago as a Note on my… Read More A Brief History of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan; Movement Against Communalism (1984-1993)
NB: During World War II, Albert Camus joined the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation; and worked as editor of the underground resistance journal Combat. In 1943, he began writing a series of letters to a hypothetical German friend. In a time when justice and truth seem helpless before ideology and hatred, Camus’ 81 year… Read More Albert Camus: Letters to a German Friend (1943)
Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, 2012 Reviewed by Ben Watson Raya Dunayevskaya died in 1987 aged 77, but her ideas remain alive and to-be-lived-by today, a permanent reproach to thought’s accommodation to an intolerable present. Dunayevskaya inspired and inspires a special enthusiasm, evidenced here by… Read More The Raya Dunayevskaya – Herbert Marcuse -Erich Fromm Correspondence
Donna Ferguson In 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote a letter that would change the landscape of the modern world. “I sailed to the Indies with the fleet that the illustrious King and Queen, our sovereigns, gave me, where I discovered a great many islands, inhabited by numberless people,” he wrote after his return to Europe to royal treasurer… Read More Original letter from Columbus announcing ‘discovery’ of America goes on sale
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
Talk delivered to the Creighton Philosophical Club at Syracuse University in April 1940 Introductory remark Both the intellectual glory and the political misery of the Germans may be traced back to one and the same cause: German civilisation is considerably younger than the civilisation of the West. The Germans are, strictly speaking, less civilized than the English… Read More Leo Strauss: The Living Issues of German postwar Philosophy (1940)
John Bartlett in Santiago Days before Salvador Allende’s confirmation as Chile’s president in 1970, US President Richard Nixon met with a rightwing Chilean media mogul to discuss blocking the socialist leader’s path to the presidency, newly declassified documents have revealed. The documents, published in a new Spanish edition of the Pinochet files by archivist and writer Peter Kornbluh, include… Read More Files reveal Nixon’s role in plot to block Allende from Chilean presidency
After the truth-shower 