William Pfaf (June 2013) Reviewed: The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century by Vladimir Tismaneanu The twentieth century undoubtedly will mainly be remembered for producing totalitarian politics. Italian Fascism was the first to give this name to the phenomenon, even though Mussolini’s movement was the least “total” of the… Read More Pure, Purifying, and Evil
By JOSEPH FRONCZAK One long century ago, on June 9, 1917, not quite halfway between the February Revolution and the October Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt. The lifelong communist died only five years ago, in 2012 at the age of ninety-five. He spent his final years placidly convinced that socialism belonged still… Read More Eric Hobsbawm’s Long Century
‘At the core of both our nature, and our way of being within nature, is a relentless, collective conversation about what is good and what is true.’ Richard Bernstein Richard J. Bernstein. The Vicissitudes of Nature: From Spinoza to Freud. New York: Polity Books, 2022 During the past few decades, our practices have been destroying nature,… Read More Alex Betancourt reviews The Vicissitudes of Nature
Frances Stonor Saunders on MI5 and the Hobsbawm File First posted March 26, 2015 On 25 January 1933, the 16-year-old Eric Hobsbawm marched with thousands of comrades through central Berlin to the headquarters of the German Communist Party (KPD). When they arrived at Karl Liebknecht Haus, on the Bülowplatz, the temperature was –18°C. They shuffled and… Read More British Intelligence (MI5)’s file on Eric Hobsbawm
Pranjali Bandhu A stalwart of India’s freedom movement, Gandhian economic philosopher, pioneer in the development of village and cottage industries and advocate of a decentralised, localised economy of permanence and freedom, it is unfortunate that J C Kumarappa (1892-1960) remains practically unknown to the present generation of Indians. The reasons for this are many, but… Read More J C Kumarappa’s Concept of an Economy of Permanence
Stephen Harding on the Modernist Poet and His Fascist Politics By the spring of 1939, the widely acknowledged dean of Anglo-American Modernist poetry, fifty-three-year-old Ezra Pound, had lived in Europe for three decades. After leaving the United States in 1908 at the age of twenty- three, the poet had initially settled in London, then moved… Read More Literary Celebrity, Mussolini’s Mouthpiece, and American Traitor: Who Was Ezra Pound?
Ernst Junger (1895-1998): Jünger found his countrymen’s discriminatory treatment of French Jews unacceptable. In his Parisian diaries, the writer wrote on 7 June 1942 that he had encountered for the first time the yellow star carried by three little girls who were passing by in the Rue Royale, and that he considered that day as fundamental in his personal history,… Read More An Aesthete at War
The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz’s searing anatomy of authoritarianism, highlights the dangers of self-deception in the name of ‘realism’ The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz’s searing anatomy of authoritarianism, tells a story drawn from an older Polish novel by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Insatiability. Europe is about to be overrun by a Sino-Mongolian army that dominates from… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: From a book on authoritarianism, lessons on ‘realism’ for India
Isabel Jacobs “Be human, after all!” – “But I don’t want to be human!” Bertolt Brecht, Mahagonny, cited by Kojève Until 2025, the name “Alexandre Kojève” was a paradox. A philosopher often invoked yet rarely read – a famous enigma. For decades, Kojève’s mythical reputation rested on rumors and anecdotes orbiting his Hegel seminar of the 1930s.… Read More A Famous Enigma: On Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography and “The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève”
How a Washington Post columnist laundered the Sangh’s violent history Dhirendra K Jha THE RASHTRIYA SWAYAMSEVAK SANGH has been on a spree, celebrating a century of its existence. Over this period, it has demonstrated its ability to patiently expand, mobilise and grow. Thousands of people, including the former president Ram Nath Kovind, attended the hundredth… Read More Manufacturing Legitimacy
After the truth-shower 