Beijing (AsiaNews) – The popular Chinese messaging site WeChat continues to silence He Weifang, a Peking University academic known for his campaigns in favour of the establishment of the rule of law and freedom of expression in China. In a handwritten letter that has been circulating on the web since 3 February, the academic denounced… Read More WeChat silences He Weifang, defender of rule of law in China.
A Delhi University professor has been booked for an allegedly objectionable social media post on the claims of a ‘Shivling’ being found at the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi. Ratan Lal, an associate professor of history at the Hindu College, has been booked under IPC sections 153-A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion,… Read More Hindu College history professor booked for post on Gyanvapi ‘Shivling’ / Teachers, students demand immediate release of associate professor Ratan Lal
Should I be banned because I admire Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s masterpieces Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, and Castle to Castle, despite his virulent anti-Semitism…? Should I be banned for liking Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which is rabidly misogynistic? Should I be banned for loving William Butler Yeats, who, like Ezra Pound… was a fascist collaborator? Should… Read More Hedges: Alice Walker and the Price of Conscience
By Konstantin Akinsha In early March, the University of Milan-Bicocca reacted to the Russian war against Ukraine by cancelling a seminar on Dostoevsky. This peculiar stand against Russian imperialism provoked a heated discussion among academics and intellectuals. The seminar was taught by the writer Paolo Nori, who instantly became famous. For a few days, the… Read More Don’t cry for me, Dostoevsky
Margaret Thatcher hated the ‘British Bastard Corporation’, as her husband liked to call it. Coverage of the Falklands War was an inevitable flashpoint, with Thatcher raging against reporters’ references to ‘British’ forces rather than ‘our’ troops. The tabloid press sensed an opportunity to put the boot in, with the Sun wheeling out the tiredest of tropes by… Read More Books reviewed: Beebology, or the history of the ‘British Bastard Corporation’
When my daughter asked why she couldn’t have an Alexa, I told her it is because Alexa steals your dreams and sells them It is often said that people are entitled to their opinions. But are they really? Do you have a God-given right to believe that torture is good, or that the moon… Read More Book review – Freedom to Think: the big tech threat to free thought
The Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) administration and the security forces are doing themselves a great disservice by creating an extremely coercive eco-system for journalists in the Union Territory (UT). Those administering the UT are rapidly losing out on the critical feedback that could make the system more stable. An apocryphal story amongst journalists in Srinagar… Read More Bharat Bhushan: Media persecution in J&K is a misguided venture
The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. Gone is the interview with Nathaniel Philbrick on his book about George Washington. Gone is the discussion with Kai Bird on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gone is my… Read More Chris Hedges: On Being Disappeared / The Lie of American Innocence
In the medieval era, when a thinker successfully claimed divine revelation, he placed his words beyond dispute. Only the hopelessly benighted or demonically inspired could doubt him. In recent decades, the claim of “science” achieves a similar result. Politicians maintain they “just follow the science” while supportive mass media platforms banish questioners as enemies of… Read More THE CANCELLATION OF RUSSIAN CULTURE. By Gary Saul Morson
Amid Russia’s shelling of Kharkiv, the limits to what we can learn from you are clear. Your knowledge was produced under the conditions of American hegemony, which has reached its limits at Russia’s blood-red lines. The US has lost its ability to represent its interests as common interests for Russia and China. It cannot enforce… Read More Volodymyr Artiukh: The Western Left doesn’t understand Putin or the world outside the US / Tatyana Margolin & Yelena Litvinov: Putin is trying to silence his critics
After the truth-shower 