Forging stronger bonds in a post-pandemic world… will require acts of moral imagination that are not part of any political ideology or mission statement, but are functions of the human condition: tenderness, compassion, longing, generosity, allegiance and affection. These are the only answers to loneliness, alienation, dislocation and disintegration. But the fullest expression of these functions…… Read More Jill Lepore: Is society coming apart?
With the Narendra Modi government, the American empire finally has at India’s helm, a reliable handyman unperturbed by factors such as the sufferings of common people. What previous governments since 1991 had failed to deliver… Modi has delivered with decisiveness. Since 2014, the government has dutifully gone about following the diktats of a fraudulent ranking… Read More Aryaman Jain, Irina Cheema – Farmers’ Movement in India: A Moment for Collective Introspection / Gallery: One Year of Kisan Andolan
The farmers’ greatest weapon against the police and its ideological militia was non-violence Prime Minister Modi, who was unbeatable in Parliament – and used his party’s brute majority to push through the farm laws without proper debate–has been subdued in the street by peoples’ power. The Central government’s climb-down on the three controversial farm… Read More Bharat Bhushan – 'Entire political science' lesson: Peoples' power trumps people in power
‘Post-truth politics may have started on the left bank of the Seine, but they ended up in the White House… postmodernism is intended to be subversive. Since civilisation works by order and authority, challenging these things is bound to seem disruptive. The trouble is that neoliberalism challenges them too. Nothing is more fluid and flexible than… Read More Book review – How We Became Postmodern
You do not fight Hollywood with critical argument. You fight Hollywood with Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Suleiman, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Moufida Tlatli, Ousmane Sembène, Yasujirō Ozu, Guillermo del Toro, Mai Masri, ad gloriam. You do not battle misrepresentation. You signal, celebrate, and polish representations that are works of art…. The recent release… Read More Hamid Dabashi: Hollywood Orientalism is not about the Arab world. It's about the American world
A further word on the subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state. This lesson… Read More The Owl of Minerva and the Spirit of Trust
NB: Given the state of affairs in many (there are exceptions) English language departments wherein ‘theory’ is shorthand for the ideas of Derrida and Foucauld, and where the notion of truth is sneered at, this newest upsurge of the antisemitic propaganda around the Dreyfus case ought to be an alert. I don’t think it will… Read More Jon Henley: Rise of far right puts Dreyfus affair into spotlight in French election race
The U.S. wars lost in Iraq and Afghanistan showed imperial overreach beyond what even 20 years of war could manage. That the defeats were drawn out for so many years shows that domestic politics and the funding of the domestic military-industrial complex were, more than geopolitics, the key drivers of these wars. Empires can die… Read More Richard Wolff: How the troubled U.S. empire could quickly fall apart
The violence against the Hindu minority in Bangladesh is an ominous development. But it is also a reminder of one cardinal truth: All of South Asia is “tied together in a single garment of destiny,” to borrow Martin Luther King’s phrase from a different context. Violence in one place will spill over to another; freedom… Read More P. B. Mehta – Violence and communalism: South Asia’s disturbing commonality
Whenever there’s a leak of documents from the remote islands and obscure jurisdictions where rich people hide their money, such as this week’s release of the Pandora papers, we ask ourselves how such things could happen. How did we end up with a global system that enables great wealth to be transferred offshore, untaxed and hidden… Read More George Monbiot: Trashing the planet and hiding the money isn’t a perversion of capitalism. It is capitalism
