NB: The reviewer (and Lilla) are too quick in their assessments of Leo Strauss. True he had right-wing followers (incidentally, card-holding Nazi’s such as Heidegger and Carl Schmitt have left-wing acolytes to this day). But Strauss took Heidegger seriously, and that is why he is the most effective and far-reaching critic of historicism, the core… Read More The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (2016)
There is one recurring theme: Young people feel robbed of their future Pratap Bhanu Mehta NB: A timely and typically thought-provoking essay by this scholar. I add some observations below 1/ The crisis of the 1960s and 1970s culminated in the Trilateral Commission’s 1975 report on The Crisis of Democracy, authored by Samuel Huntington et… Read More Nepal, France, America: democracy seems overtaken once more
Dilip Simeon NB: This article was published seventeen year ago. I post it now because of a need to highlight certain alarming features of our criminal justice system. The article appeared in Mail Today on June 17, 2008, and is an account of my personal experience of Indian justice. The happenings it relates were public… Read More Insult to Injury
NB: Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee (2017); and The Natural History of Destruction by WG Sebald (1999); are two books that show the mirror to ‘Western civilisation’ and Israel, inheritors of an atrocious history of exterminism and genocidal mania stretching from the Roman destruction of Carthage till the Armenian genocide of 1915, the… Read More The new barbarians
On Doval–Wang table: LAC situation, next steps to repair ties; visits taking place in run-up to SCO summit in China, possible visit by Putin to India NB: During the 1960’s the RSS hailed the American war of agression against Vietnam as a dharm-yuddha, or ‘holy war’: manifesting their visceral hatred of socialism and of communist… Read More Jaishankar heading to Moscow, Wang to Delhi amid strain in India ties with US. Remember Nehru’s non-alignment?
Number of arrests was highest recorded in relation to single operation in past decade, according to police NB: Some advice to the brave protestors: fill the jails. Get the police to arrest thousands more of you. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered with the help of the USA and UK, with its self-proclaimed… Read More Police arrest 474 people at protest over Palestine Action ban in London. Mass civil disobedience is the only way forward
Anyone deflecting from the clear responsibility of the Israeli state for this mass starvation of two million people, anyone resorting to euphemisms about “crises” makes themselves complicit in this historic crime. NB: This is the way the Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of captured Russian and Polish POWs and civilians in WW2, by placing them… Read More Murder not crisis – Why Israel’s starvation of Gaza is exceptional in a global context
NB: This is what needs to be said repeatedly, because so many people have shut their eyes to the most brutal campaign of mass extermination since the American punishment of Vietnam, which left some 4 million dead over a decade. The rate of murder in Gaza would please the operators of the death camps run… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: If Gaza’s corpses can vanish from our conscience, what else are we becoming blind to?
NB: America’s religious fanatics have converted the Old Testament into a title deed; Jesus into a bloodthirsty warrior; Christianity into an instrument of the arms industry; and compassion for humanity into obscurantist nationalism and narcissism. To assist them in this endeavour, the US Supreme Court is functioning as a Catholic theocracy. In a word, religion… Read More Prophecy, not politics, may also shape America’s clash with Iran
NB: Skip the first three paragraphs. What follows should be easy to read. The aphorisms are not purely mine, but then nothing is. DS In our obscurity, in all this vastness , there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us: Carl Sagan The… Read More After Discourse
After the truth-shower 