NB: A blurb for a book of philosophical essays asks if ours is the era of ‘faint-hearted’ philosophy, because we were/are not ‘able to bear the greatness, the immensity of the claims made by the human spirit.’ The ongoing ideological assault on the mind and the very soul of humanity point to the widespread failures… Read More Natalia Ginzburg: Our Monstrous Ideas
NB: The idea of collective guilt or collective punishment is sheer poison. Everyone, especially the ruling establishments of various countries I need not name, should be aware of the inhumanity of this idea. You cannot defeat darkness with more darkness; violence with more violwence. For all its technological progress, global society seems not to have… Read More ‘We are all human beings first’: Jews and Muslims embrace at vigils for those killed in Bondi beach terror attack
This article was authored in June 2024. It appears in our fifth print issue, Contra Temps, available here Buber had written that for “political Zionism,” “the State is the goal and Zion a ‘myth’ that inflames the masses.” That propaganda employed to shore up nationalist militarism and settler-colonialism could leverage European guilt to “distort and exploit respectable… Read More Zionism Breaks
By Irfan Chowdhury / Sapan News Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan 1971-1974By Ilyas Chattha; Cambridge University Press, 2025 Growing up in the 1980s in Bangladesh, I had heard many stories of the 1971 war. I knew about the Bengalis working, for example, in the civil service of Pakistan, like my uncle who was stranded with… Read More Silences within silences: excavating the hidden history of Bengalis interned in Pakistan after 1971
NB: This article is interesting but open to caveats. One does not have to be a Putinist or Russian chauvinist to object to the statement that Russia started World War II by signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 (see below); simply aware of historical facts. Were Britain and France responsible for WW2 becuase they… Read More Investigating Putinism: History Over Ideology
By Paul Celan – Translated By Dean Rader Black milk of daybreak we drink it at dusk we drink it at noon in mornings we drink it at night we drink and we drink we dig a grave in the sky there is plenty of room A man lives in the house he plays with his snakes… Read More Paul Celan: Todesfuge
Earlier this year, Bangladesh asked Pakistan for a formal apology for the 1971 war crimes. But responsibility for the massacre of civilians does not rest with Pakistan alone. Ramesh Sharma’s latest documentary ‘Chronicles of the Forgotten Genocide’ looks at the role of the US in the violence that accompanied the birth of Bangladesh. The Emmy-nominated filmmaker… Read More The puppet-masters behind the Bangladesh genocide of 1971: Interview with Ramesh Sharma
Satya Sagar The recent surrender of top leadership figures within the Communist Party of India (Maoist) marks the most decisive failure yet in their decades-long armed struggle against the Indian state. This collapse signals the strategic end of a movement that consciously sought to replicate the great revolutionary success of Mao’s China on the complex,… Read More The Red Sunset: Analysing the Decline of the CPI (Maoist)
In the atomic age, the traditional political distinction between “friends” and “enemies” utterly failed, not because we all became “friends” but because the very notion of “enemy” is now meaningless. The only real enemy threatening us is atomic annihilation; the only real totalitarianism is the atomic condition, which transforms the whole planet into a borderless… Read More The Concrete Possibility of Total Nihilism: Günther Anders and the Atomic Bomb
Peace cannot be engineered on the basis of coercion. It requires justice, and justice is precisely what has been denied to Palestinians for generations – Rashid Khalidi In a region where peace has been promised and broken more times than history can count, optimism is a luxury few can afford. The latest proposal put forward… Read More Trump’s Gaza Plan Is Built on Sand: Why This Proposal Cannot Deliver Peace
After the truth-shower 