It’s easier to blame brutes and sadists for extreme violence. But as we see in the documentary, modern genocides are fueled by people who are uncomfortably recognizable Omer Bartov Werner Best, a senior SS official and jurist who helped organize the Nazi death squads that murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, is also known for… Read More How do human beings rationalize genocide? NAZA provides a chilling look
Committee recognises work of South African who chaired UN commission that concluded Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza Julian Borger and Rachel Savage The Nobel peace prize has been awarded to Navi Pillay, the South African former UN human rights chief who chaired the UN commission that concluded Israel was guilty of genocide in… Read More ICJ judge Navi Pillay wins Nobel peace prize for promoting international law
Kaveh Rostamkhani – Erfan Kouchari At nearly 104 degrees Fahrenheit and 80% humidity, Bandar Abbas was already an open-air sauna at 5 a.m., as fishers unloaded their fresh catch of shrimp and fish at the city’s wholesale fish market, right at the wharf. The intense tang of rotten fish residue was unbearable. Elias Rahimi, like… Read More Life in Iran’s War-Torn South on the Strait of Hormuz
The genocide continues… in full view of the world People tell of lives changed beyond recognition after the 7 October attacks by Hamas three years ago and the subsequent Israeli offensive By Seham Tantesh in Gaza and Jason Burke Ahmed Ishtaiwi has six chairs. They are cheap and plastic and battered, but they are among… Read More ‘Neither war nor peace’: Palestinians in Gaza on existing amid disease, despair and ruins
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would… Read More Viet Thanh Nguyen -To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other
Philip Oltermann In a new book, German artist and writer Philipp Ruch argues that viewing the ascent of Hitler’s NSDAP through the prism of the Third Reich has distorted our understanding of fascism’s electoral breakthrough With your art collective Centre for Political Beauty you famously built a replica of the Holocaust memorial on a property… Read More ‘Hitler was a lazy criminal who slept in until noon’: why most of what we think we know about the rise of the Nazis is wrong
The Real Costs of the War on Iran and the Continuities of American History Kabir Rao – Navigating the Nuclear Age The involvement of the United States across the Global South or, in older parlance, the Third World, has a long and tragic history. Its encounters with Third World Countries have generally involved the practice… Read More What Has America Lost?
Genghis Khan conquered brutally, but strategically. Israel’s leaders wage endless war without clear goals or the means to achieve them. The Mongols, at least, eventually made peace with their enemies Reuven Amitai In his thought-provoking article on the eve of Sukkot, Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel quoted at length some sharp and troubling remarks by… Read More Comparing Israel’s Leaders to Genghis Khan Insults the Mongols
Halfway through 2024 the world got to an unspeakable, unwritable place. Israel’s orgiastic genocide of the Palestinians. Malignant capitalism. Murderous misogyny. Poisoned politics. It was literally beyond words. The ethical bankruptcy of power everywhere short-circuited my vocabulary into a charred and smoking ruin. Since I process dark, smelly feelings by articulating them, wordlessness only made… Read More Mitali Saran: Power and the nothingburger
The international legal order is in shambles. But from the ruins of impunity and lawbreaking, a group of nations is working to enforce accountability. Varsha Gandikota On Monday, the UN general assembly’s high-level meetings opened to news that Washington had drawn up sanctions against the international criminal court, targeting its bank accounts, software, insurers and… Read More Israel and the US have battered the international legal order. The impunity must stop
