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
To the motives for war in human history, capitalism added another: profit. That motive drove technological advancement and created a genuine world economy. It also built new capitalist empires such as the Spanish, Dutch, British, French, Belgian, Russian, German, Japanese, and American empires. Each of these countries built its empire by various means including wars… Read More Richard Wolffe: The Role of Capitalism in the War in Ukraine
The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons… Read More Chris Hedges: The Pimps of War
Whatever else the Second World War was about, it was, on both sides, a war for empire. Taking a global view leads to a different picture of the war. For example, when did it begin? Most English speakers would say 1939, with Germany’s invasion of Poland. But by then Japan had already been at continuous war… Read More A New History of the Second World War
According to the IMF, Ukraine’s war-ravaged economy could shrink by up to 35% this year if Russia’s invasion becomes a protracted conflict. This will have serious consequences on the Ukrainian popular classes who are reeling under serious difficulties. At the end of 2021, Ukraine was already burdened with $94 billion in public debt on its… Read More Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt: Ukrainian debt, Argentina and IMF, Sri Lanka
Professor Madhavan Palat’s lecture on the Ukraine War: Regional History & Current Crisis was delivered on Tuesday March 29, at Habitat Centre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PTtMaXOCho Madhavan K. Palat read history at the Universities of Delhi and Cambridge. Thereafter he specialized in late Imperial Russian history and took the D.Phil. degree at the University of Oxford. He taught… Read More Madhavan Palat's lecture on the Ukraine War : Regional History & Current Crisis
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
The scenes of the horrible destruction that Russia is inflicting on Ukraine’s civilian cities, from Kharkiv to Mariupol, and the killing of nearly 1,000 civilians, including nearly 100 children, have tugged at the world’s heart strings – and rightly so. Nineteen years ago, when the George W. Bush regime unleashed its “Shock and Awe” campaign on… Read More US Deplores Russia’s ‘Shock and Awe’ against Ukraine, but Found its own Against Iraq “Spectacular”
Russia’s war in Ukraine, like the USA’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, should be understood as barbaric mass slaughter. For all their mutual hostility, the Kremlin and the White House are willing to rely on similar precepts: Might makes right. International law is what you extol when you aren’t violating it. And at home, rev… Read More From Moscow to Washington, the Barbarism and Hypocrisy Don’t Justify Each Other
On 27 February, three days after Russian tanks rolled into his homeland, the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa resigned from the European Film Academy. Loznitsa, an ebulliently professorial figure who moved with his family to Berlin in 2001, was furious that the EFA had issued a statement of solidarity with Ukraine that he saw as too “neutral,… Read More Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukrainian film-maker who refuses to be cancelled
After the truth-shower 