Siyavash Shahabi Europe’s migration policy produces deniability through distance. A document leaked to Statewatch this month confirms what many have warned about for years. The European Union’s naval mission, Operation Irini, has signed a technical agreement to train and equip coastal forces in eastern Libya. The mission is also to establish a migration coordination centre… Read More Migration, War, and the Dirty Work of Empire
Bharat Bhushan The ruling BJP and its acolytes are celebrating Narendra Modi having beaten the record of Jawaharlal Nehru as “elected” prime minister across all available media. Note that to make Modi taller than Nehru, the years 1947 to 1952 have been deleted. Should Modi’s prime ministership ultimately be judged on the day it clocked 4,399 days, surpassing… Read More Longevity isn’t legacy: Modi meets Anand
After 59 years of occupation, apartheid and Jewish terror, it’s obvious that, as with mold – plastering or a government of change will not uproot the blight without treating the root cause: racism Michael Sfard According to the human rights group B’Tselem, 24 Palestinian communities were completely uprooted and forcibly transferred from their place of… Read More A Decade of Pogroms and Jewish Terror: Welcome to the 60th Year of Occupation / In Israel’s Army, Murdering a Child Is Fine, but Having an Affair Is Reason to Be Fired
Will Buckingham – 2020 Our knowledge of Diotima is so sparse that many people have concluded that she was not an historical figure, but instead a literary invention. Diotima appears as a character in Plato’s Symposium, where Socrates refers to her as “a woman of Mantinea—a woman who was wise in many things.” And our knowledge of her doesn’t extend… Read More Diotima Climbs the Ladder of Love / The truth about love
NB: Over the past two decades I have written many commementaries on Indian Maoism, of which this one carries an inverted resonance with the article below. ‘Inverted’ because had the Naxalite movement organised a non-violent mass campaign in defence of the labouring poor, it would have achieved historic successes. It is a tragedy that the… Read More Dreams of a Maoist India
For thirty-seven years, we, the Tiananmen Mothers, have never forgotten the pain of losing our loved ones. Because we have persisted in speaking the truth, we have long suffered unjust treatment, and our family lives have been deeply affected. Yet we continue, peacefully and rationally, in our pursuit of justice. A Statement from the Tiananmen… Read More Tienanmen mothers commemorate the 37th Anniversary of the 1989 June Fourth Massacre
For tens of thousands of years, these Palaeolithic artworks were unseen. When they were rediscovered, onlookers marvelled at their vivid beauty. One of the world’s leading experts took me up close. The latest thinking on the subject proposes that our ancestors painted their way across western Europe, and what we now know as “cave art’ is… Read More ‘They take you out of life, out of time’: a journey into Spain’s astonishing cave paintings
Presented below is the Foreword by ROBERT ELEGANT. And this is an excellent review: Simon Leys: The art of interpreting non-existent inscriptions written in invisible ink on a blank page. Book review As his seventieth year approached, Laszlo Ladany decided to retire from the strenuous tasks of periodical scholarship to which he had voluntarily subordinated himself since… Read More LASZLO LADANY: The Communist Party of China and Marxism 1921-1985: A Self-Portrait (1988)
Review by Patrick Malcolmson “In a time when tyranny is resurgent all over the globe, in a bewildering variety of forms – military and civilian, theocratic and kleptocratic, ideological and tribal – this book provides a synoptic historical and philosophic perspective that does full justice to the manifold phenomenon in all its range and complexity.”… Read More Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror
NB: The story of this remarkable man may also be read in Chapter 3, The Heart of the Heart, of Benjamin Labatut’s book When we Cease to understand the World; which is where I first read about hi. Alex Lebrun This is an English translation of a post written in French by my father Gérard Lebrun. The pages… Read More Alexander Grothendieck, the secret genius of mathematics
After the truth-shower 