Brian Ulrich Informed Comment During the past seven months, the world has seen the significance of the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial chokepoint not only for oil, but natural gas, fertilizer, food for the Gulf states, and other industrial materials. That strait actually takes its name from a city and kingdom which once dominated the… Read More The Strait of Hormuz in World History & the Present Crisis
Roger Berkowitz Hannah Arendt’s homeland was populated with friends, most of them men—at least that is what her published correspondence would lead you to believe. The published letters between Arendt and her friends include books with Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Blücher, Gershom Scholem, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Joachim Fest. The only woman whose correspondence with… Read More On Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy’s Decades-Long Friendship
How the ancient pharaohs attempted to preserve their legacies for eternity By Susan Tallman Not so long ago, heroic public statuary felt irrelevant—good for locating yourself in traffic circles but otherwise dismissed as a relic of some credulous, great-man-besotted past. The fact that places like Pyongyang and Ashgabat still went in for it just confirmed… Read More The Vanity of Kings
Dear readers, in a note above an earlier post, Electoral Inquisition, I mentioned the outstanding features of our ruling establishment: it uses democracy to destroy democracy it demands eternal power in the name of the people – defined as those who agree with it it seeks the ‘look’ of legitimacy by subjugating the autonomy of… Read More India’s self-incubated East India Company
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
How the persistence of American Islamophobia makes it painfully clear that we are still living with the War on Terror Rozina Ali – Interviewed by Jonathan Shainin Twenty-five years after 11 September, it is hard to separate Islamophobia in America from the shock of that morning, as if everything since was caused by its impact.… Read More Second-Class Citizens
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?
RSS Ideology Launching पर Sanjay Singh की दमदार Speech Saffron Shadows: The RSS, A Century of Influence is a newly released anthology edited by writer and social activist Leher Sethi that examines the century-long journey and polarizing impact of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). +++++++++++ Rahul Gandhi defamation case: Savarkar’s grandson admits Nathuram, Gopal Godse… Read More Sanjay Singh’s Speech on the ideology of the RSS
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
By Shoaib Ahmed Sayam / Global Southasia / sapannews.com This past June, an elderly man was found stranded in no-man’s land on the Bangladesh-India border. For 24 hours, he and his nationality were shoved from one flank to the other. In the sweltering heat, border officials of both countries kept grilling Shosti Chandra Barman —… Read More Who defines where home is? Confronting Partition trauma
