First posted January 26, 2017 Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib cage an inch or two above my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the… Read More Heda Margolius Kovaly (1919-2010) : Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968
He and I had quarreled. A quarrel doesn’t matter – even if those who quarrel never see each other again – just another way of living together without losing sight of one another in the narrow little world that is allotted us. It didn’t. keep me from thinking of him, from feeling that his eyes… Read More Jean-Paul Sartre: Tribute to Albert Camus (February 1960)
First posted December 10, 2012 From the Socialist Register, 1974 Dear Edward Thompson Why I am not very happy about this public correspondence is because your letter deals as much (at least) with personal attitudes as with ideas. However I have no personal accounts to settle either with Communist ideology or with the year 1956;… Read More My Correct Views on Everything: Leszek Kolakowski’s correspondence with E. P. Thompson (1974)
By CELIA VIGGO WEXLER I don’t understand the adulation that some Italian-Americans continue to bestow on Christopher Columbus, who, as history demonstrates, was less a hero than a thug, exploiting and enslaving indigenous peoples. But the real culprit behind the subjugation of non-European peoples across the globe wasn’t an individual, or even a monarch. It was the… Read More Columbus was a thug. But the church was the big problem
Donald Trump has had the urge to crush many things, including the last election. So I must admit I found it eerily amusing that, when the FBI entered his estate at Mar-a-Lago recently, they did so under a warrant authorized by the Espionage Act of 1917. History certainly has a strange way of returning in our world and also… Read More Adam Hochschild: The Crushing of American Socialism
Jim Mamer: Fake Journalism Is Only the First Draft of Fake History In recently crediting the slave owners who wrote the Declaration of Independence with inspiring the abolitionist movement, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was only the latest in a long line of politicians determined to purify the innocence of the American experience despite its original… Read More The United States of Amnesia
First posted December 29, 2011 The Third George J. Wittenstein Lecture To ‘resist’ from the Latin resistere, means to stand fast, to uphold principles against pressure to abandon them. Claudia Koonz discusses the Nazis’ mandate to “Love only the neighbor who is like thyself.” Using examples from visual and print media from the 1930s, Koonz… Read More Professor Claudia Koontz’s lecture: Hitler’s Assault on the Golden Rule (February, 2008)
First posted April 05, 2015 NB: This is a short piece about the German carpenter Johann Georg Elser. It was written in 2001, as an appendix to a public lecture. Now a film is being released about this little-known hero. Read the BBC report below this story: The man who missed killing Hitler by 13… Read More In Memory of Johann Georg Elser, the carpenter who nearly prevented the Second World War
”How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause,” Sophie said. ”Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go… but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” Margie Burns At… Read More Sophie Scholl and the White Rose
First posted February 09, 2012 A photo of a lone man with his arms folded as hundreds around him perform a salute in Nazi Germany has resurfaced. The snap was taken in Hamburg in 1936, during the celebrations for the launch of a ship. In the crowd, one person refuses to raise his arm to… Read More Ordinary people. The courage to say NO
After the truth-shower 