”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
First posted June 19, 2014 Martin Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte; Black Notebooks – 1931-1941 – first published March 2014 Reviewed by Richard Wolin In the anti-philosophical arguments of the Black Notebooks, Heidegger views reason, individualism, and democracy through the prism of modern humanity’s utter and wholesale “abandonment by Being.” His obscure point of departure leads to equally obscurantist forms… Read More National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks
First posted July 20, 2013 The life-impulse can exist without fascism, but fascism cannot exist without the life-impulse. Fascism is the vampire leeched to the body of the living, the impulse to murder given free rein, when love calls for fulfilment in spring.. Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933): The essays below are part of a… Read More The law of killing: A brief history of Indian fascism / Arthur Rosenberg: Fascism as a Mass Movement / Kannan Srinivasan: A Subaltern Fascism?
First posted May 26, 2019 NB: Ambedkar’s book is a crucial archive for the climate of the times in which it was written. A noticeable feature is the extensive research, done in short time, soon after the Muslim League’s Lahore Resolution in March 1940. It is also noteworthy that he used stereotypes, fairly common in… Read More Extracts from B. R. Ambedkar’s book on Pakistan (1940, 1945)
First posted October 1, 2012 Even though India’s British rulers considered him a dangerous anarchist and repeatedly put him in jail, Gandhi always proclaimed his friendship for the British people. When he was in London for the Round Table Conference in 1931, he decided to visit the mill areas of Lancashire. He was warned by the police not… Read More Gandhi visits the poor people of England in 1931
One of the interesting points that you make is how we in the West think of Solzhenitsyn in terms of his The Gulag Archipelago published in 1973. We think of Solzhenitsyn as a human rights actor. But that’s not the role that he plays where Ukraine is concerned. Your argument is that Solzhenitsyn is, as it were,… Read More Decentralizing the Cold War: an interview
Comrade-proletarians, and toilers of all countries: We, Russian workers and soldiers, united in the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, send you warmest greetings and announce the great event. The Russian democracy has shattered in the dust the age-long despotism of the Tsar and enters your family of nations as an equal, and as… Read More CALL BY THE PETROGRAD SOVIET TO THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD; March 28, 1917
Dilip Simeon First posted April 11, 2017 Lecture presented at the Champaran Satyagrah centenary celebrations, Patna, April 10, 2017 A pdf of the lecture is available here. A fuller argument on satyagrah and nihilism may be read here The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it: Mary Catherine Bateson Nihilism doesn’t stand… Read More The search for new time: Ahimsa in an age of permanent war
First posted May 3, 2017 NB: This article appeared under the title 50 years of Naxalbari in CatchNews on May 1, 2017. I post it below with my original title. It is the first of two articles I wrote about the first phase of Naxalism. The second appeared in Outlook on May 15, I’ve posted it here: Yesterday once more. I take… Read More Annihilation – 50 years of Naxalbari
After the truth-shower 