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
First posted May 6, 2017 NB: This is the second of two pieces that I have written for publication on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Naxalbari. It has appeared today in Outlook. I post it here under the title that I gave it. The first one was entitled Annihilation. And this post has photos from a… Read More Yesterday once more – 50 years after Naxalbari
First posted on August 14, 2017 NB: Outlook asked me to write an article on ‘the decline of idealism’, with a focus on the Left. Here is what I wrote – it has appeared in the current issue under the title The Idea and its Mutant – DS Before discussing the idealism of the Left, it would be… Read More The decline of idealism
First posted June, 2021 NB: George Orwell was born in Motihari, Bihar, in 1903. I posted this video and collection of links on him in 2013, but find it necessary to remind ourselves of his continuing relevance. This was his final warning; and a full documentary of his life may be found here. With the… Read More George Orwell’s Final Warning: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever”
First posted December 3, 2016 Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion By Gareth Stedman Jones; Reviewed by Jeremy Adelman While Jenny was dying, Marx wrote a letter to the Russian Group for the Emancipation of Labour in Geneva on the question: was communal property good? Stedman Jones ends Karl Marx with a story about the fate of… Read More Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
First posted November 11, 2017 Madhavan Palat Utopia is a place or as it literally means, a no place, in Thomas More’s Greek pun, one that does not exist, cannot exist, but ideally should come into being as the good place, the Eutopia. Many utopian projects, be it beauty that never fades or the return… Read More Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia
