In the mid-1970s, exiled from the Soviet Union for exposing its vast crimes against humanity, and having won the Nobel Prize in Literature for that endeavor, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) turned his back on the lionization that awaited him in New York and other cultural capitals of the West and instead settled with his family in… Read More Book review: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece is finally appearing
Forging stronger bonds in a post-pandemic world… will require acts of moral imagination that are not part of any political ideology or mission statement, but are functions of the human condition: tenderness, compassion, longing, generosity, allegiance and affection. These are the only answers to loneliness, alienation, dislocation and disintegration. But the fullest expression of these functions…… Read More Jill Lepore: Is society coming apart?
With the Narendra Modi government, the American empire finally has at India’s helm, a reliable handyman unperturbed by factors such as the sufferings of common people. What previous governments since 1991 had failed to deliver… Modi has delivered with decisiveness. Since 2014, the government has dutifully gone about following the diktats of a fraudulent ranking… Read More Aryaman Jain, Irina Cheema – Farmers’ Movement in India: A Moment for Collective Introspection / Gallery: One Year of Kisan Andolan
NB: History has always been a battleground, for as Orwell’s Big Brother reminds us: ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’ (1984). The search for the truth about the past is as difficult as it is inevitable. DS Had justice and the rule of law prevailed in South… Read More Terry Bell: A REASON FOR SADNESS AT THE DEATH OF FW DE KLERK
The morning after a great historical crisis, you feel as sad and sick as after a heavy night. But there is no aspirin for historical hangovers .. The world is no longer divided into the just or unjust, but into masters and slaves. He who is right is he who enslaves. Albert Camus La crise… Read More Albert Camus's lecture 'The Human Crisis', New York, March 1946. 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents'
NB: Given the state of affairs in many (there are exceptions) English language departments wherein ‘theory’ is shorthand for the ideas of Derrida and Foucauld, and where the notion of truth is sneered at, this newest upsurge of the antisemitic propaganda around the Dreyfus case ought to be an alert. I don’t think it will… Read More Jon Henley: Rise of far right puts Dreyfus affair into spotlight in French election race
Many of the early twentieth-century champions of eugenics were social democrats and feminists. All shared a belief that science and technocracy could re-engineer society for the better. Attempts to institutionalize eugenics coincided with the emergence of welfare states and infrastructure to monitor the ‘feebleminded’. What Malthus called the population question looms large in the intellectual history… Read More Bryan Fanning: People like us
Consider the ‘Overture’ to Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire, 1875-1914… where we are told how a young Viennese woman and a young male English immigrant of Polish-Russian origin happened to find themselves during 1913-14 in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. There they met by chance, fell in love, and were eventually married. The marriage, though, took place… Read More Anjan Basu: Remembering Eric Hobsbawm Who Made History Reading Delightful With His Wit
The most striking aspect of the persona that Goebbels composes in the diaries is that it doesn’t try to conceal traits that any halfway decent morality would condemn. He is not ashamed of the abject servility that he shows in relation to Hitler; he glories in it. He registers no flicker of remorse regarding the… Read More The Nazi everyman: Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels
For the first time, he began to see himself as he really was, naked and defenseless at the center of a universal debacle, buffeted this way and that by events, threatened on every side by an all-pervasive decay, sinking slowly into the quick-sands of failed resolutions, and finally disappearing into the ultimate morass against which… Read More The Death of Napoleon by Simon Leys
After the truth-shower 