NB: Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was one of the greatest writers of our times. He wrote during a tumultuous historical period. Deutsches Requiem, posted below, a short story written in 1946, is an imaginary testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal, Otto Dietrich zur Linde. Before getting to the story, I post two paragraphs he wrote in 1944,… Read More Jorge Luis Borges – Deutsches Requiem: a short story (1946)
Miłosz is best known outside Poland for The Captive Mind (1953), his study of how Eastern European intellectuals were seduced by Stalinism. Through several character portraits, he showed how a combination of opportunism, exhaustion, and hope led Polish writers to swallow the pill of contentment in exchange for compliance. Some prospered, like “Alpha, the Moralist” (based on… Read More Miłosz’s Magic Mountain. By Joy Neumeyer
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance… Read More Anjan Basu: What Can Karl Marx Offer to the 21st Century?
The Indian working class was a proud participant in the anti-imperialist struggle against British rule in India. Whether it was the six-day strike of the working class of Mumbai in 1908; the attempts of the Ghadar Party organised by Punjabi immigrant workers in Canada, who sailed to India in 1914 to overthrow the British; the… Read More Sudha Bhardwaj: Seventy-Five Years Since Independence, Industrial Working Class Still Struggles for Rights
NB: A timely reminder of the vulnerability of historiography to ideology. There are some among us who wish to ‘rectify’ history; whose resentment at the past can never be satiated, neither by revising textbooks nor by bulldozing the homes of the poor. Their emotional affliction is best described by Friedrich Nietzsche: The will cannot will… Read More Narayani Gupta: The problem with cherry-picking facts from history
A brilliant study of corruption by power, more specifically of the willingness of the German elites to chummy up to the psychotic vileness of the Third Reich. This is an account of clubs, diplomatic receptions and parties, but one shot through with a scholarly analysis of the nature of sociability, elitism and luxury in a… Read More Vases, Tea Sets, Cigars, His Own Watercolours: High Society in the Third Reich
The years leading up to the declaration of war between the Axis and Allied powers in 1939 were tumultuous times for people across the globe. The Great Depression had started a decade before, leaving much of the world unemployed and desperate. Nationalism was sweeping through Germany, and it chafed against the punitive measures of the… Read More ALAN TAYLOR – Historic photos of World War II: Before the War
Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, April 23, 2022 Climate Change 2022 Report: Act Now to Avert Catastrophic Events | K N Ninan Earth Day re-emphasizes need for resolving the survival crisis | Bharat Dogra Making Sense of IMF’s Institutional View on Capital Flows | Kavaljit Singh Jammu and Kashmir: Tenth Report Of The Concerned Citizens’ Group Alas, Hindi… Read More Mainstream, April 23, 2022 / Ramjas History students bid farewell to retiring teacher
A historical study of the opium and heroin trade and its political context, based on primary and secondary sources, including interviews with some of the key players of the developments in Indochina in the 1950s through 1970s. Alfred W. McCoy; The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central… Read More Book review: Alfred McCoy on the Politics of Heroin & CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
