Tag: History

Erasing Palestine in the name of Jewish trauma: Jewish Voice for Labour (Nov 2024)

Seeing Things Clearly: How projecting past persecution onto Palestinians only perpetuates the war… We need to see what is really happening in all its precision… Only then can we see what specific political responses are necessary. Instead, a substitution occurs, Nazis are substituted for Hamas, the Holocaust for acts of political violence. Israelis, alongside many… Read More Erasing Palestine in the name of Jewish trauma: Jewish Voice for Labour (Nov 2024)

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The new barbarians

NB: Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee (2017); and The Natural History of Destruction by WG Sebald (1999); are two books that show the mirror to ‘Western civilisation’ and Israel, inheritors of an atrocious history of exterminism and genocidal mania stretching from the Roman destruction of Carthage till the Armenian genocide of 1915, the… Read More The new barbarians

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To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement 

Dan Shortridge Benjamin Nathans logged on to the Pulitzer Prize live announcement feed in early May just in time to hear his name read as a finalist. A split-second later, he heard his name read again, as the general nonfiction winner of one of the United States’ most prestigious arts-and-letters prizes. “It came as a complete… Read More To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement 

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Israel’s Assassination of Memory

The campaign of erasure banishes intellectual inquiry and the dispassionate examination of history. It celebrates magical thinking… The Israeli government bans public commemorations of the Nakba… a day of mourning for Palestinians who seek to remember the massacres and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians carried out by Jewish terrorist militias in 1948 for this reason. Palestinians… Read More Israel’s Assassination of Memory

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For Once in Our Lives

We’re Right Again. Now that it is too late, it’s no longer forbidden to use the word “genocide” in polite company. Now, as Gazans starve, as they are shot by soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces while seeking food aid at sites run by the farcically-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the world has decided it is, after all, “against this.” Only recently,… Read More For Once in Our Lives

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Bulldozing Gaza

The singularity of the Israeli campaign in Gaza lies in the asymmetry of power, its intensity, its enclosure, its direct connection to a settler colonial project. All this leads us back to the 1940s and Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, which he modeled on Nazi-occupied Poland. That line of thought should not be dodged, or… Read More Bulldozing Gaza

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Strangers in the Family Album: Reflections on Soviet Amateur Photography

By Zeynep Devrİm Gürsel “Just as any advanced comrade must have a watch, he shall also possess mastery of a photo camera.” So declared Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1926, in his role as the Soviet Union’s Commissar of Enlightenment. This programmatic statement was included in the very first issue of the photography journal Sovetskoe Foto, published that same… Read More Strangers in the Family Album: Reflections on Soviet Amateur Photography

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‘The King Lear in I Am the Walrus? That came from John Cage’: Paul McCartney on the Beatles’ debt to great avant-garde composers

Elizabeth Alker It is a sunny October afternoon and I am sitting in a long wood-panelled hallway in an old converted townhouse in London waiting to be called into the office of Paul McCartney. I am dressed in my best clothes and trying not to let nerves get the better of me. I am here to… Read More ‘The King Lear in I Am the Walrus? That came from John Cage’: Paul McCartney on the Beatles’ debt to great avant-garde composers

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Another Country

Mukul Kesavan Freedom should have come in fifty-seven,a century after eighteen-fifty-seventwo centuries after Plassey’s fifty-seven,(which made our history rhyme with five and seven).But freedom came before its time,four and seven didn’t rhyme,the witching hour’s midnight chime,rang in twins before their time,conjoined twins before their time,in nineteen-forty-seven. Radcliffe carved the join and there was blood,that was… Read More Another Country

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