Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know. By Mark Lilla Reviewed by John Banville This is at once a wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit. Almost every one of the short sections into which the narrative is divided… Read More The enduring power of stupidity
By Alfred McCoy / TomDispatch Some 15 years ago, on December 5, 2010, a historian writing for TomDispatch made a prediction that may yet prove prescient. Rejecting the consensus of that moment that U.S. global hegemony would persist to 2040 or 2050, he argued that “the demise of the United States as the global superpower could come… in 2025, just… Read More Requiem for an Empire
“When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus,” Owens said. “I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House… Read More Jesse Owens pierced a myth
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting: Milan Kundera NEW YORK: I am in the The Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center next to the St. Vartan Armenian Cathedral in Manhattan. I am holding a bound, hand-written memoir, which includes poetry, drawings, and scrapbooked images, by Zaven Seraidarian, a… Read More Chris Hedges: Organized Oblivion
Ø दिलीप सिमियन ‘’अपने क्षेत्र की विशिष्टता का आग्रह हमारे जीवन का एक अभिशाप है. हम चाहते हैं कि हमारा क्षेत्र फैल कर भारत की सीमा के साथ मिल जाए और अंततः वह इस पृथ्वी की सीमा तक फैल जाए. और ऐसा नहीं हुआ तो यह नष्ट हो जाएगा.“ — महात्मा गांधी, सितंबर 1947 “सत्य कभी… Read More गांधी का समुद्री वर्तुल
Trump’s lewdly playful face now fills our screens as Biden’s frail visage recedes. Not forever; there will always be a Jekyll impersonator in America’s political repertory Mukul Kesavan Donald Trump’s triumph doesn’t show us a ‘polarised’ America. This lazy metaphor for division obscures America’s shapeshifting oneness. When pundits pointed out that Trump’s success in 2016… Read More Exit Jekyll, enter Hyde: America isn’t polarised; Trump victory shows US is bipolar
The answer lies in Germany’s history – but it is not, as many assume tied to efforts to atone for the Nazi Holocaust and ensure that it never happens again… Germany was never fully de-Nazified. It never attempted to come to terms with the politics that had led to the rise of Hitler. Tony Greenstein… Read More Why is Germany supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza?
All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory: Viet Thanh Nguyen ‘Americans liked seeing people eye to eye, the General had once told me, especially as they screwed them from behind’ – (From Chapter One of The Sympathizer) From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The… Read More Nothing ever dies: Vietnam and the memory of war / Viet Thanh Nguyen and Michael Vann in conversation
First posted June 07, 2020 Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the… Read More President Eisenhower’s Speech on the American Military Industrial Complex, January 17, 1961
I have no idea who will win the US election. (This was written before the results began to arrive). But there are many of us who have had enough hypocrisy from the American establishment, whether led by Democrats or Republicans. We are now witnessing the decline of the US dominated post Cold War global order.… Read More The freedom bubble
After the truth-shower 