By Nicky Reid / CounterPunch Every single American war has been bullshit. They all come with different excuses and some of them are pretty goddamn convincing but every major conflict that this country has ever engaged in has been motivated by greed and power, and every single war we’ve fought has ended the exact same way, with… Read More Exposing the Myth of the ‘Good War’
Older Cubans are struggling to make ends meet on tiny pensions as the country pivots towards private enterprise Ruaridh Nicoll and Eileen Sosin in Havana In central Havana, Martha Ortega has been queueing for mince. She has both osteo- and rheumatoid arthritis causing her foot to drag, but she remains stylish, a checked shirt and… Read More Members of Cuba’s revolutionary generation feel abandoned by the society they created
First posted October 06, 2012 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. Edited by Noel Malcolm. Oxford University Press; 2,355 pages WHEN Thomas Hobbes was maths tutor to the future English king, Charles II, in Paris in 1646, his young charge reportedly found Britain’s first great modern philosopher to be “the oddest fellow he ever met with”. That was one of… Read More After more than 350 years, the first critical edition of Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’
Husserl’s well-tended archive has given him a rich afterlife, while Nietzsche’s was distorted by his axe-grinding sister Peter Salmon I have a terrible fear that I shall one day be pronounced holy: from Ecce Homo; by Friedrich Nietzsche On the morning of 24 September 1938, a Franciscan priest by the name of Herman Van Breda… Read More Paper trails
First posted October 19, 2020 Fascism has awakened a sleeping world to the realities of the irrational, mystical character structure of the people of the world: Wilhelm Reich… .. the concept of ideology makes sense only in relation to the truth or untruth of what it refers to. There can be no talk of socially necessary delusions… Read More Ralph Dumain: Paranoia Papers Bibliography. The (Un)Natural History of Social Paranoia
Saba Naqvi; and P. Raman It is the centenary of the RSS next year, and it is an organisation that plays the long game. Towards that end, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a great enabler of their ideological agenda. But now that the BJP has crashed in the nation’s two most populous States, Uttar Pradesh… Read More The RSS and Modi – Two Articles
NB: The rendering permanent of an ’emergency’ was the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s contribution to the jurisprudence of tyranny. For him, ‘sovereign is he who decides the state of exception‘; and politics was defined in its essence by the ‘friend-enemy distinction‘. I have developed this argument at length in my 2023 essay on the demolition… Read More Colonial Reality of India’s Criminal Laws Remains Despite the New Hindi Names
The theologian and journalist suggests that slaves in the Roman empire contributed to the core texts of Christianity in this refreshingly readable book God’s Ghostwriters by Candida Moss Peter Stanford Graham Greene, who wrote so much about Catholicism in his novels, was regularly asked whether he was still a believer. It was listening to the… Read More God’s Ghostwriters: did enslaved scribes write the New Testament?
In Aeschylus’ ‘Persians’, Xerxes though defeated, was not dethroned. He went on to rule for another decade or more. But the spirit of freedom and democracy set alight by that struggle lived on for more than a century Vijay Tankha What could the earliest extant Greek tragedy have to say about the recent elections? Nothing… Read More Why an ancient Greek tragedy has resonance in politics today — in India and beyond
Corine Pelluchon THE REVERSAL OF REASON INTO IRRATIONALITY AND THE SCHEME OF DOMINATIONThe COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of collapse due to climate change and the erosion of biodiversity point to the aberrations of a development model that is based on the unlimited exploitation of natural resources and other living beings. More than ever, it… Read More Ecology as new Enlightenment
After the truth-shower 