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
NB: NATO, Russia, North Korea etc are all flexing nuclear muscles. The film referred to above was made sixty-one years ago, and is even more relevant, given the increase in the number of insane old men dreaming of mushroom clouds. And this is a link to the source of this article, the Cardiff University Philosophy… Read More Dr Strangelove: how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Stanley Kubrick, 1963
Why did Japanese Confucians enthusiastically support Imperial Japan’s murderous conquest of China, the homeland of Confucius? Shaun O’Dwyer At the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946-48), convened to try Japanese military and civilian leaders for war crimes, one defendant delivered a puzzling explanation for Japan’s 1937-45 war against China. The aim of the… Read More Chastising little brother
First posted November 14, 2011 In a minor replay of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Indian media have been gloating at the defeat of the Left Front in West Bengal especially and have repeatedly suggested that this signals the ’end of the Left in India’. Even at the best of times… Read More End of the Left in India?
U.S. Jewish Army Intel Officer Quits over Gaza, Says Impossible Not to See Echoes of Holocaust We speak with U.S. Army Major Harrison Mann, the first military and intelligence officer to publicly resign over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Mann left his role at the Defense Intelligence Agency after a 13-year… Read More U.S. Jewish Army Officer Quits over Gaza, says he sees echoes of Holocaust
It’s all the more striking that Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar have run to be alongside Narendra Modi as he prepares once again to step into the role of the prime minister after describing the country’s largest minority group as “infiltrators”. Anand Sahay It is noteworthy that two leading political figures — the resurrected Andhra… Read More Naidu, Nitish Ignore the Pain of All Those Who Have Suffered During Modi’s 10-Year Tenure
