Since independence, the Republic of Congo has been suffering from ethnic strife, armed rebellions and military interventions by neighbouring countries. The presence of valuable minerals has added fuel to the strife which has taken millions of lives. Can peace ever come to this troubled nation? D.J. Ravindran The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), formerly… Read More Congo: A Tragedy in Many Parts Over Many Decades
Behind today’s headlines is a history of imperial outrage—including a Philadelphia contract man who wreaked havoc in early 20th century Venezuela and helped oust a president. Greg Grandin Before Nicolás Maduro and Hugo Chávez, there was Cipriano Castro. Before Donald Trump, there was Theodore Roosevelt. And before petroleum, there was asphalt pitch. The following excerpt… Read More Tar Wars
From Venezuela to Minnesota, Trump is trying to create a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity… The good news is that the US is a large, diverse, energetic country, filled with people who do not like to be bullied and coerced, who still possess significant degrees… Read More Homeland Empire
NB: (The counter revolution) ‘…tried many forms and devices, but soon learned that it could come to power only with the help of the state machine and never against it… the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and the Hitler Pustch of 1923 had proved this.. In the centre of the counter revolution stood the judiciary. Unlike administrative… Read More Chris Hedges: The Machinery of Terror
Julian Borger The attack on Venezuela and the seizure of its president was a shocking enough start to 2026, but it was only the next day, when the smoke had dispersed and Donald Trump was flying from Florida to Washington DC in triumph, that it became clear the world had entered a new era. The US president… Read More Trump’s territorial ambition: new imperialism or a case of the emperor’s new clothes?
Abinash Dash Choudhury Cuttack first came to me as a palimpsest of stories in which the personal, the historical, and the mythological mingled without clear distinction. From my father, I learnt that it was the city where my paternal grandfather spent his final days in penury, shuttling between his workplace in the Old Secretariat and… Read More Seeing Cuttack
The Colombian novelist on Trump’s new doctrine and the long shadow of US aggression in Latin America Intervention and imperialism: that’s what the new world looks like. It will take many shapes. One of them is what we saw in Venezuela, but other processes are at work. I’ve been worried for a long time about… Read More ‘An International Thug’
The president has vowed to kill off ‘woke’ in his second term in office, and the venerable cultural institution a few blocks from the White House is in his sights By Charlotte Higgins On 30 May last year, Kim Sajet was working in her office in the grandly porticoed National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The gallery… Read More Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’
Once humiliation is naturalised as a civilisational condition, violence no longer appears as aggression but as rectification. Anubhav Singh Cinema has never merely reflected political life; it has functioned as one of its most efficient laboratories. From its earliest mass forms, cinema has been a technology for organising affect, disciplining perception, and training populations to… Read More How Hindi Cinema is Preparing India for Violence
NB: Justice in India today: no trial, no conviction, no bail; jail for 5 years. Sometimes we are punished not for what we did but for who we are. DS The young scholar’s work, though not without its flaws, is one of one of the most accomplished doctoral dissertations by an Indian that I have… Read More Ramachandra Guha: In praise of Dr Umar Khalid, from one historian to another
After the truth-shower 