Nick Turse Mr. Turse is a Columbia University graduate student completing a dissertation on American war crimes during the Vietnam War. On October 19, 2003, the Ohio-based newspaper the Toledo Blade launched a four-day series of investigative reports exposing a string of atrocities by an elite, volunteer, 45-man “Tiger Force” unit of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division over… Read More The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of
First posted December 27, 2016 NB: An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article, I’m uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation of communal parties in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in… Read More Goodbye Sadiq al-Azm, lone Syrian Marxist against the Assad regime
To accept that the spectacle about to be staged in Ayodhya can be extricated from politics is to sanctify the falsification of our living memory KAPIL KOMIREDDI There is no ritual that can sanitise the genesis of the temple that will be consecrated in Ayodhya on 22 January. It exists because the house of worship… Read More Ayodhya event not about Ram, but coronates Hindutva as state religion
First posted June 30, 2015 The Old Astronomer to His Pupil Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet,When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of howWe are working to completion, working on from then to… Read More The Old Astronomer to His Pupil / Stunning New Footage Of Earth
Titled “Ayodhya: Where Divinity Meets Modernity,” the full-page colour ad that the Uttar Pradesh government put out in newspapers recently made me pause. Beneath the photos of the model Rama temple and of the CM of UP and the PM, the verbose ad claimed that the “double engine government” was “restoring” the “glory” of “the… Read More Chandan Gowda: Two Kinds of Hindus
NB: An introduction to this event was first posted on March 30, 2012 on my older blog; and reposted on November 26, 2022, as Another Time, Another Mosque. Readers may refer to it for the historical background which provided the impulse for this fast (Gandhi called it his yagnya, or sacrifice). It lasted till January… Read More Mahatma Gandhi’s last fast against hatred and violence began on January 13, 1948
‘There are no innocent civilians in this area’: Capt. Ernest Medina officer commanding the units that entered My Lai village; the day before the murder of 350 to 500 Vietnamese civilians on March 15, 1968 ‘There are no innocent civilians in Gaza’: Israeli President Isaac Herzog, October 13, 2023 By Simeon Man March 16 marks… Read More ‘No innocent civilians’: the Violent Legacies of the U.S. War in Vietnam
No one could accuse the U.S. of double standards. What it is vulnerable to is the accusation that it no longer has any standards at all… Modern Germany needs to believe that Israel’s creation was a “happy ending” to the horrors of the gas chambers… For Germany, its commitment to Israel is offered as a… Read More Gaza and the End of Western Fantasy
Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center In her evocative book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza, the Israeli journalist Amira Hass writes, “To me, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it represents the central contradiction of the state of Israel—democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve.” The conflict in… Read More The Gaza War and the Rest of the World
‘I return often to Albert Camus’s Letters to a German Friend, written clandestinely during the occupation of France in 1943–44… published after the liberation, despite Camus’s initial opposition… His opening plea hangs in the air: “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.” ‘ On November 9 the NYR Online published an essay… Read More Seth Anziska on Dominant Orthodoxies
