The United States is a republic forged by war; its founding document lists grievances against a king for quartering troops and waging war without consent. Yet modern Americans often cheer the latest intervention with little reflection on history or morality. The Maduro raid reveals a people quick to salute and slow to question. When the… Read More The Ugly Truth About Many Americans: They Love War
Opinion by Anne Applebaum In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the world is divided into three spheres of influence: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, all perpetually at war. Sometimes two of the states form an alliance against the third. Sometimes they abruptly switch sides. No reasons are given. Instead, the Party tells the proles, “We have always been at… Read More Trump’s ‘American dominance’ may leave the USA with nothing
How Did I End Up Living in Donald Trump’s Suicidal America? By Tom Engelhardt As 2026 begins, what a strange planet we find ourselves on. The two great empires of my youth, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and my own country, are clearly experiencing some version of imperial decline, even if Vladimir Putin is acting otherwise… Read More What Planet Are We On?
Maybe we have lost the quality of friendship in becoming too particular about whom we choose to have as friends, and in a sense eroding what is, after all, the essence of friendship—camaraderie of various kinds and a fundamental trust in the other : From Just Being NB: Professor Romila Thapar is a stalwart of… Read More Romila Thapar: Just Being
The kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife solidifies America’s role as a gangster state. Violence does not generate peace. It generates violence. The immolation of international and humanitarian law, as the U.S. and Israel have done in Gaza, and as took place in Caracas, generates a world without laws, a world of… Read More ‘Naked imperialism’: how Trump intervention in Venezuela is a return to form for the US
Ending the American Dream by 2029? For writers, the future has long been a tricky terrain. While the past can prove unsettling and the present uncomfortable, the future seems to free the mind from reality’s restraints and let the imagination soar. Yet it has also proven full of political pitfalls. The ‘Putinization’ of US foreign… Read More Alfred McCoy: The Future According to Trump / Julian Borger: The Putinization of US foreign policy has arrived in Venezuela
This is no book; who touches this touches a man: Walt Whitman Zweig and his second wife, Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann, committed suicide on February 22, 1942; the day after he submitted the manuscript of this book to the publisher. His farewell message read: I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect… Read More Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday
Netra News obituary for the first female prime minister of Bangladesh She became only the second woman ever elected prime minister in a Muslim-majority country, leading a party that liked to cast itself as the centre-right antidote to the Awami League’s secular nationalism. By the time her Bangladesh Nationalist Party returned to power in 2001,… Read More Begum Khaleda Zia, the walking contradiction
NB: A timely reminder that a century ago the two outstanding revolutionaries of the world were Gandhi and Lenin; and that Indian intellectuals were profoundly affected by their ideas. To carry this discussion further, the essays immediately following this article argue that the most significant contra-position in the world in the past century – in… Read More Polar perspectives: Gandhi vs Lenin
Interview with the author November 11, 2025 There is a whole agenda out there waiting for a younger generation of the left to lay out in a rigorous and comprehensive way. But that is an agenda that will simply collapse if it subscribes to “orthodoxies” and other forms of intellectual snobbery. Historical materialism as Marx… Read More Jairus Banaji on his book A Marxist Mosaic
After the truth-shower 