NB: This essay was written nearly 40 years ago, in the aftermath of the 1984 carnage of Sikhs in New Delhi. It was my first attempt at arguing that communalism was India’s version of Nazism, and that it was a singular phenomenon with different religious (and mutually influential) expressions, rather than an arithmetical total of… Read More Communalism in Modern India: A Theoretical Examination (1986)
First posted March 09, 2017 The most outstanding figure in 20th century Kashmiri literature has also been the least published poet of his generation. To his many readers and admirers, Dinanath Nadim has been a bit of a paradox. In a literary career extending over half a century, Nadim (1916-89) wrote a lot but published little. Partly,… Read More Dinanath Nadim: Kashmir’s forgotten poet by Mohan K. Tikku
William Egginton As history’s bloodiest war metastasised from Europe outward, two men – a world apart from each other, and coming from profoundly different disciplines – converged on one fundamentally similar idea. One of the men was a poet and short-fiction writer with middling success in his own country but virtually unknown outside its borders.… Read More Quantum poetics: Borges and Heisenberg on language and reality
You might think that — after killing such a vast number of people in a war of aggression based on continuous deceptions — some humility and even penance would be in order… but no.. being the United States government means never having to say you’re sorry Norman Solomon hen Joe Biden flew out of Hanoi last week,… Read More Biden Is the Latest President To Tout the Vietnam War as Proud History
the larger tendency in American culture (is) to simply accept a certain level of death, step over the bodies and keep going to work and the moviesAmericans have formed a cult around Mammon, the demon of wealth… when the overall cultural attitude is to put profits above people, it doesn’t matter what rituals we perform. The… Read More Is America a death cult?
It may well be that the future of the world, and thus the sense of the present and the significance of the past, will depend in the last analysis on contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s work – from Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947) by Alexandre Kojève Alexandre Kojève was an immense influence on many… Read More The scar of identity
NB: What enables someone who has been a communist all his life become an ultra-chauvinist overnight? What lies beneath the slippery nature of ideology, and what is the difference between political philosophy and ideology? Why do Leninist parties in power enforce single-party dictatorships? What is the communist understanding of law and justice – is it… Read More Multipolarity, the Mantra of Authoritarianism
Letter from church source in anti-Hitler resistance reporting 6,000 daily killings undercuts Vatican’s claims of lack of knowledge Newly discovered correspondence suggests that the second world war-era Pope Pius XII had detailed information from a trusted German Jesuit that up to 6,000 Jews and Poles were being gassed each day in German-occupied Poland. The documentation… Read More Letter suggests Pope Pius XII knew of mass gassings of Jews and Poles in 1942
Dalya Alberge A young Australian who joined the French Resistance, worked undercover for British intelligence, and helped to save thousands of lives in war-torn France was guillotined by the Gestapo in 1943 after he was betrayed by a British double agent. Yet Corporal Bruce Dowding’s bravery and ultimate sacrifice have been largely forgotten because France’s attempt to… Read More The forgotten Australian hero who saved thousands from the Nazis crimes
The romance of Camus and Casares is richer, if not sadder, when considered alongside the narratives of each of their work. There is an eerie doubling of life and art. Absurdity is the only certainty, and this is confirmed by coincidence and chance. The two first met on June 6, 1944, the storied day the Allied forces… Read More Albert Camus and Maria Casares
After the truth-shower 