Daniel Johnson on the life and work of Max Weber, whose controversial views on democracy still resonate today First posted August 28, 2020 As a young freelance of my acquaintance, exceptionally gifted, tells me that she has abandoned journalism in favour of a teaching post at a university. “I don’t think I’d be able to… Read More Daniel Johnson: Myths of the Prophet Max
John Bartlett in Santiago Days before Salvador Allende’s confirmation as Chile’s president in 1970, US President Richard Nixon met with a rightwing Chilean media mogul to discuss blocking the socialist leader’s path to the presidency, newly declassified documents have revealed. The documents, published in a new Spanish edition of the Pinochet files by archivist and writer Peter Kornbluh, include… Read More Files reveal Nixon’s role in plot to block Allende from Chilean presidency
I value George Orwell’s writing for his devotion to truthfulness and his recognition of all the ways that truths get corrupted. This is why, even if his private mores are of his time, his public writing still gives us tools to think about ours. By Rebecca Solnit The feminist writer Moira Donegan recently mocked contemporary social… Read More George Orwell in an age of moralists
France has retained a quasi-empire in Africa by stealth, and it is under threat like never before. Nabila Ramdani Retreats from crumbling empires are inevitably characterised by hastily arranged evacuations. Panicked civilians make their way to rickety airport terminals, in the hope of an emergency flight out of the chaos. This was the postcolonial scene… Read More The Niger crisis shows France’s quasi-empire in Africa is finally crumbling
NB: Meanwhile the JNU History Centre collection, one of the most valuable in the country, is being dismantled by the authorities to make room for a new centre of Tamil studies. I am sure lovers of Tamil language and culture do not wish for the university’s history collection to be removed. This is nothing but… Read More Sri Lanka, thirty one years after: Burning of the Jaffna Public Library, May 1981
NB: The temptation of our day is to accept the intolerable, for fear of still worse to come: Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism (1939). DS This is an appeal to the national and global academic community at large, including JNU alumni as well as teachers’ associations, student bodies and individual professors and students across the world.… Read More Appeal & Signature Campaign to Save the Centre for Historical Studies Library in JNU
First posted August 06, 2019 NB: An insightful essay. In the ideas contained in Weber’s inaugural lecture on his appointment to the chair in political economy at Freiburg (1895) he comes across as an economic nationalist in favour of colonial expansion; and the closure of Germany’s eastern border to ‘cheap’ Polish labour migrants. He also used… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Reading 1919 in 2019
PRAVEEN SWAMI Erased from our memory by high-rise buildings and malls, Gurugram, and the Mewat region that sprawled to its south, imploded into a macabre carnival of killing during Partition. “Whole villages were razed; scores of mosques desecrated; thousands killed or forced on pain of death to convert to Hinduism”, historian Ian Copland writes, “and many… Read More Gurugram’s is a hard-won economic gain. But Nuh violence shows it’s imploding
By NORMAN SOLOMON In 1980, when I asked the press office at the U.S. Department of Energy to send me a listing of nuclear bomb test explosions, the agency mailed me an official booklet with the title “Announced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979.” As you’d expect, the Trinity test in New Mexico… Read More Were the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings “nuclear tests”? The U.S. government said so
Japan has marked the 78th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima where the mayor urged the abolition of nuclear weapons and called the G7 leaders’ notion of nuclear deterrence a “folly”. On Sunday a peace bell tolled at 8.15am, the time the bomb was dropped. About 50,000 participants in the outdoor memorial ceremony… Read More On 78th anniversary of atomic bomb, Hiroshima mayor says nuclear deterrence ‘folly’
