Raymond Geuss, Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno Reviewed by Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College This volume belongs to the genre of works that aim to tell us something about what Western philosophy is — or, in this case perhaps, about what it was — by recounting its history from ancient Greece to today (which here means,… Read More Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno
Pjotr Sauer Donald Trump appeared to confuse geography and history on Monday, saying on television that he planned to meet Vladimir Putin “in Russia” on Friday for their much-anticipated, high-stakes summit. It was the latest in a series of verbal slip-ups by the US president – though had he made it a century and a half earlier, it… Read More Otter pelts, Orthodox priests and a $7.2m bargain: how Russia sold Alaska to the US
Dilip Simeon NB: This article was published seventeen year ago. I post it now because of a need to highlight certain alarming features of our criminal justice system. The article appeared in Mail Today on June 17, 2008, and is an account of my personal experience of Indian justice. The happenings it relates were public… Read More Insult to Injury
Seeing Things Clearly: How projecting past persecution onto Palestinians only perpetuates the war… We need to see what is really happening in all its precision… Only then can we see what specific political responses are necessary. Instead, a substitution occurs, Nazis are substituted for Hamas, the Holocaust for acts of political violence. Israelis, alongside many… Read More Erasing Palestine in the name of Jewish trauma: Jewish Voice for Labour (Nov 2024)
NB: Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee (2017); and The Natural History of Destruction by WG Sebald (1999); are two books that show the mirror to ‘Western civilisation’ and Israel, inheritors of an atrocious history of exterminism and genocidal mania stretching from the Roman destruction of Carthage till the Armenian genocide of 1915, the… Read More The new barbarians
Dan Shortridge Benjamin Nathans logged on to the Pulitzer Prize live announcement feed in early May just in time to hear his name read as a finalist. A split-second later, he heard his name read again, as the general nonfiction winner of one of the United States’ most prestigious arts-and-letters prizes. “It came as a complete… Read More To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
The campaign of erasure banishes intellectual inquiry and the dispassionate examination of history. It celebrates magical thinking… The Israeli government bans public commemorations of the Nakba… a day of mourning for Palestinians who seek to remember the massacres and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians carried out by Jewish terrorist militias in 1948 for this reason. Palestinians… Read More Israel’s Assassination of Memory
We’re Right Again. Now that it is too late, it’s no longer forbidden to use the word “genocide” in polite company. Now, as Gazans starve, as they are shot by soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces while seeking food aid at sites run by the farcically-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the world has decided it is, after all, “against this.” Only recently,… Read More For Once in Our Lives
The singularity of the Israeli campaign in Gaza lies in the asymmetry of power, its intensity, its enclosure, its direct connection to a settler colonial project. All this leads us back to the 1940s and Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, which he modeled on Nazi-occupied Poland. That line of thought should not be dodged, or… Read More Bulldozing Gaza
By Zeynep Devrİm Gürsel “Just as any advanced comrade must have a watch, he shall also possess mastery of a photo camera.” So declared Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1926, in his role as the Soviet Union’s Commissar of Enlightenment. This programmatic statement was included in the very first issue of the photography journal Sovetskoe Foto, published that same… Read More Strangers in the Family Album: Reflections on Soviet Amateur Photography
After the truth-shower 