Lessons from the first year of Donald Trump’s second term The West’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal razing of Gaza and the impunity with which an allegedly isolationist Trump abducted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, expropriated its oil, bombed Iran, and threatened to annex Greenland and Canada has, it’s fair to say, made international law a disreputable… Read More Moment of reckoning
Julian Borger The attack on Venezuela and the seizure of its president was a shocking enough start to 2026, but it was only the next day, when the smoke had dispersed and Donald Trump was flying from Florida to Washington DC in triumph, that it became clear the world had entered a new era. The US president… Read More Trump’s territorial ambition: new imperialism or a case of the emperor’s new clothes?
The image Narendra Modi sought as a world leader who is principled and autonomous has been broken. Indian diplomats rely on lobbying firm not once, but routinely for access. Records show a pattern of dependency on the lobbying firm even for routine telephone calls and meetings — paying upfront for access — rather than through… Read More Muted on Venezuela, patronised by Trump, dependent on lobbyists: Modi’s global image takes a hit
Once humiliation is naturalised as a civilisational condition, violence no longer appears as aggression but as rectification. Anubhav Singh Cinema has never merely reflected political life; it has functioned as one of its most efficient laboratories. From its earliest mass forms, cinema has been a technology for organising affect, disciplining perception, and training populations to… Read More How Hindi Cinema is Preparing India for Violence
Carlos Padrón Venezuelan psychoanalyst As Venezuelans, we share embodied knowledge formed by living through violence, terror, collapse, authoritarianism, migration, fear, absurdity, trauma, and survival. But we also share a layered archive of extraordinary stories: the struggles and resilience of our people; our complex and fascinating history; our literature, art, and music; our relentless and often… Read More Venezuela: Private Wounds, Loud Audiences
This article was authored in June 2024. It appears in our fifth print issue, Contra Temps, available here Buber had written that for “political Zionism,” “the State is the goal and Zion a ‘myth’ that inflames the masses.” That propaganda employed to shore up nationalist militarism and settler-colonialism could leverage European guilt to “distort and exploit respectable… Read More Zionism Breaks
Dr Rebecca Reich examines politics, culture and reality in the Soviet Union “Dissenters in the USSR responded by making literary use of psychiatric discourse to both validate themselves and challenge the authority of the state. “The impact of their essays, transcripts, poems and works of fiction may have seemed limited within the isolation and silence… Read More State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin
Miłosz’s complicated Second World War Alan Jacobs The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discovering that his wife had been unable to escape Poland, he tried to return to her by way of Romania, then Ukraine… Read More A Quarrel With the World
++++++Readers outside of India can donate hereto support Mainstream Weeklyhttps://tinyurl.com/2rsy4ss6++++++ In this issue DOCUMENTS: BOOKS IMAGE & SOUND Editor’s Picks: Books of Note
NB: Anyone with the faintest idea of what is happening to Indian education will understand the importance of this book by this esteemed and highly accomplished scholar. The policies of our rulers can be described as nothing less than assault on education. Government enthusiasts could ask themselves why every year, hundreds of thousands of Indian… Read More Scholar GN Devy asks whether India risks becoming an anti-knowledge nation
After the truth-shower 