War heightens the kaleidoscope of temporality. That you might say is the premise of Grossman’s entire book. It is an effect of combat and of the proximity of death. There would be other such moments in World War II – Bagration, Normandy, and the Battle for Berlin come to mind. But perhaps never again, indeed… Read More Reading Vasily Grossman’s ‘Stalingrad’ and ‘Life and Fate’
NB: This is the most painful thing I have ever posted on Palestine, and is painful reading, but it needs to be circulated. It is to the credit of the Israeli historian that he has done this work. We can only bow our heads to the victims. DS A woman with a child is shot… Read More A Massive Database of Evidence, Compiled by a Historian, Documents Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting: Milan Kundera NEW YORK: I am in the The Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center next to the St. Vartan Armenian Cathedral in Manhattan. I am holding a bound, hand-written memoir, which includes poetry, drawings, and scrapbooked images, by Zaven Seraidarian, a… Read More Chris Hedges: Organized Oblivion
NB: An important thinker, Fr Pannikar combined compassion with thoughtfulness; and sought dialogue as a means of addressing the worlds problems. I empathise with him, and am sorry to note (for my part) the absence of divine compassion for the innocents of Gaza; not to mention the millions of innocents who suffered and died in… Read More Eruption of Truth: An Interview with Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010)
National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled expresses deep shock and profound anguish at the untimely death of Dr. G N Saibaba Despite his repeated requests for being released on bail or parole to get treatment and operated for gall bladder stones, it was denied, even while hardened criminals, murderers and rapists were granted… Read More Rahul Pandita: What I learned from G. N. Saibaba
NB: This is the text of the talk I delivered on October 2 at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi. DS The bane of our life is our exclusive provincialism, whereas my province must be co-extensive with the Indian boundary so that ultimately it extends to the boundary of the earth. Else it perishes – Mahatma Gandhi,… Read More The Oceanic Circle: Talk on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s 155th birthday
First posted May 01, 2016 NB: The Berrigan brothers represent the best in the tradition of non-violent resistance to war and bellicose nationalism. Here is what they said in a public statement issued at the height of the Vietnam war, in 1968: “We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies and the synagogues of America with their… Read More Daniel Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism Dies at 94 (2016) / Catonsville 9 Statement written by Dan Berrigan, S.J.
First posted May 27, 2012 Out of the mass experience of pointless death, a new way of speaking and writing, devoid of euphemism, arose, a plain style we associate with Hemingway.. The Great War chronicles the loss of the old rhetoric, of high pieties, of sacrifice and roseate dawns, in favor of “blood, terror, agony, madness, shit,… Read More Paul Fussell, ex-soldier, literary scholar & critic of war (1924-2012)
First posted May 22, 2015 The historian Antony Beevor tells Keith Lowe why his next book will confront one of the last taboos of the Second World War Antony Beevor has sleepless nights. When I met him recently at his west London home, he confessed this in a matter-of-fact way, and neither of us sees… Read More Antony Beevor on the history of the second world war: ‘There are things that are too horrific to put in a book’
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past: George Orwell, 1984 When you have a monopoly over power, you develop an obsession with secrecy: Frank Dikotter Amy Hawkins Senior China correspondent In the early hours of 4 June 1989, Li Rui, a veteran of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), was… Read More ‘Monument to history’ battle between US and China over future of Mao’s secretary’s diary
After the truth-shower 