Final immersion ceremony of the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi at Allahabad on February 12, 1948. Credit: Photo Division, GOI Pavan Kulkarni Five months after India’s independence, on January 14, 1948, three members of the Hindu Mahasabha – Nathuram Godse, Narayan Apte and Digambar Badge, an arms dealer regularly selling weapons to the Mahasabha – arrived… Read More How Savarkar Escaped Conviction For Gandhi’s Assassination
Bidisha Mamata Last month, Elon Musk walked into Twitter and then all the good people left. I quit, too. It was a time-sink, a brain drain and an eye strain. In 12 years, I gained nothing, while witnessing peers and colleagues at their worst. Oh, the bliss of not turning every little thing into a quip. The… Read More I too quit Twitter this week – and have never been more relieved
First posted June 28, 2013 NB: Carl von Ossietzky was the first of only two Nobel Peace Prize winners (1935) who was prevented by their government from receiving the prize. The second was Liu Xiaobo. The Chinese Communist Party thereby followed the example of the Nazi regime. What is even more noteworthy is that when… Read More The Nobel Peace Prize For Espionage. Remembering Carl von Ossietzky
NB: This fearless intellectual, who defied the mighty Chinese Communist Party even as he fought for the freedom of the human mind, died in hospital on July 13, 2017, denied the right even to proper treatment. Beneath the image is an extract from Simon Ley’s review of Liu Xiaobo’s book, No Enemies, No Hatred. It… Read More The Legacy of Liu Xiaobo
First posted January 24, 2017 Jerzy Krzyżanowski The Captive Mind (1953) has been compared to the two most revealing and penetrating works on the same subject previously published – Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Read an interview with him in 2003, the year before he… Read More The Captive Mind revisited
H. SCOTT PROSTERMAN Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – AIPAC and Jewish Republicans are a puzzlement. They are financially supporting over 100 racists, climate deniers and election deniers running for Congress, because they express unqualified support for Israel’s occupation, expansionist settlements and denial of Palestinian human rights. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one… Read More Why is the Major Israel Lobby in America supporting Antisemitic Racists, Climate Deniers and election Denialists for Congress?
Understanding the far right’s online powerbase Millions of people are consuming, repeating and disseminating far-right ‘culture war’ material online, but if you do not seek out that content and are not served it by algorithms, you may never know it was there. Ben Little: People have used the term ‘culture wars’ for a long time, especially… Read More Digital culture wars
First posted March 14, 2018 NB: The blatant sabotage of Indian justice is unfolding before our eyes, as a section of the official establishment connives at the Sangh Parivar’s scheme to destroy Indian democracy. In the face of their undisguised contempt for the Constitution, all honest judges, bureaucrats, police officers – indeed all Indians who respect… Read More Sabotage of Indian criminal justice continues unchecked: Aseemanand’s ‘disclosure’ missing from court
By Andy Kroll ( Tomdispatch.cm ) – For about a week in the summer of 2018, I caught an early-morning train from Washington, D.C., to the Albert V. Bryan federal courthouse in the suburb of Alexandria. Located a short drive from George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon, that courthouse serves the Eastern District of Virginia.… Read More The Courts have been the Last Bastion of Sanity in Polarized America, but what if they Go MAGA too?
First posted June 12, 2015 To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care any more. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators… Read More Lee McIntyre. The Attack on Truth and our age of willful ignorance
