Tag: Orwellian reminders

The Banal Acts of a Nation That Citizens Have Grown to Fear / ‘You are making me an outsider’: Bishop’s College principal questions EC roll revision

What lakhs of citizens of India are undergoing with SIR is, to borrow from the political theorist Hannah Arendt, “fearsome, word-and-thought-defying.” Suraj Gogoi Sitting at the edge of the Arabian Sea, I, like many others who were gathered on the warm afternoon at the Kozhikode Literature Festival on January 24, 2026, had the good fortune… Read More The Banal Acts of a Nation That Citizens Have Grown to Fear / ‘You are making me an outsider’: Bishop’s College principal questions EC roll revision

Dilip

Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran has no mandate – or legal basis

US president chooses to take the biggest gamble of his administration… The attack on Iran is a clear violation of the UN charter, in any absence of any credible, imminent Iranian threat to the US. Julian Borger The first war of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace era has begun – an unprovoked attempt at regime… Read More Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran has no mandate – or legal basis

Dilip

Fascist Aesthetics Has Come Back Matching Fascist Politics

Fascist movements have always understood aesthetics as pedagogy—as a way of training people to feel power before they are allowed to think about it. It would be easy to dismiss (Trump) as a narcissistic clown. That would be a mistake. He is a demagogue who despises democracy, targets people of color, revels in violence, and… Read More Fascist Aesthetics Has Come Back Matching Fascist Politics

Dilip

Moment of reckoning

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

Dilip

Trump’s territorial ambition: new imperialism or a case of the emperor’s new clothes?

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?

Dilip

Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’

The president has vowed to kill off ‘woke’ in his second term in office, and the venerable cultural institution a few blocks from the White House is in his sights By Charlotte Higgins On 30 May last year, Kim Sajet was working in her office in the grandly porticoed National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The gallery… Read More Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’

Dilip