First posted April 05, 2015 NB: This is a short piece about the German carpenter Johann Georg Elser. It was written in 2001, as an appendix to a public lecture. Now a film is being released about this little-known hero. Read the BBC report below this story: The man who missed killing Hitler by 13… Read More In Memory of Johann Georg Elser, the carpenter who nearly prevented the Second World War
First posted February 09, 2012 A photo of a lone man with his arms folded as hundreds around him perform a salute in Nazi Germany has resurfaced. The snap was taken in Hamburg in 1936, during the celebrations for the launch of a ship. In the crowd, one person refuses to raise his arm to… Read More Ordinary people. The courage to say NO
First posted May 31, 2016 IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious. TWENTY-YEARS AGO, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles… Read More Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967)
Fredy Perlman First posted 2013 & April 2015 Written: 1977; First Published: 1977; Source: Red & Black Detroit Public Domain: Perlman Internet Archive 2006. This work has always been completely free The Egocrat does not express his longing for community and communication in practice; he transforms it into a Thought. Armed with this Thought, he is still mute and powerless, but is no longer… Read More Ten Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats (1977)
First posted December 3, 2016 Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion By Gareth Stedman Jones; Reviewed by Jeremy Adelman While Jenny was dying, Marx wrote a letter to the Russian Group for the Emancipation of Labour in Geneva on the question: was communal property good? Stedman Jones ends Karl Marx with a story about the fate of… Read More Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
Kasia Delgado First posted September 7, 2019 Vladimir was sentenced to 10 years’ hard labour. Ivanna was Prisoner 108, and his secret correspondent. She looks back on a love affair with a man she never met In 1953, a young Ivanna Maszczak trudged through the Siberian labour camp in which she was serving a 10-year… Read More ‘I longed for the moment you would write’: The Gulag penpals whose love lasted 60 years
Ben Okri NB: This is a fascinating meditation, not merely on the Queen, but on God, monarchy, twentieth-century history and impermanence. Not to mention our regard for sheer human decency. Well written sir. DS Monarchs have passed away before, but there is something special which Queen Elizabeth has done, which makes it harder for the… Read More Queen Elizabeth was part of our psyche
New research shows small gestures matter even more than we may think. By Catherine Pearson In late August, Erin Alexander, 57, sat in the parking lot of a Target store in Fairfield, Calif., and wept. Her sister-in-law had recently died, and Ms. Alexander was having a hard day. A barista working at the Starbucks inside the… Read More The Unexpected Power of Random Acts of Kindness
Michael Amoruso I pray for friends I’ve lost, family, like my uncle who passed away,’ Bruno told me. We were chatting in the nave of the Church of the Santa Cruz of the Souls of the Hanged, a small Catholic church in central São Paulo. Built near the old city gallows, regulars go there to… Read More Saudade: the untranslatable word for the presence of absence
