The driving out of peoples was ‘a thoroughly bad and vicious solution, for which the world will pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come’: Lord Curzon, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, commenting on the exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Cited in R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans… Read More The Agony of Palestine
Extreme positions are not replaced by moderate ones but rather by extreme ones, though of the opposite kind: Nietzsche The Will to Power In the past 24 hours, two reports out of Israel have pointed to a striking conclusion: that the failure to prevent Hamas’s murderous assault on southern Israel rests in significant part with the government… Read More Netanyahu’s deliberate extremism has failed
One of Iran’s foremost public intellectuals and critics of the Iranian regime was taken to prison in handcuffs on Saturday to start serving a five-year sentence. Majid Tavakoli, who has a three-year-old child, was found guilty of spreading propaganda against the state. His dispatch to jail had been deferred for three weeks, but security officials… Read More Iranian intellectual calls on opposition to unite as he is again sent to prison
At the time I was reimagining this scene, I spent much of my day on Twitter. It was early 2021, and everyone there was chronically angry. People communicated by jeering, trading insults, hectoring, flinging accusations… It was like being in an abusive relationship with everyone in the world. Sandra Newman A few years ago, I… Read More Orwellian nightmares: What I learned about today’s rage culture from rewriting 1984
Her brave struggle has come with tremendous personal costs. Altogether, the regime has arrested her 13 times, convicted her five times, and sentenced her to a total of 31 years in prison, and 154 lashes The 2023 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to jailed Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi for “her fight against the oppression of women… Read More Nobel Peace Prize won by Narges Mohammadi for fight against the oppression of women in Iran
First posted July 12, 2013 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 1993 Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany, 1993 Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 1993 Reviewed by Peter Osborne – click for a pdf: Radical Philosophy 070 (Mar/Apr 1995) There are moments in the reception of particular thinkers – especially in… Read More Tactics, ethics, or temporality? Heidegger’s politics (1995)
Carole Cadwalladr The last time a journalist won a Nobel prize was 1935. The journalist who won it – Carl von Ossietzky – had revealed how Hitler was secretly rearming Germany. “And he couldn’t pick it up because he was languishing in a Nazi concentration camp,” says Maria Ressa over a video call from Manila. A Novaya… Read More Nobel Peace Laureate: ‘We journalists are the defence line between dictatorship and war’ (2021)
NB: This essay was written nearly 40 years ago, in the aftermath of the 1984 carnage of Sikhs in New Delhi. It was my first attempt at arguing that communalism was India’s version of Nazism, and that it was a singular phenomenon with different religious (and mutually influential) expressions, rather than an arithmetical total of… Read More Communalism in Modern India: A Theoretical Examination (1986)
New Delhi: On Thursday (September 21) night, Bharatiya Janata Party Lok Sabha MP Ramesh Bidhuri used violent anti-Muslim slurs against his parliament colleague Danish Ali of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Bidhuri’s words were televised as part of the Lok Sabha proceedings. “Yeh ugrawaaadi (militant), yeh aatankwaadi hai (terrorist), ugrawaadi hai, yeh aantankwaadi hai,” Bidhuri can be heard shouting during the… Read More ‘Mullah Terrorist’: BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri Uses Slurs Against BSP MP Danish Ali in Lok Sabha
Former students of Vasant Valley School – one of the leading schools in the national capital – have written to its owner, the India Today group, asking it to refrain from what they say is communally polarising programming under the garb of news reportage in the television channels it runs The India Today group has multiple TV… Read More Vasant Valley Alums question India Today Group for Communally Polarising TV News
