From Pacifism To Violence and the Dialectic
I am trying to wrap my brain around the abyss between pacifism and violence as to the proper means to bring about socio-political change. And as to how to overcome…
Gaither Stewart
Ahmed Ben Bella: Revolutionary Internationalist
Image via Wikipedia (Rome) Decades ago I, a young reporter, interviewed the legendary Ahmed Ben Bella (1916-2012), the man who ignited the Algerian War of Liberation against French colonial rule…
Remembrances and Confessions
“Life is everywhere, life is in ourselves, not outside.” (Dostoevsky, just after his death sentence was commuted) Vision from the metal cubicle circling over the shores of southeastern Sicily seems…
Aspects of Russian Communism And Why Communism in the West Would Be Different
A civilization reveals itself as fruitful by its ability to incite others to imitate it: when it no longer dazzles them it is reduced to a mere…
Remembrances of Meeting Cult Novelist Andrzej Kusniewicz in Warsaw
HERE I AM The Polish word, jestem—‘I am’, ‘here I am’, ‘present’—seems to define the life of the writer and cult figure for a generation, Andrzej Kusniewicz. On an overcast, pollution-infested…
Rebellious Thoughts At The Café de Flore
Whether revisionists and debunkers agree or not, the Café de Flore on Paris’ Boulevard Saint Germain is a living institution. Since its founding in 1870 it has existed as…
On the Trail of Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires
I am uneasy writing about Jorge Luis Borges (b.1899, Buenos Aires, d. 1986, Geneva). Borges wrote so much that I have not read; yet his world of myth and fantasy…
Walter Benjamin, the Jewish Question and Theses on the Philosophy of History
Reading Hannah Arendt’s Introduction to Benjamin’s Illuminations German-Jewish intellectuals, the alienated hommes de lettres of early twentieth century German-speaking…
One Hundred Years: The Proletariat In Search of A Class
The super-indoctrinated, Trump-voting American working class, dulled by the mass media and the “American dream”,has changed very little since the crushing of the great textile strikes that swept The…
The Gehlen Org
In February 2019 Germany opened a brand new intelligence complex in the city of Berlin. The new headquarters of the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst or Federal Intelligence Service) occupies a huge space—by…
Gladio – The Story of a Conspiracy
Rome: Albert Camus in his essay “L’Exil d’Hélène” discusses contemporary disregard for the Greek value of limits. Camus writes that only the artist by his nature recognizes his limits,…
War and Betrayal: Change and Transformation
(Rome)I have wondered if the German Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus after his defeat and capture by Russians at Stalingrad in February 1943 really changed when as a prisoner of war in…
Landslide…. To Totalitarianism
I find surprising the detailed manner in which history repeats itself. The result of the…
Dirty Hands
“You should therefore know that there are two ways to fight: one while abiding by the rules, the other by using force. The first approach is unique to Man; the…
Yellow Vests, Class Struggle and Spontaneous Revolution
(Rome) In What Is To Be Done of 1902 Lenin opposed revolutionary spontaneity because it “strips away the disciplined nature of the Marxists idea of revolution, leaving it arbitrary and ineffective.”…
War and Betrayal: Change and Transformation
Rome: I have wondered if the German Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus after his defeat and capture by Russians at Stalingrad in February 1943 really changed when as a prisoner of war in Soviet…
No Man’s Land
Get out your atlas. You will likely need it when you read farther here about…
A world in which Pinochet Is Better Than Communists!
Premise: Reporting on the still unresolved abduction and murder of statesman, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades back in 1978—or in their name—the Rome sometimes left-wing investigative magazine, Espresso, reported…
Gianni Agnelli—The Grand Contradiction
It was raining in Torino. A North European rain. The kind that lasts. Through the restaurant’s great windows the wide avenue lined by plane trees points in the direction of…
Matteo Salvini, Italy’s New Strongman
Rome: As shown in the permissive attitude of Italians toward Fascism last century, also contemporary Italians perceive of a strong and charismatic leader as a shield against disorder and their inherent…
The Gringo Wall
Some years ago an amusing satirical article in the Buenos Aires leftwing daily, Pagina 12, made me want to cry. In five thousand words the Argentinean journalist José Pablo Feinmann,…
Rebellion in Munich: Sophie Scholl- The Final Days
My generation has seen that history does repeat itself. We know world wars I and II and we have seen “regime change” in action from country to country, from Libya…
Berlin-Moscow, Moscow-Berlin
(Dateline: Rome, Nov. 23, 2017) We should make no mistake about who commands in the European Union. Germany commands. For example: The “special Paris-Berlin relationship” makes headlines, but for Germany that…
Czeslaw Milosz – The Unfashionable Poet
During a stay at the American Academy in Berlin some years ago I was standing in the library at a window looking out over the troubled morning waters of the…
Bertold Brecht: Collectivism And Dialectical Materialism In Practice
Bertold Brecht put into everyday practice Marxist collectivism and dialectical materialism in his art as few other Western writers have ever achieved.Despite accusations of avidness for money, the German…
War
If you have you ever seen a monkey hanging from a tree by its tail and showing its red ass to onlookers, then you have seenthe animal kingdom’s representation…
Definitions: The Proletariat
“Suppose that some great disaster were to sweep ten million families out to sea and leave ‘em on a desert island to starve and rot. That would be … an…
Dr.Najib: A Sketch of A Man And A Country
(ROME) When in 1978 the 31-year old Afghan Communist politician-activist, Mohammad Najibullah, arrived in Tehran, “exiled” to neighboring Iran as Afghanistan’s Ambassador, I had just left Iran where I…
Definitions: The Bourgeoisie
It’s a capricious irony of history that the word bourgeois, which most clearly pinpoints the capitalist class, is perceived by nearly everyone, including the bourgeois themselves, as an epithet and is almost…
Quadriga
A five-meter tall resplendent Quadriga sculpture tops the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the Wellington Arch in London, The Bolshoy Theater in Moscow, the Victor Emmanuel Monument…
A World in Which Pinochet Is Better Than Communists!
Premise: Reporting on the still unresolved abduction and murder of statesman, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades in 1978—or at least in their name—the current Rome occasionally left-wing investigative magazine,…
The Character Of Russian Communism
A civilization reveals itself as fruitful by its ability to incite others to imitate it: when it no longer dazzles them, it is reducedto a mere collection of odds…
Strutting Fascism And Swaggering Militarism
It’s their strutting. That detestable image of the strutting that links them, the strutting and prancing Fascists and their swaggering and parading military cousins, up front for their conveniently concealed…
Left Liberals And Counter-History
I read a Facebook post by an American Liberal comparing the refusal of the French Far-Leftist Jean-Luc Melanchon to choose between Emmanuel Macron and the rightist Marine Le Pen as…
Bechtel Corporation And Iran: A Story of American Corporatism-Imperialism
(Rome) Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 resulted in the overthrow of the US-supported Pahlavi dynasty at that time under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The Iranian Revolution was a violent…
LUKOMORYE—Poets Pave The Road To The Golden Age
(Rome) The recent death of the Russian poet with whom I was acquainted, Yevgheny Yevtushenko, prompted these considerations of the role of poets in social-cultural-political progress in general and in…
Indifference
Indifference is an American-European story. As French chansonnier Serge Gainsbourg sang of his love for Brigitte Bardot: “What does the weather matter, what matters the wind? Better your absence than…
Loyalty
Most certainly in the struggle between guilt and innocence, and between loyalty and betrayal, I have never been peaceful. Walking along the lip of the precipice, you learn what loneliness…
Innocence
Dostoevsky’s Myshkin has retained much of his innocence and therefore, like real innocents in real life, is considered odd, naïve and ignorant by others who are already branded by “experience”…
A response To “Gate Of The Sun” By Elias Khoury
On this hot Italian late afternoon, after over a week inside the literary work entitled Gate of the Sun, I am still wandering in the gossamer framework of the novel…
A World Without Anchors
(Rome) The world has lost its anchors. The concept of permanence no longer exists anywhere. What were once perceived as anchors of security have transformed into uncertainty and darkness, to…
Thoughts About The Sham Cold War
(Rome) A bit of bit of real European history not in the books yet: in the 1960s and extending into the 1980s there was widespread concern, preoccupation and discontent…
Amulet: A Political- Fantasy Novel by RobertoBolaño
As read and admired by political novelist Gaither Stewart
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