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 that divide. Though not violent as a person, my basic impulse, my instinct in this regard, is belligerent: ultimately, I believe, it will be necessary to unleash a lethal war[Read More…]
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 in 1954 and was chairman and animator of the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale). In the interview Ben Bella repeatedly described himself as a revolutionary, not a theoretician, a man[Read More…]
“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 to encompass the entire Mediterranean world, the spatial unity of which world atlases confirm: Sicily, now just beneath us and to the West, Africa fixed to the South, Greece and[Read More…]
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 collection of odds and ends and vestiges of former worldly greatness. The successive attempts of Napoleon and Hitler to create a world empire failed, as the United States of North[Read More…]
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 Warsaw afternoon over thirty years ago in his crowded study in a surprisingly bourgeois apartment in a quiet residential area of the capital city, the poet-novelist insisted on the Polish[Read More…]
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 a café and a second home for French-speaking writers, artists and intellectuals of the likes of Apollinaire, Camus, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and frequented by Hemingway and Truman Capote.[Read More…]
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 and magic and metaphysics has so influenced me that since I am here in his city where I can feel Borges the man rather than only Borges the artist and[Read More…]
Reading Hannah Arendt’s Introduction to Benjamin’s Illuminations German-Jewish intellectuals, the alienated hommes de lettres of early twentieth century German-speaking Central Europe, constituted a class within that complex and multi-layered Jewish society against which a few of them rebelled, a rebellion which however could not prevent the dark disaster awaiting[Read More…]
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 United States in the 1920s. Not an iota of class-consciousness has it absorbed. (Nor has it been explained and offered to all wage earners in sufficient doses.)For also the middle[Read More…]
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 the way, much as STASI or State Security Service once did in East Berlin the former German Democratic Republic—and supposedly employs a total of over six thousand persons. The move[Read More…]
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, limits which the historic spirit disregards. The very idea of a super-secret organization like Gladio to remake the world in its own image reflects that same disregard for the Greek[Read More…]
(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 Russia he joined the National Committee For A Free Germany and the anti-Fascist Union of German Officers. Were his words sincere when he broadcast anti-fascist messages to Germany over[Read More…]
I find surprising the detailed manner in which history repeats itself. The result of the landslide described here seems to have been replicated in the USA of our times in ways that all of us witness each day. The Germany of say 1939 seems like[Read More…]
“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 second is that of beasts. But because in many cases the first method will not suffice, one must be prepared to resort to force. This is why a ruler needs[Read More…]
(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.” True to himself, Lenin then returned to opposition to spontaneous revolution after WWI during the German Revolution of 1918-19 when in a spontaneous uprising against the post-WWI system Rosa Luxemburg[Read More…]
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 Russia he joined the National Committee For A Free Germany and the anti-Fascist Union of German Officers. Were his words sincere when he broadcast anti-fascist messages to Germany over Radio[Read More…]
Get out your atlas. You will likely need it when you read farther here about the intriguing but little known story in a lesser known part of Alpine Europe: Italy’s northern territory of Alto Adige, better known as South Tyrol. I used an atlas for[Read More…]
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 that the USA and many European leaders considered Premier Moro’s project to bring the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into the Rome government destabilizing and of the utmost danger to European[Read More…]
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 the whitened Alps on the horizon. The rain, the trees, the distant mountains, and the silence create a sensation of nostalgia. Nostalgia for things that once were and can be[Read More…]
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 inclination toward anarchy. Someone to protect them against their own nature. Promises of more police and more security are reassuring to those Italians who see today’s enemy in immigrants and[Read More…]
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, ridiculed, among other things, the whole concept of the great wall the U.S. Bush government projected along the border with Mexico. “What? Raise a wall. The gringos must be very[Read More…]
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 to Iraq. Those who think that history does not repeat itself might read some of these lines about what once happened and what is happening today. Sophie with soldiers. After[Read More…]
(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 relationship is nothing special. Not so for France. Traditional France is always in search of old glories while practical-pragmatic Berlin chooses Germany’s partners and the nature of their relationship. Germany[Read More…]
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 Wannsee when from the shelves near me a book title leapt to my eyes. It seemed like a stroke of providence for me to find in that north European setting[Read More…]
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 poet and playwright belied any doubts about his ultimate goals: education of the people in Socialism. Moreover, the existence of some thirty volumes of Brecht’s works will bewilder readers who[Read More…]
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 of war. According to French playwright Jean Giraudoux, the pacifist and Legion d’onore holder in WWI, war looks just like that monkey’s ass. In 1933, on the eve of WWII,[Read More…]
“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 act of God, maybe. But suppose a manner of government that humans have set up and directed, drives ten million families into the pit of poverty and starvation? That’s no[Read More…]
(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 had worked throughout the year of 1977. Najibullah’s political party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had come to power in Kabul in April, 1978 in what is known[Read More…]
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 universally despised. Generally we conceive of the bourgeois in reference to their over emphasis on form and formality, [the aversion to making waves, no matter how unjust the situation], in[Read More…]
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 in Rome, and other important structures elsewhere. Quadriga is a Latin word (quad=square plus yoke or iugum), the name of the two-wheel chariot drawn by four horses (not three as the Russian Troika)[Read More…]
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, Espresso, reports that not only the USA but also many European leaders considered Premier Moro’s project to bring the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into the Rome government destabilizing and of[Read More…]
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 and ends and vestiges of former worldly greatness. The successive attempts of Napoleon and Hitler to create a world empire failed, as the United States of North America has failed[Read More…]
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 corporatist controllers. Il Duce among Blackshirts. A strutting and swaggering couple they are, Fascism and the entrenched class of war. Their distorted visions of gallantry and nation come so naturally[Read More…]
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 President of France to the Left’s rejection of the German Social Democrats on the eve of WWI, resulting, ultimately, in the emergence of Naziism. He cited other similar cases where[Read More…]
(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 and widely popular overthrow of a ferocious US-inspired regime installed following the CIA-organized coup d’état of the democratically elected government led by PremierMohammad Mossadegh on August 19, 1953. Eventually led[Read More…]
(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 a particularly spectacular fashion in Russia. In few other countries have poets played a more significant than in Russia. Nonetheless, for centuries Russian poets have been harassed, persecuted, and punished[Read More…]
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 your indifference.” Or Gilbert Bécaud: “Indifference kills with small blows.” The indifference of one person to the other in a dwindling love affair is emblematic of the terrible impact of[Read More…]
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 is. Yet loyalty and duty and responsibility and love can save you from a leap into the dark.
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” and are just muddling through life in a world in which innocence dies away while the great majority of people, ignorant of their former childhood innocence, strives to toe the line and be like others
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 constructed by a great writer and storyteller, Elias Khoury, a 531-page “story” consisting of the stories, incidents, histories, lives and deaths narrated by the author’s canvas of countless characters. I[Read More…]
(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 fear and terror,. Everything people thought of as integral is today disjointed, and once significant words themselves empty and meaningless. Everything has changed. Love has lost its power to dominate[Read More…]
(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 in Germany, in Europe, unease and a sensation of insecurity. The Communist East appeared to many people as an ominous threat, though it is now common knowledge that it was[Read More…]
As read and admired by political novelist Gaither Stewart
American Abrams tanks roll into Ukraine 
An open letter to JNU VC – Madam! Your association with RSS defies humanism, anti-colonial struggle Indian democracy! 
From Education to Incarceration 
Tunakataa! Saying ‘No’ to Capitalism and Imperialism in Kenya 
Rising Islamophobia and Communal Discord: An Alarming Trend in BJP-Ruled States 
Speak Truth to Power and Pay the Price! 
USA’s Wars Took 12 Million Lives in The Last 25 Years 
US to send long-range ATACMS missile to Ukraine 
In Jawan, Shah Rukh Khan makes us an offer we can refuse 
Nijjar affair poses an existential dilemma 
On the Brink of Famine 
Appeal to withdraw the notification for the public hearing for the proposed Sijimali Bauxite Mining Project 
“Making a thriller from grain” 
Key Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) Likely To Collapse In 2025-2095 
Global Biofuel Alliance at G20: Land vs Water vs Food Security- Has the government addressed the trade-offs? 
The Nijjar Murder and Indian Government’s alleged “involvement”: Reactions and Reflections 
France Will Pull Out Its Diplomats And Military From Niger, Says Macron 
Imperial Footprints in Africa: The Dismal Role of AFRICOM 
Hunger in Africa has its roots in a History of Colonialism and Neo-colonialism 
The Climate March: Magnificent and Misdirected 
Imagining a Progressive Pentagon 
“Lost Voices of Fentanyl” Rally at the White House 
Indian Government Must First Evict Dalai Lama & his Followers before Admonishing Canada for Separatist Activities 
Peasant-rebels: lineages of insurgency 
Mission to Free Assange: Australian Parliamentarians in Washington 
Bayer-ICAR Collaboration Raises Serious Concerns Regarding Indian Farm Policy 
Place of Minorities as Allotted by Savarkar, Golwalkar and Upadhyaya 
What is in the name? Attempt to stop the usage of ‘India’ by the Government 
Poona Pact: A Reappraisal 
Hate Speech Inside Parliament: Reaching a New Low 
Criminal Justice And Freedom of Speech 
75,000 Climate Protesters Marched In New York With Demand To End Fossil Fuels 
On the Dark Side of the Moon.. 
Avoiding the War on Terror would have saved over 10 million lives at home and abroad 
The Angertainer Steps Down: Rupert Murdoch’s Non-Retirement 
Climate Emergency Update, September 2023 
My appeal to Meta’s Oversight Board: Palestinian political and resistance organizations & individuals are not “terrorists” as classified by Israel 
Artificial Intelligence: Profit Versus Freedom 
How Can We Understand the Passage of Time? 
Pre- and Post-Soviet Language Policy in the East-Baltic States 
My Amma (Malayalam word for Mother) passed away on August 22, 2023 at 3.10 AM. It is always difficult to deal with the passing of a parent, that too one’s mother. I thought the grief would go away. No it didn’t. All those bitter sweet memories won’t go away. At night I lie awake for hours. My friend, guide and[Read More…]
