Articles by: Vincent Di Stefano

Remembering Tiananmen Square And The Pro-Democracy Protests

Remembering Tiananmen Square And The Pro-Democracy Protests

In any given life, there are certain events that remain firmly imprinted in our memories. I carry an indelible memory of an evening in late May 1989. I had just returned home from a meeting and my wife excitedly called me into the television room. On the screen were images of tens of thousands of young people gathered at Tiananmen[Read More…]

by 03/06/2020 1 comment World
Expanding The Poetic Field. From Ford Madox Hueffer to Kate Tempest

Expanding The Poetic Field. From Ford Madox Hueffer to Kate Tempest

I have for many years now held a deep fascination for Ford Madox Hueffer’s Antwerp, a poem as little known as the man himself, a poem written in 1915 that vividly recreates the horror of the war fields of Europe during the so-called Great War and the even greater horror of mothers waiting at Charing Cross station for sons who[Read More…]

by 22/04/2017 5 comments Arts/Literature
Lines From The Edge Of Darkness

Lines From The Edge Of Darkness

At a time when military planners intensify the demonic work of softening the world up for a normalisation of the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the ever-growing fields of war, let our hearts more fully awaken to the pain of the world, and particularly to the pain of those innocents caught up in war and preparations for war.

by 14/04/2017 2 comments Arts/Literature
As the Sun Sets On The Nuclear Wasteland

As the Sun Sets On The Nuclear Wasteland

The problem of nuclear waste has yet to be dealt with. There have been numerous plans made, numerous barrel-loads of dangerous waste dumped into rivers, water-ways and oceans, numerous false starts that went nowhere, and numerous failed projects. As cooling ponds around the world near their capacity, spent nuclear fuel rods have become the singular intractable problem for those who operate nuclear power plants. They generate high temperatures that must be controlled for decades. And they hold a mix of highly radioactive fission products that must be kept isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years.

by 29/12/2016 3 comments World
Careful Now  

Careful Now  

This is the wall of stone faces
This is the plain of lost skulls
How much blood must fallow
Before we’ve had enough?

by 01/10/2016 1 comment Arts/Literature
Protect candle flames

Guarding The Flame. Reflecting On The Herbal Medicine Traditions

The Western herbal medicine tradition represents a neglected and devalued repository of much of the knowledge developed over many thousands of years of medical experience in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Americas. Practitioners of herbal medicine throughout the world continue to make use of several hundred medicinally-active plants many of which have a long and established history. A few among[Read More…]

by 10/09/2016 1 comment Life/Philosophy
Poison In The Heart: The Nuclear Wasting Of South Australia

Poison In The Heart: The Nuclear Wasting Of South Australia

“Nuclear weapons and nuclear power are both leading instances of the irrationalities  that result from a social world that has been constructed to concentrate power  in the hands of tiny minorities, and to make it possible for them  to maintain and defend their power.”  Andrew Lichterman, 2012 “. . . because a few, by fate’s economy, shall seem to move[Read More…]

by 22/07/2016 23 comments Resource Crisis
The Devil’s Century

The Devil’s Century

Our present generation is living out of the spiritually vacuous philosophies of modernism and post-modernism, the cancerous ideologies of free-market economics and unrestrained economic growth, and the corporate and political tyrannies that have nurtured an energised ethos of transience. The triumphalism of modernity has effectively wiped from our collective memories a coherent view of just what has gone down in[Read More…]

by 18/06/2016 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy