Tag: paywall

Betrayed

3,034 words

Part 3 of 7 (Part 1, Part 2)

Translated by Ondrej Mann

Czech original (more…)

2,498 word

There is quite a bit to recommend about E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India despite the fact that as a novel it is not very good. It keeps a lazy, middling pace throughout and seems to rely upon its post-First World War readership’s hunger for detail about everything Indian — from the landscape to the wildlife to the people and customs — for much of its appeal. If you’re already familiar with most of this — or if you just don’t care — then the plot and characters will make up for it, but just barely. It’s as if Forster found it distasteful to produce anything as vulgar as suspense — or, Heaven forfend, a cliffhanger. (more…)

Hieronymus Bosch, The Last Judgement (ca. 1482)

2,049 words

Part 3 of 7 (Full series here.)

To return to Bosch & his tableaux of the end of the world — namely, The Last Judgement — one sees the guitar playing ape — the mammalian sentinel in the foreground — ahead of the picture — abreast of these developments — abandoned of an arrested fate: shirking his duty: not to be foretold — an unhallowed promontory of Hell-cat witches — the Christian Agape reversed and stood upon its head — with a fellow mammalian excrescence — not a lion or a sheep — a beast of God — staring at the ground — the sub-text of the picture — its border and foreground — tucked away in the corner. (more…)

Heidegger on a country path, 1966.

3,538 words

That whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent. — Last line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The rest is silence. — Shakespeare, Hamlet

Berel Lang
Heidegger’s Silence
Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018

Martin Heidegger’s association with the Nazis is well documented. Having come to Hitler’s attention as Germany’s leading academic, the philosopher was elected to the position of Rector of Freiburg University on April 21, 1933. (more…)

Lithograph by W. Simpson from 1859 depicting British officers travelling in panniers on the backs of camels as well as in sedan chairs carried by Indian men.

2,554 words

A statistic has been circulating widely online, and is invoked with great confidence in political speeches, social media debates, and nationalist discourse. It goes something like this: India accounted for roughly 32 percent of world’s gross domestic product in 1 CE and as much as 24.4 percent in 1700, yet by 1947, when British rule ended, that share had collapsed to just 4 percent. (more…)

From Seven Days in January.

2,335 words

Part 2 of 7 (Part 1, Part 3)

Translated by Ondrej Mann

Czech original

We can conclude that peace with the world itself is still impossible, even though the number of those who oppose it has decreased significantly. — Jean Cocteau (more…)

You can order Jonathan Bowden’s The Cultured Thug here.

5,738 words

Part 2 of 7 (Full series here.)

Edited by Greg Johnson and Peter Jacobi

In 1995, Jonathan Bowden self-published his Collected Works in six volumes (London: Avant-Garde, 1995), edited by Jürgen Schwartz, one of Bowden’s pen names. These volumes comprise 27 distinct books, 12 of which had been previously published. Altogether, the Collected Works contain more than 2,600 pages of rare early Bowden.

Deliverance is the fifth book in the second volume. It had not been previously published. We will publish it online in seven installments. (more…)

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz with retired basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson. (Image source: Twitter/X)

1,586 words

Every waking hour, every moment of the day, everywhere we look, whether it’s breakfast cereal boxes, pop-up advertising dross, or sportsball team group photos, we are bombarded by Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity — the DIE machine. It is so all-pervasive that we seemingly pay it no mind, but unconsciously we are alarmed by the presence of the hostile other. Even though it is in our faces all the time like a leering, ubiquitous transgender version of Big Brother — picture Michelle Obama posters the size of teetering skyscrapers — we often have the option of scrolling away, clicking to dismiss, or turning the channel. (more…)

William Blake, The Ancient of Days, 1794

2,903 words

Part 14 of 14

(Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, Part 7 here, Part 8 here, Part 9 here, Part 10 here, Part 11 here, Part 12 here, Part 13 here)

Editor’s Note:

I will conclude my commentary on the Gorgias with a second series of articles early in 2025. (more…)

3,157 words

Part 13 of 14

(Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, Part 7 here, Part 8 here, Part 9 here, Part 10 here, Part 11 here, Part 12 here, Part 14 here)

Power vs. Wisdom

We have seen that Callicles is more philosophical than Gorgias or Polus. So it comes as some surprise that the second part of Callicles’ speech is a critique of philosophy. (more…)

The Berlin Wall in 1986. Divided Germany may have been the plaything of foreign powers, but it perhaps remained more truly German than the country which goes by that name today. (Image source: Wikipedia)

2,996 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Schalk describes that when he first came to Germany in the 1950s, he flipped on the radio and got not German commentary or classical music, but AFN (Armed Forces Radio) belting out some jazz. It was part of what he describes as the great American inundation. He shifts back to the influence of those Germans who settled in America in the eighteenth century, and their philosophical hopes for America’s revolution. (more…)

4,116 words

Part 1 of 2

Adolph Schalk
The Germans
London: J. M. Dent, 1971

The Germans are the most misunderstood people in the world. — Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

In 1974 I was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, doing my watch on the Main. At the PX, I wandered into the Stars and Stripes bookstore and browsed near the rack featuring The Stars and Stripes, Overseas Weekly, and the usual American mags. (more…)

1.004 słowa

English original here;  French, Slovak, Spanish

Część 17 (Rozdział 1, Rozdział 14)

Kiedy biali nacjonaliści wskazują na niezaprzeczalny fakt, że na całym białym świecie kościoły chrześcijańskie aktywnie wspierają rasową wymianę białych poprzez kolorowych imigrację i kolonizację – albo, w najlepszym wypadku, nie sprzeciwiają się jej – standardową odpowiedzą zwolenników chrześcijaństwa jest stwierdzenie, że nie powinniśmy krytykować dzisiejszych kościołów, ponieważ wieki temu kościół walczył przeciw muzułmańskiej inwazji Europy i zainspirował krucjaty, aby odzyskać Ziemię Świętą. (more…)