Vasily Surikov, A God’s Fool Sitting on the Snow, 1885.
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Before the American general election, my friends kept asking me who’d be the likely winner, Trump or Biden. My response, which infuriated everyone who got it, was usually some variation of “define winning.”
Do you mean who’ll win the most votes? Do you mean who’ll win the elections, presuming no shenanigans, which was a laughable proposition even before the evidence started pouring in for America’s advanced banana republicanism? Read more …
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), once played an important role in the Spanish Civil War as an agent of the Comintern. Through his writings, he set the tone of an anti-Francoist propaganda that has endured. Later, his deceptions made him an acute critic of Stalinism. 
Sun & Steel: The Tatenokai Phenomenon in Brief
In post-1945 Japan — as in most of the states that lost in World War II — American occupation brought about radical political and social changes. In the 1946 to 1948 Tokyo trial (similar to Nuremberg), several leaders of the war cabinet were sentenced to death or long prison terms. It was also stipulated in the constitution that Japan cannot have its own armed forces, only Jieitai (Japan Self Defense Forces), a small number of volunteers for self-defense purposes. Read more …