O’Brien (Richard Burton) demonstrates that 2 + 2 doesn’t always equal 4.
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Did the international crises of 1947 and 1948 leave their mark on the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four? I’ve spent a lot of time on this question, and so far as I can tell, the answer is – yes; but only obliquely. And George Orwell may not even have been conscious of the fact.
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Connolly, Burnham, Orwell, & “Corner Table”
“In the torture scenes, he is merely melodramatic: he introduces those rather grotesque machines which used to appear in terror stories for boys.”
—V. S. Pritchett, The New Statesman, June 18, 1949
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Part 2 of 2
In the yishuv (Jewish Palestine), various terrorist groups led by the likes of future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir (more…)
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Part 1 of 2
Editor’s Note:
Dara Halley-James is the pseudonym of an author who has published well-received “mainstream” books under her real name. The following is the second in an extended series of excerpts from the penultimate draft of the forthcoming book The Sixty Million: How Leading Jewish Communists, Zionists, and Neocons Brought on a Dozen Holocausts. (more…)
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Part 3 of 3
Stus illustrates the idea of meaningless toil that ends only in death in this excerpt: (more…)
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Part 2 of 3
III.
Solid ground is death; it’s the rule of matter and the mundane; both air and water are the alternative, the boundary between the nominal and the Real it refuses to see. Yet, terms like “desert” or “tundra” refer to the lonely life of non-affirmation. One cannot create a substitute world; civilization is materialization of dominance. (more…)
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Part 1 of 3
Moral self-determination is difficult. So are criticism and logic; they are discussed and piously praised until they are used. At that moment, they become oppressive. Vasyl Stus (1938–1985) is not well known in the west; in fact, he is not known at all. Part of the reason is that he is a standing condemnation of the mass society from which poetic “celebrities” are generated. Vasyl Stus spent a substantial portion of his adult life in Soviet Gulags and hence is known to only a few specialists. (more…)
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The following text is the transcript by V. S. of Jonathan Bowden’s New Right lecture of February 4, 2012. I want to thank Michèle Renouf for making the recording available. (more…)
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Deux siècles ensemble
Volume 2: Juifs et Russes pendant la periode soviétique
Paris: Fayard, 2003
Early in this second volume of Two Hundred Years Together, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explains (more…)
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Moldova is Europe’s poorest country. Tiny, landlocked, and with a population of about 3 million and shrinking, she is often ignored in modern writing on Eastern Europe. She is one of the many castaways of the 1990s, the imposition of the “free market,” and the “end of history.” Yet she was an important part of the old USSR. But after the breakup of the empire in 1990–1991, she fared even worse than Ukraine, reaching Fourth World poverty levels. (more…)
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In a 2003 article discussing Stalin’s ethnicity, the author R. N. Terrall, concluded: “So what difference does it make to know whether Stalin was a Jew? That question must be left for other historians to answer.”[1]
Whether Stalin was Jewish was a question posed by Russian émigrés and the “anti-Semitic” movement they influenced in Germany as refugees from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. (more…)
