Dilip Simeon's blog

I first met Roger Scruton almost 20 years ago at a symposium in Sweden. I admired the eloquence with which he could talk about Kant and the elegance of his writing on beauty. I learned from his conservatism, even as I disagreed with what he said. But although I got to know him quite well over the years, our relationship was always fraught. For there was another Roger Scruton, not the philosopher but the polemicist. For all his warmth and generosity, and for all the poise of his writing, his views were often ugly. “Whatever its defects,” Scruton wrote in his memoir  Gentle Regrets , “my life has enabled me to find comfort in uncomfortable truths.”  His death last week  seems an appropriate moment to reflect on the “uncomfortable truths” of Scruton’s conservatism, and on the relationship between the philosopher and the polemicist.... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/18/the-uncomfortable-truths-about-roger-scruton-conservatism

 It was  Yuri Andropov  – the KGB boss and future head of the politburo – who drew up a secret plan to use psychiatric facilities to “treat” dissidents. It was based on  Nikita Khrushchev’s  belief that anti-Soviet consciousness was a mental disease. Political opponents including Bukovsky were detained without trial. There was no appeal. They were injected with psychotropic drugs. It was Bukovsky who brought this abhorrent practice to the attention of the west. The campaign to end it became a demand from human rights groups during the  cold war . The Soviet Union eventually dropped this state policy. Bukovsky unmasked the role played by doctors and Soviet medicine, and delegitimised those at the top who gave them orders. Bukovsky later transferred his antagonism to other Soviet and Russian leaders, in particular to Putin, of whom he said, “I think he’s evil.” He was pessimistic about Russia’s future. The KGB was still in charge of a country which,...

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a Soviet-era dissident who became a symbol of resistance in modern-day  Russia , has died at the age of 91 after a long illness. In a career emblematic of the country’s turbulent history, she defended human rights in the Soviet Union from the 1950s, and continued to do so in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Mikhail Fedotov, head of the Kremlin Human Rights Council, said Alexeyeva died on Saturday in a Moscow hospital. “This is a huge loss for the entire human rights movement in Russia,” Fedotov said. “She had been struggling with illness recently, but her mind was always stronger than her body and far stronger than any disease.” Alexeyeva had been the chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group, one of Russia’s oldest human rights organisations, which she helped found in 1976. The group lamented the loss of a “legendary, wise and humane person who remained a defender of human rights until the last moments of her life”. Posts on Human Rights in Russia Alexeyeva trained ...

The first thing the Nazis took from Freddie Oversteegen was her bed. Her mother, Trijn, a communist bringing up her children independently in the Dutch city of Haarlem, sheltered Jews, dissidents and gay people as they fled Germany in the 1930s. Oversteegen, who was seven when Adolf Hitler came to power, bunked in with her big sister Truus to make room. It was the start of a struggle that would last until she died on 5 September, the day before her 93rd birthday, in a nursing home not far from where, as teenagers, she and Truus carried out a campaign of assassinations and sabotage against Nazi invaders with pistols hidden in their bicycle baskets. “If you ask me, the war only ended two weeks ago,” her son Remi Dekker told the  Observer . “In her mind it was still going on, and on, and on. It didn’t stop, even until the last day.” Oversteegen’s war began one Friday in May 1940 with planes roaring overhead and the smell of smoke. Realising the Nazis had invaded the  ...

Stephen Hawking  died last night  at age of 76. I can think of no better, brief social media tribute than that from the  @thetweetofgod : “It’s only been a few hours and Stephen Hawking already mathematically proved, to My face, that I don’t exist.” Hawking was an atheist, but he didn’t claim to have eliminated the idea with pure mathematics. But if he had, it would have been brilliantly elegant, even—as he  used the phrase in his popular 1988 cosmology  A Brief History of Time —to a theoretical "mind of God." Commemorative video by Cambridge University The Old Astronomer to His Pupil: Sarah Williams Hawking himself used the word “elegant,” with modesty, to  describe his discovery  that “general relativity can be combined with quantum theory,” that is, “if one replaces ordinary time with so-called imaginary time.” In the bestselling  A Brief History of Time , he described how one might possibly reconcile the two. His search for this “Grand...

Renowned senior lawyer and human rights activist Asma Jahangir passed away in Lahore on Sunday,  DawnNews  reported. She is survived by a son and two daughters. The family told  Dawn News  that she suffered from cardiac arrest and was shifted to a hospital, where she passed. She was 66. Details regarding her funeral have not been made public as yet. Known for her outspoken nature and unrelenting pursuit for human rights — as well as for remaining undaunted in the face of extreme pressure and opposition — Jahangir will be remembered as a champion for the disenfranchised and for her services towards building a democratic and more inclusive Pakistan. Jahangir was born in Lahore in January 1952. She received a Bachelors' degree from Kinnaird College and an LLB from Punjab University . She was called to the Lahore High Court in 1980 and to the Supreme Court in 1982. She later went on to become the first woman to serve as president of the Supreme Court Bar Associ...

Nearly 40 years of war and insecurity have taken their toll on Afghan women, and access to education, health services and the rule of law remain severely limited. Sima Wali, who has died aged 66 from  multiple system atrophy , a rare neurological disease, was a persistent voice in her countrywomen’s battle for better rights. As president of  Refugee Women in Development , a nonprofit organisation that she established in the US in 1981 after fleeing Afghanistan for fear of communist persecution, Wali raised international awareness of the plight of Afghan women, and raised millions of dollars in funding for women-led Afghan organisations, in her own “jihad for social justice and peace”. She was instrumental in the establishment of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in the post-Taliban Afghan government, when she was one of only three Afghan female invitees to the  2001 conference in Bonn  to decide their country’s future. There, Hamid Karzai was chosen to head Afghanis...

You want to bury him bury into the dirt but you forget he is a seed (anonymous message from someone in China) Liu Xiaobo cremated in 'private ceremony', amid fears for wife's safety The Nobel laureate and democracy icon  Liu Xiaobo  has been cremated in north-eastern China, Chinese authorities have announced, amid growing fears for the safety of his wife, Liu Xia.  The veteran dissident died on Thursday, aged 61 , becoming the first Nobel peace prize winner to die in custody since the 1935 recipient, German pacifist  Carl von Ossietzky , died under surveillance after years confined to Nazi concentration camps. Speaking at a press conference in the city of Shenyang, where Liu died, government spokesperson Zhang Qingyang said his cremation had taken place at a local funeral parlour following a “short mourning service” early on Saturday morning.  Funeral ceremony for Liu Xiaobo. Photo: Shenyang government/Supplied China’s N...

The art critic, essayist and novelist John Berger threw down his challenge early in his television series Ways of Seeing. This came in 1972, the year when Berger, who has died aged 90, broke through to real fame from his niche celebrity on the arts pages of the New Statesman. Ways of Seeing, made on the cheap for the BBC as four half-hour programmes, was the first series of its kind since Civilisation (1969), 13 one-hour episodes for which  Kenneth Clark , its writer and presenter, and a BBC production team had travelled 80,000 miles through 13 countries exploring 2,000 years of the visual culture of the western world. Berger travelled as far as the hut in Ealing, west London where his programmes were filmed, and no farther. What he said in his characteristic tone of sweet reasonableness was: “In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes. The nude, according to him, is a form of art. I would put it differently: to be naked is to ...

NB:  An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article,  I'm uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation  of communal parties  in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in India, where the communist movement has from time to time allied with communal groups of all colours, with disastrous consequences. Some material on this theme may be read here .  Nor can I agree that Islamists, Hindutva groups or Khalistanis etc. can be described as 'religious parties'. I do not mean to justify alliances with 'secular' tyrants, but to remind anyone who cares to listen, that communalism is also an expression of tyranny.  Communalists proceed on the assumption that membership of a religious community automatically produces a political interest, and strive to create that interest. They enter democr...

The quiet fighter by Ramachandra Guha   Rana Dasgupta ends Capital, his fine, sometimes searing portrait of 21st century Delhi, with a walk he took with an environmental scholar through the city’s northern reaches. The environmentalist explained to the writer how Delhi’s water system had once worked, based on the retention of rainwater through an intricate network of tanks and canals. Before the British came, said the scholar, the life of Delhi was centred around the Yamuna, with festivals and water games. However, the capital of the Raj and of independent India treated the river merely as a sink for its wastes. And it had built over the tanks that the more far-seeing citizens of the earlier generations had constructed. The Yamuna that now flows past Delhi is biologically (as well as culturally) dead. The scholar who took Dasgupta for a walk told him that “everyone has turned their backs on the river in obedience to the modern city, and so it is filthy and forgotten”. He...

Sundarayya Vignana Kendram & Alam Khundmiri Foundation Invite you to a Memorial Meeting to Commemorate the Life and Works of Javeed Alam Professor of Politics and Philosophy (retired) English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Who passed away on 5 December 2016 Monday 19 December 2016 from 6:00 pm Doddi Komaraiah Hall Sundarayya Vignana Kendram Baghlingampally Hyderabad Contact:  aniketalam@gmail.com Javeed Alam: An Obituary Javeed Alam was born in August 1943 to Khadija and Alam Khundmiri in Hyderabad, the capital of the then Nizam state. His father was a founding member of the communist party and an active trade unionist, even as he pursued his studies and went on to become a professor of philosophy. His mother would, in the years he was growing up, become a prominent political and cultural activist of the city, chiselling out an identity independent of her husband. His childhood was spent in a family which was dee...

The passing away of “Bekal” Utsahi on December 3, 2016 has gone virtually unnoticed in our press and other media. The one notable exception was a full-page feature in the Hindi daily Hindustan in its Sunday edition on December 4, which comprised a personal tribute and memoir from a fellow poet, Wasim Barelvi, the full text of one long poem by Bekal, and extracts from several others of his poems. Nehruvian laureate Mohammad Shafi Khan “Bekal Utsaahi” (1928-2016) first attracted notice in the 1960s as a flag-bearer of the idealistic Nehruvian agenda of secularism and national integration: “Dharam mera Islam hai, Bharat janamsthan/ Wazu karoon Ajmer mein, Kashi mein (a)snaan.” (“My faith is Islam, Bharat is my land of birth / In Ajmer I perform my ritual ablutions, in Kashi I take a holy bath.”) He was recognised and rewarded for this bold stance by successive Nehru-Gandhi governments. After listening to Bekal recite a poem at a public meeting, Nehru described him as an “utsahi shair...

Elderly revolutionaries joined young doctors, famous musicians, government workers and former guerrilla fighters in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución as thousands lined up to pay their last respects to  Fidel Castro . Some carried flags. A few had flowers. All came with memories of the guerrilla leader who overthrew a dictatorship, resisted a US-led invasion, faced down a nuclear superpower and dominated the island’s political life for half a century. Cartoon for @chronicleherald for Monday At the start of the official commemorations, Orlando Gómez had come with his wife to bid farewell to his old comrade in arms. Waiting in the hot sun to sign the condolence book, he recalled the first time he had gone into combat with Castro in March 1958. A few weeks earlier, Gómez – then an idealistic 18-year-old – had left his home in Havana to join the small rebel army in the Sierra Maestra mountains. He had been put in charge of a mortar unit for the attack on an army garrison at the ...

Irina Vyacheslavovna Rakobolskaya, physicist and second world war veteran, born 22 December 1919; died 22 September 2016 During the second world war, Irina Rakobolskaya, who has died aged 96, was a member of the all-female  Guards Night Bomber Aviation  Regiment of the Red Army that became known as the “night witches”. The unit was secretly formed, with the authorisation of Joseph Stalin, in October 1941, with Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow, and Rakobolskaya, then a 21-year-old physics student at Moscow State University, volunteered to join. She went on to become the regiment’s chief of staff and a chronicler of its achievements. After the war, she returned to MSU and graduated in 1949. She forged a career in the physics of elementary particles and became professor of physics at the university, but her experience with the celebrated “night witches” defined her long life. Major Irina Rakobolskaya in the early 1940s The daughter of a school teacher, V...