Dilip Simeon's blog

In the centre of the counter revolution stood the judiciary. Unlike administrative acts, which rest on considerations of convenience and expediency, judicial decisions rest on law, that is on right and wrong, and they always enjoy the limelight of publicity. Law is perhaps the most pernicious of all weapons in political struggles, precisely because of the halo that surrounds the concepts of right and justice. . Franz Neumann,  Behemoth:  The Structure and Practice of National Socialism    p 27 The law of killing: a brief history of Indian fascism The Broken Middle - my essay on the 30th anniversary of 1984 Samar Halarnkar - How India's justice system is giving in to the mob I have, for the record, never been to Pakistan. I am acutely aware of how that nation's bleed-them-with-a-thousand-cuts policy works, how it has ended bleeding them instead and in the process changed their founding essence. I suppose that automatically makes me a nationalist. But...

I am a state school-educated Muslim and racial minority. I have been stabbed at by neo-Nazis, falsely arrested at gunpoint by Essex police, expelled from college, divorced, estranged from my child, and tortured in Egyptian prison, and mandatorily profiled. I’ve had my DNA forcibly taken at Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 Laws, which deprive terror suspects of the right to silence at UK ports of entry and exit, among much else. I’ve been blacklisted from other countries. I am every grievance regressive leftists traditionally harp on. Yet their first-world bourgeois brains seem to malfunction because I refuse to spew theocratic hate, or fit their little “angry Muslim” box. Yet they talk to me about privilege, and non-fat lattes?... There is a natural fear among Europe’s left, that challenging Islamist extremism can only aid Europe’s far-right. But the alternative to this fear must not be to instead empower theocratic fascism . There is a way to both challenge those who want to impose ...

I began studying the Kurdish women’s movement during the siege of Kobane and soon became convinced that their story is so important that I had an obligation to get it out in English as fast as I could, even though I couldn’t go there and was limited by my lack of language skills. As I worked on  A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State , I was constantly pulled up short by the radical nature of this revolution and the way it questions the most basic leftwing assumptions, not only about women, or about the relationship between armed struggle, mass movement, and parliamentary party, but about the state itself. In the 20th century, it was clear what people meant when they used the word “revolution”.  Mao Zedong  said it as well as anyone: “A revolution is not a dinner party...it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class over...

Voltaire said he was the greatest reasoner who ever set pen to paper. But is there a twist to Bayle's thinking? Why is there so much wickedness and suffering in the world? Bayle went through the standard theological answers to this question and knocked down each one, often with a vivid analogy. Is God absolved of man’s evil by His gift of free will – which makes everything man’s fault? No, Bayle answered: that would be like giving a knife to a man when you know he will use it to commit murder. The gift does not absolve the giver. Did God permit man to rebel so that He could send Jesus as a redeemer? That, Bayle replied, would make God “like a father who allows his children to break their legs so that he can show everyone his great skill in mending their broken bones”. The real answer, he insisted, is that we cannot comprehend why God allows evil. A true Christian must simply accept that He does. The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was Bayle’s contempo...

How the writer listens: Svetlana Alexievich John Freeman in conversation with the nobel laureate For the past 30 years, Svetlana Alexievich has been writing one long book about the effect of communism and its demise on people in the former Soviet Bloc. Based on interviews, her books conjure a chorus of voices that rise and fall and arrange themselves into symphonic narratives: Here are the voices of Russians scarred by the meltdown of Chernobyl (Voices from Chernobyl), angered by the shame of Afghan War (Zinky Boys), and now, with  Secondhand Time , bewildered by the collapse of communism and assumption they should all be capitalists now. Alexievich was in some ways born into this task. Both of her parents were teachers and her father once studied journalism himself. At university, Alexievich was exposed to the work of Belarusian writer, Ales Adomovich, who believed the 20th century was so horrific it needed no elaboration. Unlike Studs Terkel, whos...

Grand Hotel Abyss - b y Stuart Jeffries Reviewed by Robert Minto Patricide deferred In the summer of 1923, a Soviet spy named Richard Sorge helped organize the library of a new think tank in Frankfurt, Germany. It was called the Institute for Social Research, and it had a bizarre origin story: devoted to Marxist scholarship, funded by a capitalist, housed in a building designed by a Nazi. Richard Sorge’s association with the Institute didn’t last very long. His handlers sent him on to Britain, China, and ultimately Japan. He sent back the crucial fact that Japan did not intend to join Germany’s invasion of Russia, leaving the Fuhrer’s pincer movement with just one claw. This bit of spying may well have changed the course of the war. It allowed Russia to deploy its anti-Japanese Siberian divisions to the Battle of Moscow for the first, pivotal defeat of the German Army. Sorge was captured by the Japanese, tortured, disavowed by Russia, and hanged in 1944. Twenty years l...