Dilip Simeon's blog

A former Soviet military officer credited with averting a possible nuclear disaster at the peak of the Cold War has died at the age of 77.  He was the only officer in his team with a civilian education. Stanislav Petrov was on duty at a Russian nuclear early warning centre in 1983 when computers wrongly detected incoming missiles from the US. He took the decision that they were a false alarm and did not report them to his superiors. His actions, which came to light years later, possibly prevented nuclear war. Petrov died at his home in Moscow in May but his death has only now been made public. In an interview with the BBC in 2013, Petrov told how he had received computer readouts in the early hours of the morning of 26 September 1983 suggesting several US missiles had been launched. "I had all the data [to suggest there was an ongoing missile attack]. If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it," he said. "All I had to d...

The apparent threat to transfer the Director General of Police (DGP), Haryana, following Gurmeet Singh’s (I refrain from adding Baba or Ram Rahim to his real name) arrest remained in the realm of speculation. It would have constituted a great travesty of justice if those who wield the power to appoint and transfer had shifted the blame from themselves onto the shoulders of the police chief. The police in India today are not expected to uphold the rule of law. They are trained to do that but as soon as officers are absorbed into the system they quickly learn that all they are required to do is uphold the rule of the party in power. There was a time when politicians were wary of expecting senior police officers to blindly toe their line, irrespective of the moral, ethical and, more importantly, legal merits of their instructions, communicated directly or through trusted intermediaries. This is not the situation today. Politicians of all parties and ideologies treat the bureaucracy a...

"Maybe the reason young radical thinkers are not impressed by pleas to recognize “ambiguity and contingency” is because what they have seen in their lifetimes is a lesson in some pretty unambiguous facts about how capitalism works. Even rock-ribbed neoclassical economists are coming around to the view that forty years of stagnant wages might have something to do with the attack on unions; that the decline of the labor movement in turn accelerated the shift to the right in politics; that this shift in turn led to a pretty successful evisceration of what little social support the state gave to the poor; that when the mad rush for short-term profits finally drove the economy into the tank, the state returned the favor by passing off the costs to the public and handed over trillions of dollars to the banks. There was no contingency or ambiguity in any of this. It was a quite predictable result of a highly successful class war that transferred political power firmly over to el...

NB: Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian religious and political philosopher. He was among 160 non-communist intellectuals and scholars, deported from Russia in 1922 on Lenin's orders (after interrogation by Felix Dzherjzinsky, of the secret police), for being spies and counter revolutionaries.  Berdyaev  had also been convicted of blasphemy for criticising the Russian Orthodox Church; and in 1913 was sentenced to deportation for life to Siberia. The outbreak of war saved him.  Here are two of Berdayev's essays, on communism; and on the lie - on which also see:  Alexandre Koyré The Political Function of the Modern Lie .  I need hardly point out the relevance of the function of lying and deceit in this era of ideological tyranny. The so-called 'parivar'  currently   ruling India might be surprised to learn how close its instincts are to the totalitarian stream within the communist movement. There was an anti-Bolshevik stream as ...

By Soutik Biswas: Did India’s economic reforms lead to a sharp rise in inequality? New research  by French economists Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, author of Capital, the 2013 bestselling book on capitalism and increasing inequality, clearly points to this conclusion. They studied household consumption surveys, federal accounts and income tax data from 1922 - when the tax was introduced in India - to 2014. The data shows that the share of national income accruing to the top 1% of wage earners is now at its highest level since Indians began paying income tax. The economists say the top 1% of the earners captured less than 21% of the total income in the late 1930s, before dropping to 6% in the early 1980s and rising to 22% today. India, in fact, comes out as a country with one of the highest increase in top 1% income share concentration over the past 30 years," they say. How India’s currency ban is hurting the poor Is India winning the war on poverty? ...

There’s nothing more dangerous than a writer whose feelings have been hurt.” The speaker is Joan Castleman, the charming, enigmatically discreet and supportive wife of world-famous author and New York literary lion Joe Castleman. It is a fascinating and bravura performance from Glenn Close, in this hugely enjoyable dark comedy from director Björn Runge, adapted by Jane Anderson from the novel by Meg Wolitzer. Perhaps it’s Close’s career-best – unnervingly subtle, unreadably calm, simmering with self-control. Her Joan is a study in marital pain, deceit and the sexual politics of prestige. It’s a portrayal to put alongside Close’s appearances in Dangerous Liaisons and Fatal Attraction. This is an unmissable movie for  Glenn Close  fans. Actually, you can’t watch it without becoming a fan – if you weren’t one already. The Castlemans are on the plane to Sweden, ready for Joe to get the Nobel prize. Yet they are being pestered on the flight by a certain Nathaniel Bone, part st...

Enzo Traverso is an Italian historian of the Holocaust and totalitarianism The Aporias of Marxism :  In a letter to Walter Benjamin, dated 13 April 1933, Gershom Scholem described the rise of Nazi Germany as ‘a catastrophe of world‑historical proportions’ which permitted him for the first time ‘to comprehend deeply’ the expulsion of the Spanish Jews in 1492: ‘The magnitude of the collapse of the communist and socialist movements,’ he wrote ‘is frightfully obvious, but the defeat of German Jewry certainly does not pale by comparison.’ These words, written in Palestine by a historian of the Cabbala who had left Germany almost ten years before, seem today a good deal more lucid than any of the Marxist analyses of the time. In 1933 ,  very few intellectuals were aware of the fact that Hitler’s rise to power signified the end of Judaism in Germany. The Jews, as Scholem bitterly observed in this same letter, were powerless and continued desperately to cling to a national id...