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Showing posts from October 9, 2022

An Unlasting Home

“The Hidden Light of Objects  was banned in 2017. Since then, thankfully, that particular law has been overturned, so my book is no longer banned. But it reveals that those in power do indeed believe that literature can make a difference , enough of one to necessitate its suppression.”
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MEE Perpetuates Amnesia

This is disgraceful to say the least. Is Middle East Eye rebaptizing someone who was/is complicit in war crimes along with Blair? No a single mention of Hague’s position and defense of the war and of Blair. Related Hague and Jolie at LSE
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Is There Any Honour in War?

“Despite  being funded  in a fashion beyond compare and spreading its peculiar brand of destruction around the globe, its system of war hasn’t triumphed in a significant conflict since World War II (with the war in Korea remaining, almost three-quarters of a century later, in a painful and festering stalemate).” This is a liberal nationalist view of a former American military professor and Air Force officer. All his emphasis on ‘lies’ by the military and the propaganda of war without mentioning what he calls the ‘truth’ is keeps the reader wondering, bewildered perhaps. Not a single mention of the political economy of war , especially of the nature and functioning of American capital. You just get the impression that a few liars at the top cause wars as if politicians, strategists of empire, ruling classes, advisors, etc think and work outside a socio-political frame work of power structure and power relations domestically and internationally. There is a mention of ‘honour’ a...
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Is Virgil’s Aeneid a Celebration of Empire?

A British student sitting next to me is reading the epic. All I knew about Virgil before reading the critique here , was the meaning I used to describe to tourists of the famous mosaic housed in the Musée de Bardo in Tunis, Tunisia. Here is what Daniel Mendelsohn writes about the Aeneid on The New Yorker:  [T]he Aeneid—notoriously—can be hard to love. In part, this has to do with its aesthetics. In place of the raw archaic potency of Homer’s epics, which seems to dissolve the millennia between his heroes and us, Virgil’s densely allusive poem offers an elaborately self-conscious “literary” suavity. (The critic and Columbia professor Mark Van Doren remarked that “Homer is a world; Virgil, a style.”) Then, there’s Aeneas himself—“in some ways,” as even the Great Courses Web site felt compelled to acknowledge, “the dullest character in epic literature.” In the Aeneid’s opening lines, Virgil announces that the hero is famed above all for his  pietas , his “sense of duty”: hardly ...
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Sudan’s Unfinished Revolution

A review of Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy Related Historical background To understand fully today’s popular protests, we need to look all the way back to the Sudan’s colonial past. Post-independence conflicts in Sudan were largely caused by ethnic divisions created by the British colonial administration between 1899 and 1956. “Divide and rule” policies pursued by the British continue to haunt contemporary Sudan, both north and south. During most of the colonial period (1899-1956), Sudan was ruled as two Sudans. The British separated the predominantly Muslim and Arabic-speaking north from the multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and multilingual south. Britian’s “divide-and-rule” policy separated southern Sudanese provinces from the rest of the country and slowed down their economic and social development. The British authorities claimed that the south was not ready to open up to the modern world. At the same time, the British heavily invested in the Arab north, modernizing and liberalizing p...
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