What happens when a city runs out of water? Day Zero was the doomsday of looming climate catastrophe which was almost reached during the Cape Town water crisis of 2015-2020. A holistic geographical perspective places this local crisis in global context, and recognises a physical geography phenomenon of drought amid global warming as also a […]

I. Critical notes Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism was originally published in 1955. It has since become a foundational essay on the nature of colonialism in postcolonialism. Significantly, until the Soviet Union repression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Césaire looked to the Soviet Union (and Stalinist socialism) as a future model for society. While Discourse on Colonialism presents as […]

Pankaj Mishra’s (2024) essay in the London Review of Books, “The Shoah after Gaza”, is essentially a call for ‘ordinary Jews’ to become ‘exceptional Jews’: to learn the correct lesson from the Holocaust, which is to become extraordinary human beings. The problem, for Mishra, is that most Jews, inside Israel and beyond, are ‘ordinary Jews’ […]

The transcendence of the principle of “everything is permitted” into the realm where “everything is possible” is the hallmark of totalitarianism – so understood Hannah Arendt (1962) in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Indeed, until that moment in human history, there were no parallels between life in the German and Russian concentration camps of totalitarian power. […]

TV fictions and AWL reality (Sean Matgamna): “AWL’s adverse reputation in the ostensible left arises from the fact that we try to be consistent democrats and socialists on questions such as Israel-Palestine; from the politically decomposed state the left is in; from the prevalent unreason and displaced emotion on the left on such questions; and […]