Author Archives: Michael Wehle

In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman argues that for all the incontestable novelty of the Nazi genocide against the Jews, its essential message lies in what it tells us about modernity and its peculiar mindset, rationality and institutions, thus … Continue reading →

Wolfgang Streeck, Jacobin: Noch grundsätzlicher ließe sich fragen, was ein Staat seinen Bürgern, die auf seinen Befehl hin ihr Leben lassen sollen, an Bemühungen schuldet, den Krieg, dem sie zum Opfer fallen könnten, gar nicht erst stattfinden zu lassen. Hier … Continue reading →

Peter Hitchens, The Spectator: the era’s greatest reporter of US government secrets, from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib prison disgrace, Seymour Hersh, has lengthily and credibly explained how the US did indeed plant and detonate the enormous … Continue reading →

I, for one, am certainly exercising increased caution today, as the security environment remains complex with the potential for unforeseen escalation. Foreseen escalation I’m o.k. with, but it’s this potential for unforeseen escalation which concerns me. 😬

Rima Hassan, +972 Magazine: I met with the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, who confirmed that no member of the European Parliament had ever previously been placed in police custody over a tweet. … They geolocated me and … Continue reading →

One of the first albums I ever bought. Liked it a lot. Going to have to say when I was eleven “Come rub it upon my belly like guava jelly” didn’t have the same meaning it would ten years later.

Guardian: Trump appears to be flirting with electoral disaster in re-stoking a war that is already unpopular with voters – not least for its inflationary impact on fuel and living costs. “There’s basically no timeline in which this makes any sense for … Continue reading →

Wikipedia: That night the prisoners were awakened and driven in carts on a road leading to the village of Siniachikha, some 18 kilometres (11 miles) from Alapayevsk, where there was an abandoned iron mine with a pit 20 metres (66 feet) deep.[82][83] Here they halted. … Continue reading →

I found myself watching this scene a number of times and thinking about the ARA in Minsk only a few years later. Shortly after there is a wall in another scene with a decree from this body. Until recently I’ve … Continue reading →

Abdaljawad Omar, equator: The facts of Palestine are spoken, and increasingly by Palestinians themselves, but they are met by a refusal to listen, by ears that prefer the drone of implausible denial to the unbearable weight of fact. This structure … Continue reading →