Blog - Page 11 of 11 - Lanka Socialists Forum

19 Feb

Our Daily Sanction

wisidagamage0 CommentsFeatures, Politics

MARCO D'ERAMO 24 JANUARY 2022 POLITICS A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted, but it brings a pressure upon the nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist. Never has the cruelty, the cold violence of economic sanctions, been better expressed than in these words, pronounced by the American president Woodrow Wilson at the Indianapolis Coliseum on 4 September 1919. The…

19 Feb

Red to Black

wisidagamage0 CommentsFeatures, World

JOHN-BAPTISTE ODUOR 27 OCTOBER 2021 IDEAS Until his death in September, Charles Mills was the most persistent defender of the irreducibility of race in the American academy. Across a nearly thirty-five-year career, he opposed both its reduction to an epiphenomenon of economic exploitation and to a category subsumable under supposedly universal conceptions of the rational human being. By his account both Marxism and liberalism had failed to get race adequately into view; the two chapters of his intellectual life took the form of a critical dialogue with each in turn. It was the immanent critique of the latter, set in…

19 Feb

Geringonça’s End

wisidagamage0 CommentsFeatures, Politics

Originally From: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/geringoncas-end?pc=1424 JOSÉ NEVES 14 FEBRUARY 2022 POLITICS On 27 October 2021, the budget put forward by Portugal’s ruling Socialist Party (PS) was voted down by the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and Left Bloc (BE), resulting in the dissolution of Portuguese parliament, the collapse of the government and an early general election. The subsequent national ballot, held on 30 January, saw the PCP and BE lose half their elected positions while the PS gained an absolute majority. The PCP fell from 6.33% of the vote to 4.39%, the BE from 9.52% to 4.46%. Although the polls showed an increasingly…

19 Feb

Rigorous Beauty

wisidagamage0 CommentsArts & Culture, Features

Originally From: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/rigorous-beauty?pc=1424 SAUL NELSON 17 FEBRUARY 2022 CULTURE Freedom in art is never simple. This is the basic lesson of modernism. Rule follows rupture. Technical restriction opens onto formal innovation, and vice versa. As Theodor Adorno observed in Aesthetic Theory (1970), the artists who came to matter most to twentieth-century modernism ‘rejoiced less over the newly won realm of freedom’ generated by invention and revolt, than ‘they immediately sought once again after ostensible yet scarcely adequate order’. This dialectic, linking freedom and constraint, is everywhere apparent in Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty, the first show of the artist’s prints at a UK public…

19 Feb

News from Natoland

wisidagamage0 CommentsFeatures, Politics

Originally From: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/news-from-natoland?pc=1424 TARIQ ALI 16 FEBRUARY 2022 POLITICS Since 3 December 2021, when the Washington Post ‘broke’ the story – based on some aerial photos of tents in a field and other helpfully selected nuggets of US intelligence – the Anglophone world has been subjected to a highly orchestrated media campaign, trumpeting at top volume the ‘massive’ and ‘imminent’ Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the absence of any actual news to report, unnamed US security officials are wheeled out like clockwork to issue pronouncements, NATO figures (Stoltenberg, Borrell) are pushed forward to fill any gaps. Daily front-page headlines hammering home the…