“After the Reign of Terror and the fall of Robespierre, Hegel took a more somber and often times very critical view of Jacobinism in his later Jena period, right through to the publication of his masterwork, the Phenomenology of Spirit. But it is important to understand how Hegel understood the Jacobins’ role as not entirely…
Category: terror
Never-before-published Hannah Arendt on What Freedom and Revolution really Mean
Thoughts on misery and revolution.
Tariq Ali interviewed on “The Legacy of Vladimir Lenin”
Lenin ‘was quite fond of Kropotkin, and he was quite fond of some of the anarchist militants and activists. How could he not be? They had dominated Russian politics for the whole of the nineteenth century. It wasn’t Marxism that was dominant. It was anarchism. This was the ideology the young people liked. These were…
Olivier Roy: “Who are the new jihadis?”
“Biographies of ‘homegrown’ European terrorists show they are violent nihilists who adopt Islam, rather than religious fundamentalists who turn to violence. … To summarise: the typical radical is a young, second-generation immigrant or convert, very often involved in episodes of petty crime, with practically no religious education, but having a rapid and recent trajectory of…
J. Oliver Conroy: “The far right: They hate the US government, and they’re multiplying: the terrifying rise of ‘sovereign citizens'”
“While US counter-terrorism efforts remain locked on Islamist extremism, the growing threat from homegrown, right-wing extremists is even more pressing.”
China Miéville: “Why does the Russian revolution matter?”
“Why does the revolution matter? Because of what was right about it, and what went wrong. It matters because it shows the necessity not only of hope but of appropriate pessimism, and the interrelation of the two. Without hope, that millennial drive, there’s no drive to overturn an ugly world. Without pessimism, a frank evaluation…
Gabriel Hetland: “Why is Venezuela Spiraling out of Control?”
“Opposition violence and the government’s increasing authoritarianism are both to blame.” Today, “the majority of Venezuelans are suffering at the hands of a vengeful, reckless opposition, and an incompetent, unaccountable government.”
Ricardo Isea: “Venezuela under Dictatorship”
‘After several months of political apathy, Venezuela is experiencing a massive popular uprising since April 4th. Over the last three weeks, almost daily, a wave of mass anti-government protests has exploded in major cities of the country, reaching its zenith on April 19. Hundreds of thousands of people have poured into the streets to contest…
Edgardo Lander on ‘The “unconditional solidarity” of the Left with Chavismo’
The Left’s uncritical support for Left authoritarianism: “The rather authoritarian profile of Chavismo was something that was there from the beginning. And the same applies to the extractivist productive model that has been implemented. So, why shouldn’t we open a debate on all these things, in order to think critically and make proposals? I’m not…
Richard Wood: “The Syrian War and the Western Left’s Myopia”
On Islamic radicalism and revolutionary movements: ‘The diverse Islamist organizations’ visions of future social organization may not be that of Western leftists, but to defend or applaud regimes like Russia (with its imperialist history vis a vis Muslims) that intervenes to crush them is shortsighted indeed. Syrian and Libyan societies have been wrecked amid a…