Category: Power and Ideology

Today’s One-Liner (#69)

“People ignore reality in favor of their bright ideas.” –Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 1965, quoted in Susie Linfield, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky

Today’s One-Liner (#26)

Dogmatism buckles under pressure from reality. –Nellie Bowles, “The Failure of San Francisco,” in Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History

What’s Missing

During the thousand years of her history Russia had seen many great things. During the Soviet period the country had seen global military victories, vast construction sites, whole new cities, dams across the Dnieper and…

What’s Been Going on

Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to…

On “Useful Idiots”

The last half of 2023 I have shared several posts based on the riveting book by Gary Saul Morson, Wisdom Confronts Certainty. Recently, I noticed he and his colleague Morton Schapiro used their knowledge on…

Dostoevsky Saw It Coming

What would be “a thousand times more serious” is revolutionary killing such as Dostoevsky was to predict in The Possessed. This book, alone among nineteenth-­century works, foresaw what we have come to call totalitarianism, not…

The Communist and the Buddhist

[Nikolay] Valentinov … recorded his shock at Lenin’s certainty not only that Marx and Engels were absolutely correct, but that no fundamental principle they enunciated, about anything, could ever be changed.  “Nothing in Marxism is…

Twenty-two Years Ago

The following is from Israeli novelist David Grossman’s Seven Days: A Diary, October 2001, in Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years after Oslo MONDAYI keep reading hostile remarks about Israel in the…

Elimination

“Total destruction… the orchard, apiary, destruction of hives, bees buzzing despairingly, the men blow up hives with gunpowder… attack the hives, a wild orgy…I feel sick about it all,” [Isaac Babel] wrote in the diary, and one Red…