A Website of the Radical Imagination
Thomas Mann left Germany when Hitler came to power. He spent the Reich’s twelve years in exile, stripped of his citizenship, a proud enemy of the German state. Here’s a question: which was the greater patriot, Mann or Hitler? Hitler, after all, undid Versailles, created a Grossdeutschland, and reduced the heart of Europe to a … Read more
Earlier this month, The New Yorker‘s George Packer talked up a plan to break up Iraq proposed (in a New York Times op-ed) by Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb, who argue the U.S, in collaboration with Iraq’s neighbors, should broker a divorce between the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. Iraq may be in process of splitting … Read more
Alan Johnson – editor of the online journal, Democratiya, conducted an interview with Kanan Makiya in December of 2005. Following on from two previous postings here at our website (See “What’s Going On” and “Inside the Whale”), this interview amounts to the next chapter in Makiya’s on-the-fly history of the Iraq “project.” As Alan Johnson … Read more
We’re honored to reprint this (slightly adapted) excerpt from Kate Millett’s Going to Iran (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York 1982) — her inspiring, heartrending and newly relevant account of her time in Tehran witnessing women’s struggles against Islamist misogyny after the fall of the Shah. Today is expected to be a very big gathering. … Read more
One of the cartoons which my local newspaper has refused to print shows two veiled women, their staring round eyes, all that can be seen of their faces, expressing alarm, while a bearded man, apparently the Prophet, with a bar obscuring his eyes, his features otherwise visible, radiates a chilling and furious certainty. It is … Read more
Most times, the words, he’s got a gun, will redirect the conversation pretty effectively. Not this time, it appears. The uproar over the Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons of Muhammad has been framed as a free speech issue. The real issue is force. People have recalled the Salman Rushdie fatwa, from almost twenty years ago, and it’s worth … Read more
In the midst of A Matter of Opinion – Victor Navasky’s affable account of his professional life in journalism – The Nation‘s publisher tells a tale about a libel settlement that dishonors a smart set who have trashed efforts to mobilize resistance to the Muslim World’s Ku Klux Klan. Navasky, though doesn’t seem to recognize … Read more