The most shocking part of the Trump triumph has been the open and unresisted entrance of the hard right, from the Ku Klux Klan to Stormfront, into the ranks of Trump supporters ( Read more... )

For me, personally, the final evidence of the guilt of British criminal Hanratty, of anarchist Nicola Sacco. and of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg - however different the circumstances - have been a personal shock. They are the undeniable proof that people can lie even in the face of death and eternity, that claims of innocence from the scaffold are no ( Read more... )

As a rule, I don't have much time for those artists who remained in countries ruled by criminal tyrannies and made their peace with their usurping governments. But in the case of Zoltan Kodaly, Hungarian composer and educator, I shall make an exception. An anecdote from The New York Times, 4 November 1961:

Mr. Kodaly was recently invited by the ( Read more... )

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It is typical of the whole spirit of willing self-deception with which the average educated person approaches the so-called Enlightenment, that the most famous quote about it is false. Voltaire never said: "I disagree with your views, but I will fight to the death for your right to hold them", and if he had he would have been a liar. Voltaire was ( Read more... )

The place of war in human affairs is overestimated. War rarely causes any great change in overall historical trends; nine times out of ten, the great trends of sociology, economics and culture have already decided which party will win, when war is joined. It is rare to find a war where historians are not broadly agreed as to the causes of success ( Read more... )

When I hear that sentence "I never dreamed..."( Read more... )

One point about the fall of the Berlin Wall is not made often enough. It used to be a historiographical commonplace that Germany was the European country where liberal revolutions had always failed. That is no longer the case. There has been a successful democratic revolution at the very core of the old Prussian authoritarian state, in a part of ( Read more... )

I have often found myself in the position of having to say: "You are talking nonsense. I know what Fascists are like. I have met them in considerable number since I was a child. I was born in the same country as Fascism. I have studied Fascism as a historian. [insert personal or group name] may be a detestable person, and his/her/their views ( Read more... )

Most of us know that ever since the bloke with the beard took over Cuba, homosexuality - associated with the island's supposed pre-revolutionary past as a haven of Yanqui degeneracy - has been suppressed, persecuted and punished by (what passes in Cuba for) law. Well, no more. Raul Castro seems to have noticed that his putative allies in the ( Read more... )