Brigadier General S. K. Malik’s book Quranic Concept of War was published in Lahore in 1979. Malik articulates a uniquely Islamic contribution to ‘just war’ theory, using the Qu’ran to discuss wartime ethics and the nature of modern jihad. (More…)
Reads
I’d been looking forward to reading ex-Bitch Magnet guitarist Jon Fine’s Your Band Sucks, his memoir of his life in the indie rock scene, for some time. I’d been fascinated with (the stupidly named) Bitch Magnet ever since I first heard Ben Hur in Thirty Ought Six front man Sean Roberts’ basement in Portland a couple of lifetimes ago. (More…)
Several years ago, I spent the night carousing in Prenzlauer Berg. As things broke up after two, I realized that I had stayed out too late – which meant until after the north-south U-Bahn lines had stopped running. In those days, I was living in Neukölln which, for those unfamiliar with Berlin, is a considerable distance. (More…)
The economist Joseph Schumpeter is one the most fascinating and, it is probably fair to say, underappreciated figures of the 20th century. He was a product of a remarkable multigenerational school of economic thought in the last decades of the Habsburg Empire. (More…)
PSYOP: Post- 9/11 Leaflets: Operation Enduring Freedom, is a collection of leaflets dropped by the United States military on Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. The book, which was put together by Christoph Büchel and Giovanni Carmine, was published in 2005 by Win With Words as part of an exhibition at the 7th Sharjah Biennale, in the United Arab Emirates. (More…)
Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans is the most eminent scholar of the Third Reich and the Holocaust writing in the English language today. He has to his credit numerous notable books, including works on the social and political history of Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries, significant contributions to the study of the historiography of modern Germany. Evans’ magisterial three volume history of Nazi Germany will be the state of the art for decades to come. (More…)
The essays in Class War Conservatism have been judiciously selected. The first section begins with Miliband’s 1965 essay “Marx and the State” which provides an important preliminary for Miliband’s response to Nico Poulantzas’s review of The State in Capitalist Society (1969), along with Miliband’s critical pieces on Poulantzas’s Pouvoir politique et classes sociales (1968). (More…)
These days the name Miliband is most associated in the popular mind with the young wonks currently overseeing the bumbling demise of the British Labour Party. But there was a time not so long ago that Miliband was a name to conjure with. Ralph Miliband was one the leading lights of postwar British Marxism. (More…)
During the 2015 NUS Women’s Conference, I was passed a note from a friend. “I’m so happy and proud that you are here,” it read, “All my love, sister.” I was surprised at my reaction to the word “sister,” which made me feel an unfamiliar sense of warmth and community. (More…)
In a recently released open letter, a group of scholars and venture capitalists described the digital revolution as, “the best economic news on the planet.” This is the sort of thing likely to elicit hosannas from those whose situations in finance and academia have positioned them to reap the benefits of this revolution. (More…)
Of all the pricks against which the philosophically-minded person must kick, few are as galling as the persistent tendency of booksellers to shelve the works of Ayn Rand in their ever-dwindling philosophy sections. It’s bad enough that the works of Aristotle and Plato must compete for shelf space with titles like The Simpsons and Philosophy and the works of Bernard-Henri Lévy. (More…)
Mega media-scholar Robert McChesney has been accused, with some justice, of being an over-producer. His histories of American media going back to the founding of the Republic pretty much set the tone for that area of scholarship in Communications, sending him around the country and sometimes around the planet with severe critiques and dire warnings. (More…)