“A new documentary, Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution, introduces us to heroes of the American Revolution who aren’t typically found in history books. They are a writer, a double agent, a martyr and a soldier — and they are all black.”
Category Archives: Blog
“‘Black Patriots’ Were Heroes Of The Revolution — But Not The History Books”
Posted in Blog, film, freedom, revolution, rights
Tagged American Revolution, race
Joseph Fronczak: “Melancholy and Mobilisation”
A review of Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory by Enzo Traverso
Posted in Blog, defeat, film, melancholy, power, revolution, the Left, tragic politics
Tagged Judaism
Keith Thomas: “Does Liberalism Have Its Roots in the Illiberal Upheavals of the English Reformation?”
Review essay of James Simpson’s book, Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism.
Posted in Blog, disobedience, power, revolution
Tagged Calvinism, English Revolution, liberalism, Reformation
“Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe”
“We focus on how the memory of civil resistance has been produced in documentaries, memoirs, commemorations, archiving projects as well as in the visual and literary arts.” Project leader Prof. Ann Rigney, Utrecht University
Posted in Arts, Blog, disobedience, resistance
Tagged memory
ROAR Collective: A Dual Power Reading List
An anthology from the magazine.
William Dalrymple: Review of “The Buried” by Peter Hessler – Life, death and revolution in Egypt
‘In this scheme, the fall of Mubarak, the chaos of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the restoration of authoritarian rule under Sisi also follow rhythms familiar to Egyptian history. Hessler sees a mirror in the story of the pharoah Akhenaten – a failed revolutionary whose attempt to introduce monotheism was crushed in “what was possibly the first military coup in human history” by his general Horemheb, and whose tyranny was consolidated by Horemheb’s successor Ramesses II.’
Posted in Blog, governance, power, revolution, tragic politics, tyranny
Tagged Egypt
Joseph Choonara: “A new cycle of revolt”
“This is the third cycle of struggle since the turn of the century. The first, from the late 1990s until the mid-2000s, saw the development of movements against corporate globalisation and neoliberalism. … A second cycle developed in 2011. In Europe it was reflected in occupations of public squares by movements … The claim that a third cycle of revolt is now emerging should be qualified in two ways. First, the struggles do not constitute a coordinated movement. … Second, none of the cycles mentioned above are universal in scope.”
Bernard E. Harcourt: “The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens”
“The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans. Harcourt shows how counterinsurgency’s principles–bulk intelligence collection, ruthless targeting of minorities, pacifying propaganda–have taken hold domestically despite the absence of any radical uprising. This counterrevolution against phantom enemies, he argues, is the tyranny of our age.”
Posted in Blog, governance, revolution, tyranny
Blake Smith: “The Sacred French Revolution: Emile Durkheim, Lynn Hunt, and Historians”
“The French Revolution was a spiritual phenomenon, a manifestation of the sacred. Its legacy and commemoration have become a religion with rituals, festivals, and idols. This was the provocative thesis of Émile Durkheim.”
Posted in Blog, revolution, the common
Tagged French Revolution, Lynn Hunt, religion
Alex von Tunzelmann: “The Evil Repercussions of the American Revolution”
A review of TO BEGIN THE WORLD OVER AGAIN: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe (2019) by Matthew Lockwood. “He finds it at the root of a long list of ills, including increasing authoritarianism within Britain itself and the wider British Empire, the failure of Irish, Indian and Peruvian movements against imperialism, the Russian conquest of Crimea, the establishment of penal colonies in Australia and the growth of the global opium trade.”
Posted in Blog, defeat, hubris, melancholy, terror, tragic politics, tyranny
Tagged American Revolution
