Essays

In 2015, Nigeria, a country of about 190 million, spent $625 million to conduct federal and local elections. By comparison, India, with a population of 1.2 billion, spent $600 million on its 2015 election, according to figures released by the Electoral Commission of India (ECI).[1] In 2019, the election budget of Nigeria’s Independent Electoral Commission…

I find to my bemusement that many Americans seem to have strong views on Brexit, which most of them seem to oppose. What was an American friend imagining when he told me, on the day the outcome of the Brexit referendum became known, that I must be proud to be Scottish because a majority of…

In the period following the invasion of Ukraine, I began monitoring the interventions  of what I’m calling the Alt-Left, having been especially struck by the behavior of  The Nation, a periodical with which I’d been associated for many years.  This account proceeds with  some quotations from The Nation, DSA, and several well-known Left intellectuals,  along with…

On my way home from one of the crazy trips I took to DC over the Kavanaugh confirmation battle in the fall of 2018, I wondered about all the years of actions in DC. Our trips to fight wars, presidents, and looming fascism, to try to make democracy work for people. Most of the time,…

In March of 2022, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law the controversial “Parental Rights in Education” bill – informally known as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill.” The bill specifically prohibits “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity…in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is…

The undiminished impact of Joyce in world literature, as well as the great critical and commercial popularity of contemporary Irish fiction, can blind us to the fact that the novel has an uneasy place in the Irish literary tradition. For more than a century, Irish fiction has enjoyed popularity and esteem on the world literary…

Many are the phenomena that can light the path towards the emancipation of oppressed beings. Among them, there are sometimes processes that society spontaneously generates, and that can develop in unexpected circumstances. Something of this kind is happening now. The circumstance is war, and the oppressed beings are nonhuman animals. Pen Farthing and the Flight…

Anniversaries have a way of focusing historical memory. One such anniversary is upon us in 2022 and another came and passed in 2021. Forty years ago, in 1982, East Germany’s most famous dissident, the internationally acclaimed scientist and critical Marxist Robert Havemann, died. Imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Nazis for his activities as an…