I am not surprised by this revelation in today’s BBC News. Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted to halve the number of Turks living in West Germany in the early 1980s, British official papers cited by a German magazine reveal. He discussed the idea with then UK PM Margaret Thatcher at a meeting in Bonn in ...
70 years ago today, Nazi “judge” Roland Freisler sentenced to death three members of the Christian resistance group Weiße Rose: Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst. Together with the other members of the group (among them Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, and Alexander Schmorell who were murdered after trials later in the same year, 1943) ...
[footnotes at the end of this post – links don’t work…] As Simmelian/Bermanian Marxist, Plessner fan and antifascist, I have a deep aversion against the protagonists of the proto-fascist “conservative revolution” (konservative Revolution) in the Weimar Republic – people like “jurist” Carl Schmitt, the essayist and “novelist” Ernst Jünger, the “historian” Oswald Spengler … and ...
The Iranian Revolution in 1979 and particularly the aftermath of Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa calling for the killing of Salman Rushdi spelled, for many, the end of Western style secularisation. Clearly the religious revival in the Islamic world and its political repercussions meant that religion was still a factor in world politics – and within ...