January 19, 2016 edition
Hatred is strength. Anger is force. Darth Vader understood this. And probably so, too, those who have formulated political words and acts since the 20th century: from Hitler to Donald Trump, from Stalin to IS, from the Ku Klux Klan to Pol Pot, from the Red Guards to the Islamic Defenders Front. They incite anger, they spread hatred, and then they turn both of them into 'ideology' and from then on who knows how many victories are celebrated and how many millions of bodies pile up.
Anger, hatred, violencethey differ from one another and do not always have a relationship of cause and effect. Yet how often we see the three fused, both in history and in imagination.
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More Sidelines articles in other editions
January 12, 2016 edition
Since time immemorial, enmity between 'the Dark side' and 'the Light' has been the stuff of legend; in the third century CE a Persian called the 'Prophet Mani' articulated it, and in the 20th and 21st centuries, Star Wars repeated it.
Indeed, Manichaeism does not die easily; its dualistic cosmology has made 'the Dark' and 'the Light', bad and good, in perpetual conflict in the universeso clear and simple that it is easy for people to just accept it.
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January 5, 2016 edition
Perhaps Apocalypse Now! is being shown right now in the Middle East. Not as a film.
On 5 July 2014 at the Al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq, someone calling himself Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi appeared and gave a Fasting Month sermon. He was wearing a black turban and a black robe, he was heavy-set and had a scary face with thick eyebrows; somehow, some procedure led him to being considered the Caliph, the world leader of the Islamic ummat. And from then on, a series of confusing reports have been flowing via the world media about what in English is called IS, Islamic State, or Daesh, an acronym from ad-Dawlah al-Islmiyah fi'l-Irq wa-sh-Shm.
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December 29, 2015 edition
December 22, 2015 edition
In the early winter of 1956, when Ben Anderson was aged 20, something happenedsomething that changed the course of his life.
That day, on the campus of the University of Cambridge, a group of Indian and Sri Lankan students were voicing impassioned protest. Ben, who was in his last year in the Classics Department, went to listen. But suddenly some English youths started singing God Save the Queen and assaulted them. They smashed and beat up the thin dark-skinned students who were demonstrating. Ben, a short-sighted and puny young Irishman, tried to break things up. But he got punched himself. "I had never been so angry in my life," he later said.
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December 15, 2015 edition
Life is not a framed map. But it seems that people easily forget this, when history becomes a finished storyprior to conquest.
There is an anecdote from the 18th century when Europeans were sailing to all corners of the earth as explorers, and later (or simultaneously) as colonizers. One day in 1787, La Prouse, a French admiral of the fleet, arrived in China aftersailing around the Pacific Ocean for a hundred days. You could call it a scientific expedition: La Prouse took with him 10 scientists. They wanted to map the coast of Sakhalin Island.
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December 8, 2015 edition