Why I won't be mourning Derrida - Johann Hari, Commentators. The popularity of Jacques Derrida's philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence. Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free - so they have turned to a wild, often absurd philosopher who trashes the humanities (and any coherent political project) in a search for intellectual stimulation. As he is buried this week, it is time to ask whether his ideas - and the long, agonising postmodern intellectual spasm - should be buried with him. I have friends who still awake weeping at 3am with nightmares about trying to understand Derrida in time for their final exams. It's true his writing is wilfully obscure, and at times he lapses into gibberish.
But in fact, once you learn how to boil down his prose, his ideas are fairly simple - and pernicious. Derrida believed Western thought has been riddled since the time of Plato by a cancer he called "logocentrism". Derrida was, in short, the mad axeman of Western philosophy. Tribute to Patrice Lumumba on the 50th anniversary of his assassination | Beat Knowledge. Patrice Lumumba Malcolm X, speaking at a rally of the Organisation of Afro-American Unity in 1964, described Patrice Emery Lumumba as “the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent. He didn’t fear anybody. He had those people [the colonialists] so scared they had to kill him. They couldn’t buy him, they couldn’t frighten him, they couldn’t reach him.” This was three years after Lumumba was assassinated by Belgian mercenaries in the breakaway state of Katanga (southern Congo).
Why was Lumumba killed? Until the mid-1950s, the nationalist movement had been dominated by the small Congolese middle class. The masses wanted control. Lumumba was the key figure in mobilising these masses. In 1958, he and others formed the broad-based Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), which immediately established itself as the key organisation in the struggle against colonial rule. The Belgians, along with the other colonialist nations, were horrified at Lumumba’s stance. Speakers include: Wallace Shawn, Are You Smarter Than Thomas Jefferson? Walking With The Comrades. The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat.
I’d been waiting for months to hear from them. I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to take care of bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: “Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas. Password: Namashkar Guruji.” Namashkar Guruji. There are many ways to describe Dantewada. Red Shadow: Centenary celebrations of the adivasi uprising in Bastar; Sten gun at hand In Dantewada, the police wear plain clothes and the rebels wear uniforms. Across the Indravati river, in the area controlled by the Maoists, is the place the police call ‘Pakistan’. The antagonists in the forest are disparate and unequal in almost every way. Therefore, this war. It’s late. I hear dogs. The Trickledown Revolution.
The law locks up the hapless felon who steals the goose from off the common, but lets the greater felon loose who steals the common from the goose. —Anonymous, England, 1821 In the early morning hours of July 2, 2010, in the remote forests of Adilabad, the Andhra Pradesh state police fired a bullet into the chest of a man called Chemkuri Rajkumar, known to his comrades as Azad. Azad was a member of the politburo of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and had been nominated by his party as its chief negotiator for the proposed peace talks with the Government of India. Why did the police fire at point-blank range and leave those tell-tale burn marks, when they could so easily have covered their tracks? Days after I said goodbye to the comrades and emerged from the Dandakaranya forest, I found myself charting a weary but familiar course to Jantar Mantar, on Parliament Street in New Delhi.
Jantar Mantar is the only place in Delhi where Section 144 is not enforced.