Glenn Greenwald, Havana Syndrome and Anglophone Russophobia. Vladimir Putin, Nikolai Berdyaev and the Free Academy of the Infinite Conversation. The return of history and the last democracy. Woke cults. Saint Thomas More and Thomas a Kempis. Elena Shvarts. Culaincourt and the retreat from Moscow…. and Afghanistan. Gideon Haigh, Melbourne lockdowns, wastelands, and the false freedom event.
This episode of The Burning Archive podcast explores how Havel’s writing, ideas and the model of his way of living in truth remains meaningful to us today. This episode sets out the main events of Havel’s life and the ideas of his political essays. It looks in depth at the “Letter to Gustav Husak” (1975), and its uncanny evocation of aspects of our lives today in a locked down world.
Things are very serious here in Australia. There is a mental health crisis. We have endured a state of emergency since March 2020. Normal rules of government decision making have not applied. We have pursued a medical utopia of COVID Zero at stunning cost. It is really something that should never happen again, and hopefully, at the right time in the right way by the right people, will be deeply investigated and reflected on.
I am reposting this post from maybe May or June. In Melbourne now all the weeks…
And so it seems, the people of Melbourne again must endure this impoverished choice in their lives, as they endure another siege by public health. But such infinite possibility is there in those choices: of attitude, of gesture, of a last word.
Today 12 February, Melbourne and all the citizens of Victoria have been thrown, with eleven hours…
Throughout the year I have kept a diary in a an A5 black notebook of 200…
As part of my The Kaeleidoscope of 2020: Year in Review post I have updated with…
Historians (and I am one) will search for cultural archetypes that explain the strange delusions of…
Curfew, Melbourne 2020 Unimaginable city, locked down in its dark tomb,Its streets masked for an uncommon…