Larissa Reisner and the German revolution of 1923
In a vain effort to escape from the disgusting trivia of the New Zealand elections, I have been reading Hamburg at the Barricades, Larissa Reisner’s1 account of the failed German […]
Category Archives: literature
Apology, anthropology, and colonial genocide
A review of Terra Nullius, A Journey Through No One’s Land, by Sven Lindqvist Terra Nullius – a Latin expression meaning ‘no one’s land’ – was a legal fiction used to clear […]
Cultural appropriation, race-baiting, and the power of fiction: in defence of Lionel Shriver
US novelist Lionel Shriver ruffled a few feathers – to put it mildly – when she spoke at the Brisbane Writers Festival in September. Shriver took aim at ‘identity politics’ […]
Shanghai and the holocaust
Jewish communities have existed in China for at least a thousand years, since they arrived as traders along the silk road. The European explorer Marco Polo, visiting Beijing in the […]
The Condition of the Working Class in New Zealand in 1890
In 1842 Friedrich Engels, the 22-year-old son of a German textile manufacturer, was sent to Manchester, England, to work in the family business. Manchester was at the time the centre […]
“Really living life” vs the Russian Revolution: Watching Doctor Zhivago fifty years on
When you’re trapped in an aeroplane seat for twelve hours, you will watch almost any movie to take your mind off the noise of the engines and the thought of […]
Beauty, truth, and “the hideous music admired by savages”
Beauty is truth, truth, beauty – that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know John Keats, Ode on a Grecian urn With this, Keats articulated […]
Robert Burns the revolutionary – and Harry Holland
In the nineteenth century, as the wars to dispossess the Maori of their land got under way in New Zealand, on the opposite side of the globe another violent act […]
The colonial-settler labor movement: utopian and scientific socialism
In his celebrated pamphlet, “Socialism, utopian and scientific,” Friedrich Engels pays tribute to the utopian socialists who preceded the scientific socialism of Marx and himself. Among these pioneering critics of […]
