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History

Free speech and the ‘snowflake’

If, as advocates of free speech would have it, to speak the truth is to necessarily cause offence, what, asks Keston Sutherland, is the origin of the threat posed by the ‘snowflake’?

 

The Greenhouse Effect

Jeff Bezos at the launch of Amazon Spheres last week (Credit: AP)

Eco-friendly glass architecture that incorporates flora into its design is trending high among West Coast tech giants. Only last week, Amazon's 'Spheres' HQ opened in Seattle. Key Macfarlane traces the imperial and utopian lineage of this aesthetic, arguing that its contemporary effect is that of the greenhouse: a seductive but reactionary spectacle of life incubated by total corporatisation.

 

The Corporate Biodome

Lest We Forget

Field Punishment No. 1, as depicted in a contemporary War Office illustration.

Brian Ashton outlines a catalogue of cruel and harsh treatment meted out on the soldiers of the British military during the First World War set against a background of the use of force against working class struggles in pre-war Britain. Maltreatment of workers and soldiers continued through the entire war, with the shell shocked soldiers subject to sadistic treatments born of propaganda encouraging mistrust of the working class. In what is still a little-told story, of those traumatised by the violence of the war, Ashton brings together the accounts and records that document this period.

Athens and the Bankers

Andreas Embirikos (1901-1975) came from a wealthy family as his father was an important ship-owner.

The Greek crisis is often diminished to a simple story of Debt versus the People. Richard Braude moves between the symptomatic details of everyday life in Athens today and the deep history of the crisis to recover gleams of human possibility beyond the narrative of bad bankers and rad technocrats

 

To Be a Pilgrim

Helen Macfarlane was a Chartist revolutionary, the translator who put the ‘hobgoblin’ in the Communist Manifesto, and an advocate of ‘the total demolition of the present system of things’ on Christian grounds. Peter Linebaugh welcomes the 150 years-overdue publication of her writings, invoking the Blood and Fire of that earlier ‘ruthless critic of everything that exists’, John Bunyan

When the Streets Run Red: For a 21st-Century Anti-Lynching Movement

The heterogeneous elements of the Black Lives Matter movement are fighting white supremacy by confronting gendered domination, capitalism, and the repressive apparatuses of the state. Erin Gray traces the critical impulse of the current movement against anti-black violence to the legacy of Ida B. Wells’s radical anti-lynching campaigns, and suggests that the fiercest opposition to police terror in the US has always been against the law

 

Out of Time

Goods imported into the port of London from Tuesday May 24, to Tuesday the 31 ft of May 1785

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