3 May 2019 — Electronic Intifada
Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, greets Benjamin Netanyahu during his 2017 visit to Brussels. (Council of the European Union)
Oscar Wilde wrote that “the truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
The French diplomat Gerard Araud has – unintentionally, no doubt – overturned that observation. He has shown how the truth is often simple and rarely accepted.
23 January 2014 — New Left Project
For Oscar Wilde, 1891 was a busy year. In addition to ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism,’ published that February in the Fortnightly Review, Wilde released four books, wrote Lady Windermere’s Fan and penned the bulk of Salome. ‘The Soul of Man’ is now read, when it is read at all, through the prism of ‘Oscar Wilde’—gay martyr, canonical playwright and official member of the Irish literary pantheon. A certain effort is required to recall the circumstances of its appearance. But by revisiting the intellectual and cultural world in which it first arrived, we can come to see it—and, perhaps, its author—afresh.
21 January 2014 — New Left Project
Wit, provocateur, sharp social satirist. Oscar Wilde was, famously, all these things, but he was also a highly engaged participant in the radical political circles of late Victorian London. Nowhere was his stature as a serious political thinker more evident than in his 1891 essay, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism.’
21 January 2014 — New Left Project
Despite its title, Wilde’s 1891 essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism,’ first published in the Fortnightly Review, advocated not state socialism but anarchism: there were to be no laws, no prisons, no punishments, no family, in short no authority over the individual. In Wilde’s utopia everything necessary or useful was to be manufactured by communally-owned machines, while people were to be left free to choose their own occupations, cultivating leisure and pleasure, ‘the making of beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight.’
The New Dark Age 