About

Leo Tolstoy opens Hadji Murat with the image of a plowed field desolate save for a lone thistle bush. The narrator marvels at how the bush survived the mowing even after everything around it was destroyed, how the crushed thistle still does not surrender its little patch of earth. He reflects, “How staunchly it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life.”

The thistle in the story becomes a symbol for the struggle of Hadji Murat in the face of imperial aggression. It is a universal symbol of resistance, of a wild kind of beauty that far from being fragile, is unbroken, resilient, and free.

We live in a time when nature is under assault like never before, when philistinism is funded in the millions of dollars and seeks to appropriate and commodify art for its profit, when tech surveillance is ubiquitous and grants the power to modify both individual and collective behavior, when war is glorified, and theological texts are mistaken for constitutions.

This is a space to challenge processes dominant systems seek to normalize. My political columns are wholly personal and independent. Their aim is to present a skeptical view of media representations of the world, and diversify the perceptions of our time. Our age is surely scary, but it is also burgeoning with beauty both natural and human made.

The Thistle is more than only political writing. Through this space I seek to express myself with complete freedom about the world. I’ll be posting selected journal entries, descriptions of travels and long walks, art and cultural commentary. This is a record of my life as lived.

Contact: email me at santiagoscg@protonmail.com or follow me on Bluesky @santiagosc.bsky.social