When the district judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected the US demand to extradite Julian Assange, many Leftist and liberal critics commented on this decision in terms which recall the famous lines from T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: “The last temptation is the greatest treason / To do the right deed …
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We read again and again in our media that we are at the “beginning of the end” of the pandemic: although numbers of infections and deaths are still rising, millions are already vaccinated, so there is now at least the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. In spite …
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The world has lived with the pandemic for most of 2020, but what is our situation with regard to it now, in early December, in the middle of what the European media is terming ‘the second wave’? Firstly, we should not forget that the distinction between the first and second …
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‘Democracy Reborn’, the title of a book from 2007 by the historian Garrett Epps, is used in US historiography to designate the time after the Civil War when all progressives joined forces to add Amendment XIV to the Constitution. This amendment provided African Americans with full citizenship and prohibited any …
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On October 29, 2020, Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from the British Labour Party – why? The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the UK equality watchdog, concluded its 130-page investigation with the claim that the Labour Party could have tackled antisemitism more effectively “if the leadership had chosen to do so,” …
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In the run up to the US presidential elections, different forms of populist resistance are gradually forming a unified field: “Armed militia groups are forging alliances in the final stages of the US presidential election with conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers who claim the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax, intensifying concerns …
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Europe is now paying the price for its summer complacency, when we hoped that coronavirus would be ‘burned’ by the heat. While the epidemic diminished, it did not disappear. Life opened up somewhat, though, and there was a relief that the worst seemed to be over. Now, in the autumn, …
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A story picked up by the UK media at the end of September passed almost unnoticed. As The Guardian reported, “The government has ordered schools in England not to use resources from organizations which have expressed a desire to end capitalism. Department for Education guidance issued on Thursday for school …
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There is an old joke from the time of World War I about an exchange of telegrams between the German Army headquarters and the Austrian-Hungarian HQ. From Berlin to Vienna, the message is “The situation on our part of the front is serious, but not catastrophic,” and the reply from …
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