Germany has slipped deeper into crisis with the collapse of its governing coalition. An unlikely union between the center-left SPD, the Greens, and the free-market(ish) FDP never made much intellectual sense, but the parliamentary arithmetic worked, so that was that.
And that was then.
Read MoreUntil gang warfare and the bombings that went with it broke Sweden’s calm (the consequences of recent mass immigration have proved rougher-edged than many Swedes chose to expect), the Nordic region had for a long time been renowned for its tranquility, making it somewhat surprising that it gave birth to Nordic noir, a genre of thriller often as chilly as the realm from which it emerged. Each Nordic country has its leaders in this field, and in Norway the top dog is Jo Nesbø, hip, stylish, something of a polymath (soccer player, stockbroker, musician), and the best-selling Norwegian author of all time, renowned above all for a series of often brutal stories (recommended) featuring Harry Hole, a brilliant, awkward Oslo detective with a fondness for the bottle…
Read MoreIn July 2007, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission (Brussels’ top bureaucrat) said rather a lot of the quiet part aloud. The European Union, he boasted, was an empire, an empire of new kind, a “non-imperial empire,” but an empire all the same. For some that had always been the idea. Europe’s former great powers could never, individually, restore the global preeminence they had enjoyed before the world wars. Maybe they could come close to doing so collectively. A united Europe could become a rival “pole” to the U.S., not an enemy, not militarily, but economically and as an exemplar to the rest of the world of a better way forward….
Read MoreTen or so months on, Argentina’s Javier Milei is still pressing on with his reforms, but even though the Argentine system gives a lot of power to the president, it doesn’t help that his still young party (LLA — La Libertad Avanza) only has 15 percent of the seats in Argentina’s lower house and about 10 percent in the Senate. Even with the help of allies it can only exercise some degree of control via ad hoc blocking minorities.
Midterms are due late next year, and, if a recent poll in Buenos Aires province is any indication (not that much: the midterms won’t be held until October next year, an eon away under current circumstances) the LLA should increase its representation significantly, although still well short of a majority…
Read MoreHowever (very) bad Britain’s Conservative government may have been, the Labour government that has replaced it has proved to be infinitely worse. Much of this (such as the doubling down on net zero) was predictable, but Labour’s destructiveness has extended into areas — including (checks notes) the Indian Ocean — that have surprised even the gloomier pessimists.
Read MoreNot long after taking office, Argentine president Javier Milei went to Davos, where he gave a memorable (#understatement) speech…
Read MoreSooner or later there comes a moment when central planners’ spreadsheets and targets run into reality. And it is rarely a happy moment. Some years ago, officials in the EU, UK, California, and other dim-bulb jurisdictions came up with the idea of imposing a quota system on automakers…
Read MoreBy giving online intermediaries a sizeable degree of immunity from liability for user content, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 combined a characteristically American defense of free expression with a determination to ensure that this promising new sector was not stifled by another American tradition, predatory litigation. The outcome, through blogs, social media, and countless other outlets, has been to open the public square to voices that once would never have been heard.
Read MoreWinston Churchill was “a chief villain of world war 2?” Well, that’s the view (neatly filleted by Andrew Roberts, Churchill’s finest contemporary biographer, National Review’s Mark Wright, and others) of Darryl Cooper, the podcaster recently interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Carlson described Cooper as possibly the “best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” which would be both alarming and remarkable were it true. Cooper takes a revisionist view of the second world war that goes far beyond a continuing reexamination of the past — a basic part of any historian’s work — or even an exaggerated contrarianism into far darker territory.
This is the Capital Letter, not the History Letter, but there was one comment which marched into Capital Matters territory. It appears at the end of a tweet in which Cooper refers to the Treaty of Versailles. “The terms,” he wrote, “would keep Germany in destitution for another decade.”
But did they?
Read MoreRe-examining the Third Reich remains, even now, essential. Its lessons are too important to be deemed safely settled. But when Richard Evans argues that the task has “gained new urgency and importance” due to the emergence of “strongmen and would-be dictators” within the world’s democracies “since shortly after the beginning of the twenty-first century,” he risks trivializing past horrors by wielding them as a weapon in the current debate over populism. That’s unless he has Vladimir Putin in mind, which would make for a very different discussion…
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