Recent Posts

Pakistani Imam Preaches Jew-Hate in Belgian Parliament

Three months to the day after Hamas’s bloodthirsty massacre of Jews, an Islamist preacher from Pakistan comes to the rostrum of the Brussels Regional Parliament, in the capital of the European Union, to chant verses from a sura celebrating the defeat, surrender and massacre of Jews and the enslavement of …

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The Power Of Absent Things.

I’ve written a lot over the last couple of years about the bizarre complaisance of the western political classes and the Professional and Managerial Caste that serves them, in the face of the disastrous development of the crisis in Ukraine. I’ve cited it as an aspect of their inability to …

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Europe’s Inner Demons

If you take a tram out of Vienna and climb to the top of the Leopoldsberg, you can see a series of memorials to the successful defence of Vienna in 1683 against the invading Ottomans. Looking out over the Danube to the East, you can see an awful lot of …

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Dealing With Foreigners …

I was going to write about something quite different this week, but I got distracted by a number of stories criticising the diplomacy of the US and the EU, especially towards China. I was also struck by several people expressing scepticism about my comment that in 2014 Merkel and Hollande …

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A Clash Of Symbols

Living through the Cold War wasn’t without its moments of anxiety, and even fear: there were times when you went to bed wondering if you would wake up a radioactive crisp in the morning. Yet for all the angst and the serial crises, there was actually something quite comforting about …

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I Don’t Want this Sunak: Don’t You Have a Better Model?

People often talk about the current political crisis in the West in antiseptic and impersonal terms: the end of the Tory Party, the decline of neoliberalism, the strengthening of the extreme Right, and so on. But ideologies, parties and tendencies don’t have agency: people have agency. So let’s look at …

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