Subterms
His grammar leaves something to be desired, but the message is clear. US President Donald Trump has informed the nation and the world that he has now risen to the same significant height reached by his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. Explaining the measures he intends to take to protect the nation from COVID-19 (formerly given […] More
The Guardian’s columnist Will Hutton, a declared Keynesian, has expressed his astonishment at the Tory government suddenly abandoning its economic orthodoxy as the appropriate response to the coronavirus pandemic. His readers certainly remember the “Cameron-Osborne austerity” of only a few years ago, when Conservative economists, as they have done for decades, insisted that austerity was […] More
We live in an age of accelerated individualization — or so sociologists and social philosophers like Ulrich Beck have told us for decades. We have accepted it, even if we did not necessarily like it. The citizens of the former Soviet empire were among the first to take note. In East Germany, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary […] More
Watching French President Emmanuel Macron’s address to the nation on March 12, I couldn’t avoid admiring the skill with which he deployed two supremely engineered strategic themes. After drawing attention to the importance of a concerted European response to the pandemic, he insisted that the French government would not only bypass the interests of the […] More
A sudden controversy has exploded in the Netherlands. In March, the Dutch department store HEMA began selling a traditional Dutch pastry under the name chocoladebal (chocolate ball) instead of moorkop (referring to the head of a dark-skinned person). HEMA followed in the footsteps of a small baker who believed the racist connotation left the chocolate-glazed […] More
With the COVID-19 outbreak unfolding worldwide, with around 35,000 cases confirmed outside China to date, it is possible to attempt a preliminary analysis of the politics of coronavirus and the efficiency of policies adopted by national governments and international bodies. Unfortunately, the measures seen so far have not always displayed the degree of leadership, responsiveness […] More
Boris Johnson, the British prime minister who fancies himself a reincarnation of Winston Churchill, who talks of wars and battle plans and war rooms, and who has been pictured wearing something akin to a boiler suit, presides over studied inaction when it comes to the country’s coronavirus outbreak. Johnson and his chief medical officer, a […] More
“The trenchocracy is the aristocracy of the trenches,” declared Benito Mussolini on the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia in December 1917. Reflecting on the new type of man emerging from the war, he went on: “What an immense moral force is contained in the patriotic spirit of those who come back from the front … […] More
