The crisis never really ended. We just forgot about it. Everything that has gone wrong, from Brexit to Trump, is down to the crash. (More…)
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I’m a big tennis fan, and I’m an ardent leftist. The Serena Williams affair at the US Open final on September 8th has suddenly put me at odds with a lot of my brethren on the left. Many have taken up the Serena banner as the victim of a grave injustice; Serena, they say, was once again thwarted by sexism, or racism, or both. I don’t agree. (More…)
Marine Le Pen’s partner had just left the country. A Jew of Algerian background, Louis Aliot had been dispatched to Israel to raise funds for the Front National (FN).
Money was tight for the populists in 2012, and they were fishing for cash everywhere. Even from North African Jewish expats, sympathetic to the Front’s Islamophobia. (More…)
Talk to Spanish and Italian journalists about reporting on refugees and migration and a single common sentiment emerges.
“I wish to give a voice to the voiceless and record the unrecorded,” an Italian journalist told us. It echoed what a Spanish colleague had said: “It is necessary to give a voice to people who don’t have it.” (More…)
Decades ago, in First Blood: Part II, the character John Rambo asked, “Do we get to win this time?” If the United States had won the war, Rambo would not have been invented to rescue fictional victory from real defeat. Because it lost, its filmmakers learned to profit from telling stories about successes that never happened. (More…)
The racists have it wrong. The invading hordes of migrants are neither Arab nor Muslim. The majority, in the two cities I work, Berlin and Turin, are African. Black African that is, many speaking indigenous languages, if not French or English. If they’re religious, generally the choice of faith is Evangelical Protestantism, not jihadist Islam. (More…)
There has never been in the history of Italy a state so completely identified with one man as in the case of Fascism — and there has never been a Government in which the name of its creator and the title of its governmental system has been so meticulously kept apart. You hear plenty of the Duce del Fascismo, but never nowadays of the “Mussolini ” Fascists; you hear in Italy of the “ Fascist ” or the “ Italian ” but not of the “Mussolini ” government, and there are Fascisti, but no “Mussoliniani.” (More…)
CALAIS, France – Most people associate asylum seekers in Calais with the notorious “Jungle.” It was a place of solidarity that appealed to the imagination, with its makeshift schools, mosques, restaurants and a church built by asylum seekers with the help of international volunteers. However, the Jungle was also rat-infested and filthy; it was a threatening, lawless place where people-smuggling networks thrived. (More…)
The late historian Detlev Peukert once wrote of the literature on Max Weber that the annual volume of new publications was such that not even specialists could keep fully current. This statement could equally apply to the literature on Marx and Marxism which, even without “actually existing socialism” to act as motivator or bête noire, continues to appear in its accustomed profusion. (More…)
In the blistering heat of Lebanon’s long summer, many of the 1.5 million Syrian refugees hosted by the country have been squeezing in all the seasonal work they can. In order to pay debts and health bills, some accept exploitative work conditions and the humiliation of unpaid salaries. (More…)
Labour’s decision to adopt the full IHRA definition of anti-Semitism will backfire. Corbyn’s enemies will only sense weakness and move in to strike another blow. (More…)
The German revolutionary movement before Hitler was based on the economic and social theory of Karl Marx; an understanding of German fascism, therefore, presupposes an understanding of Marxism. (More…)