Europe

September 8, 2022 will go down in history as the date we lost Her Majesty Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and of her other realms and territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. Her son Charles, Prince of Wales, has now succeeded her as King Charles III. For the first time in this writer’s life, the anthem is to be sung as "God Save the King." To write about the accomplishments of the sole public figure remaining from one’s earliest memories is a daunting task. The Queen in her turn inherited an institution that is difficult for Americans — especially of a conservative stripe — to understand.

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II last week, every national TV network in America dispatched crack squads of producers to London to cover the aftermath. Staff shortages meant that The Spectator opted to send Cockburn over on an economy flight, although he bets that if it was anyone else, they’d be flying classy. After Cockburn got over the screaming kids and bad liquor on his JetBlue plane, he decided to start at Buckingham Palace. This was, in hindsight, a huge mistake. In fact, Cockburn would go as far to say that the British royal family’s HQ is host to a cabal of the worst humans on earth. Loud, crying Americans, British oiks taking smiling selfies, Instagram moms laying flowers down seven times to make sure that their dutiful camera man got the best angle of their ass.

Last month, in preparation for an article about the growing gay backlash against trans ideology, I spoke with Bev Jackson, the co-founder of LGB Alliance, a gay and lesbian activist group that opposes the hijacking of the gay rights movement by transfolk. Bev told me about her background — fifty years in British gay activism, a resident of Amsterdam for four decades — and asked me about mine. I mentioned my 2006 book While Europe Slept, a cri de coeur about the Islamization of Europe. I heard in her voice a degree of disquiet about its topic. Nonetheless, she asked me to participate in the LGB Alliance’s forthcoming annual convention. I accepted, but when I hung up I told my partner: “I’ve been invited to a convention in London.

As Alexander Larman writes, the passage of the Queen is not a tragedy. No life lived so well, so dutifully, and with such faith in so many things now lost to us can be considered a tragedy. But it is nonetheless very sad, even for those of us in America — a nation she loved in so many ways. Her death seems like another blow to another important institution of the West, undermined in recent decades by boomer proclivities and millennial narcissism, and likely to break into a thousand pieces in the absence of the old-world values Elizabeth represented. What is more tragic, and more offensive, is the degree to which the Queen's passing has been met by historical ignorance from the anti-Western left and its attendant useful idiots on the decadence-obsessed right.

I write as an American patriot who is also a confirmed Anglophile. So when I got the sad news this morning that the Queen’s health had taken so dangerous a turn that the palace had summoned her family to Balmoral, I steeled myself for bad news. Alas, the bad news has now been confirmed. Queen Elizabeth II has died. It says a lot that when I say “the Queen” even American readers know I can mean only one person. The ninety-six-year-old had just celebrated her platinum anniversary this summer — seventy years on the throne, the longest of any English monarch. Elizabeth was far and away the most admired head of state in the world. Her good sense, her generosity of spirit, her thoughtful but active reticence have made her one of the most successful monarchs in history.

Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine has moved into a new phase, a very encouraging one for Ukraine and its western allies. In Phase 1, Russia tried — and failed — to seize the capital city of Kyiv with a blitzkrieg assault. The idea was to decapitate the Zelensky government quickly and install a puppet regime, subservient to Moscow. After that failed, Russia focused on taking the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and forming a “land bridge” to Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014. Russia has had some success in this Phase 2 of the war, at very high cost, but movement along that front has now stalled.

Russia has invaded Ukraine, and the images are all over the news. CNN has gone to round-the-clock coverage of bombs falling near Kyiv, refugees pouring into Hungary, Putin’s war machine rolling down a misty highway. We’re outraged by this, roused to action, as we righteously hang a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag off the porch and learn to spell the names of places like Kherson and Mariupol. The West, listless and fractured, seems suddenly united again as opposition to Russian imperialism grows and... ...and it’s summer. The weather is warm and a gentle breeze is tinkling through the chimes. The kids are off from school, horsing around the kitchen, and the lawn isn’t going to mow itself.

The strategic Ukrainian port city of Mykoliav, that has been under constant Russian bombardment since the onset of war, was locked down for an entire weekend in early August as troops searched for Russian collaborators that had been calling in locations of Ukrainian troops and ammunition. The government arrested scores of traitors during their house-to-house search. Meanwhile in the capital Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky has also been sounding the alarm over Russian collaborators after firing both his prosecutor-general and head of the intelligence agency for treason. The former spy chief was a close childhood friend of the president. There are allegations that the entire intelligence agency is riddled with spies, with many defecting to Russia in the early days of the invasion.

As the war in Ukraine approaches its six-month anniversary this coming Wednesday, the fighting shows no sign of stopping. Peace talks are a figment of the imagination, as Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky remain just as committed to achieving their objectives today as they were when the war first broke out. The Russians continue to pound residential areas with artillery in the Donbas, hoping to slowly capture more territory after months of slow, high-cost maneuvering in the Donetsk region. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, are settling on a new strategy in the south, harassing Russian supply lines deep into Russian-occupied territory.

The saying goes that there is nothing that celebrities can’t make about themselves. As it turns out, that includes a war in Ukraine caused by an invasion of Russia that's already seen thousands of casualties. It's almost as though there are two wars happening at once: one on social media, where guerrilla clips from the front lines show bodies, shelling, and damage to homes, and one playing out in the pages of Vogue magazine. This week, it was revealed that Oscar-winning actress Jessica Chastain had visited with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. The photo was posted to his official Telegram account and was taken from his presidential palace. There were also several shots of Chastain seated at a table with Zelensky having a discussion of some sort.

“In Europe people wear breathable clothes made out of natural materials, in the USA people wear plastic.” “In Europe people sleep indoors, not in tents on the street like Los Angeles.” “Unfortunately people have a lot of reactions to gluten in the US and zero issues in Europe” “How can you avoid looking like an American tourist in France?” Scroll through your news feed and you’ll witness a lot of Americans, usually those who pride themselves on their progressive views, indiscriminately romanticizing “Europe.” In the wake of the endless Covid restrictions and after Roe v. Wade was overturned, there’s been endless social media chatter about how to move from the US to Europe.

The legendary nineteenth-century showman P.T. Barnum is credited with first uttering the words, “all publicity is good publicity.” Barnum had the good sense to die a century before he had the chance to see the Zelenskys’ Vogue photo shoot. https://twitter.com/MayraFlores2022/status/1552267933501489152 Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife posed for renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz. In one shot Olena stands near Ukrainian female soldiers at the Antanov airport. In another she holds hands with her husband in the presidential office compound in Kyiv as the pair stare pensively at the camera.

Boris Johnson’s departure has left a vacancy at the top of British politics. For so long, he seemed to be the "teflon Tory" who could get away with anything; now a raft of scandals have brought him back down to earth. His resignation earlier this month triggered a leadership election among his Conservative party colleagues in the House of Commons. After a week of ballots, just two now remain: Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. That pair of names will go to the party’s 160,000 members in constituencies across the country to decide which one will be Britain’s next prime minister. The former would be Britain’s first Asian premier; the latter its third female one.