Europe

Cockburn slummed it on Friday night at an elegantly appointed penthouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan. The host was Martin Peretz, a singularly influential intellectual entrepreneur for decades, notably as the publisher of the New Republic when it was worth reading. Peretz threw the party to celebrate the publication of From Odessa With Love, a new collection of political and literary essays by Vladislav Davidzon. A European cultural critic for Tablet, Davidzon, who moved to Ukraine in 2015 to found the Odessa Review, was in his element as Peretz’s protégé. Like Oscar Wilde’s, Davidzon’s credo appears to be that you can never be too overdressed or overeducated.

Is Prince Andrew a walking advertisement for republicanism? The Grand Old Duke of York is like a gift that keeps on giving, if the gift itself was an especially obnoxious one that nobody particularly wanted. Fresh from the recent revelations that his alleged sexual assault on Virginia Roberts Giuffre has led to her filing a civil case against him in New York, his name continues to be mud on both sides of the Atlantic. With everyone, that is, except his mother. It has repeatedly, and increasingly mystifyingly, been said that Prince Andrew is the Queen’s favorite child. Many would find it hard to comprehend why she continues to support him so publicly. Yet, despite everything, he has not lost her favor.

Uncles have always had a bad press when it comes to princes: ambitious, venal or lecherous, and sometimes all three. That is how Prince Harry must now be regarding his very own embarrassing uncle, Prince Andrew, as the latest round of scandalous allegations about his behavior emerge, thanks to Virginia Roberts Giuffre suing him in Manhattan federal court for historic sexual assault. The claims about Andrew’s behavior have been in the public domain for some time, but Giuffre’s court action, which was filed in New York on Monday, is a 15-page suit that explicitly states that ‘In this country no person, whether president or prince, is above the law, and no person, no matter how powerless or vulnerable, can be deprived of the law’s protection.

Budapest Even supporters of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán acknowledge privately that the Pegasus scandal is a hard blow to the embattled leader. Last month’s news that government spies had employed Israeli software to commandeer the smartphones of journalists, activists and government opponents confirmed the worst authoritarian stereotypes of Orbán, who will be running for his fourth consecutive term in 2022. These allegations, if true — and many Orbán backers with whom I spoke assume that they are — will likely displace what was Orbán’s greatest liability heading into next year’s vote: that he and his Fidesz party oversee a vast web of public corruption.

A few years ago, in my capacity as editor of the National Interest, I sent out a sonorous query to a variety of contributors asking them to comment for a forum on the direction of American foreign policy now that the Cold War was over. I promptly received a tart reply from Ferdinand Mount: 'Almost every word of the National Interest’s question could itself be questioned: has the Cold War ever definitively ended? Vladimir Putin doesn’t seem to think so.’ How right he was! His words came back to me last night with particular force when I attended an event on behalf of Belarusian democratic opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya last night, co-sponsored by the Lithuanian embassy and the Atlantic Council.

Wake up, everyone! Democracy is in peril again. Blasting across Cockburn’s email feed recently was a new piece from Yasmeen Serhan for the Atlantic, titled 'The Autocrat’s Legacy.’ The piece is about the unfathomable wickedness of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. He’s the autocrat. Orbán doesn’t stick his opponents in jail or ban political parties or rig the votes in elections. He’s a much deadlier kind of authoritarian: the kind who wins elections but believes wrong things. Orbán has been the dominant political force in Hungary since 2010, when his Fidesz party dominated elections so thoroughly that they achieved a supermajority capable of passing a new constitution (which they did; replacing Hungary’s Communist-era document). Whoops, that’s 'supermajority’.

The biggest homeless charity in the UK appears to be teaching its staff that white people who live on the street need to check their privilege because they benefit from white supremacy. This is the latest Wokeyleak from a source inside Shelter, which manages some £70 million ($96.3 million) in donations a year. The charity subjected employees to over 12 hours of excruciatingly woke Zoom tutorials on such edifying topics as ‘Mitigating Whiteness at Work’. Extracurricular reading included courses on ‘Learning How To Apologise’. Some of Shelter’s diverse staff objected to this controversial critical race theory training but were told that participation was ‘not optional’. Every single one of Shelter’s executive team, incidentally, is white.

‘Never complain, never explain,’ the Cockburns say. Our family friend Prince Harry has a different motto: carry on moaning and show me the money. Perhaps this time the Prince of Wails has good reason to be crying on the couch. A formal report has found the BBC guilty of deceitful and dishonest behavior in securing its infamous 1995 interview with Princess Diana. There were stinging reactions from Princes William and Harry yesterday, and questions in the UK about whether the BBC, a state-funded broadcaster deserves public funding. Cockburn is an old polo chum of Prince Charles and wonders whether this could finally be the spur for the estranged princes to reunite?  After all, the mood in Buckingham Palace is one of vindication.

A man can cry in public. What can I say, I was raised in a Western-European feminist household in the 1970s. But as a middle-aged guy I did feel deeply uncomfortable the other day with my abundant display of tears. It happened at Schiphol Airport in Holland, holding on tightly to my mother before saying goodbye. She was sobbing just as hard. After the long era of separation we all experienced, I had decided to fly from Los Angeles to Amsterdam on my Dutch passport. Armed with documents proving two Moderna shots and a negative COVID test I felt completely safe to make the trip. The plan was to grab my parents, who are also vaccinated, then fly them home to LA using my American passport. Given their ages and health issues, they would need some help during the trip.

As there’s nothing more annoying than when someone tells you ‘I told you so’, I shall refrain from telling you so for as long as possible. But it will be hard. There I was, lying on the couch one afternoon at work and reading Twitter, when I noticed LitHub appearing in my feed. Now, I am usually as glad to see LitHub in my feed as a prize race horse is to see cat food in his. LitHub is one of those trendy, sort-of academic websites that talks about things like ‘digital humanities’ and does its earnest best to take the fun out of reading and the point out of book-reviewing when, as any-one knows, reading and writing book reviews is a waste of time unless there’s blood and feathers everywhere by the end of the first paragraph.

One crisis can conceal another. While France has been distracted by COVID, a new menace is lurking. The specter haunting the republic is le Wokisme, the mutating ideology of race and identity that has found unexpectedly fertile ground here. French elites are unsettled. Those who assumed the French possessed herd immunity against such barbaric American ideas are having their complacency tested. Superficially a modern country, with iPhones, Amazon and electric cars, France is still often introspective and late to understand what’s happening in the wider — especially Anglophone — world, which is how wokeness has somewhat taken it by surprise. Woke had been happening in America for many years before the French noticed.

Russia is massing tanks and troops on the Ukrainian border. Inevitably, we are about to hear many ‘Putin is Hitler’ media stories. What will go unsaid is that the seven-year crisis in the Ukraine was largely an American creation, due to the US’s congenital meddling and interventionism in nations with little strategic importance to the United States. There is great irony in Biden administration officials trying to get ahead of a potential crisis that was largely caused by Biden’s nominee for undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland. The potential area of conflict is Ukraine’s Donbass region, the eastern-most portion of Ukraine where most people speak Russian as their first language.

Americans might be unaware, but a great deal of right-leaning discourse in Europe holds the United States responsible for the outbreak or inflammation of their culture wars. In France, Emmanuel Macron has spoken disparagingly of 'certain social science theories imported entirely from the US' which are 'based on a different history, which is not ours’. His education minister was more explicit, castigating an 'intellectual matrix coming from American universities...which wants to essentialize communities and identities’. In the UK, meanwhile, in a column mischievously titled 'It’s All America’s Fault’, the English commentator Ed West blamed the US for the spread of 'social justice’ trends across Britain.

Last night, Bristol’s city center erupted in violence as far-left rioters smashed up the police station, assaulted police — breaking some officers’ bones — and set vehicles on fire. The scenes of violence and arson were familiar to me. It looked like any night out of Portland, Oregon, where I’m from. Since May 2020, Black Lives Matter-antifa rioters have regularly carried out similar organized acts of carnage targeting courthouses and police stations. [caption id="attachment_23906" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Several police vehicles were destroyed in Bristol (Ben Crocket)[/caption] Some of the rioters in Bristol last night were dressed in black bloc as they set dumpsters on fire to block streets and used barricades as battering rams to attack police.

A regular column by an anonymous whistleblower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news-leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. Eat your heart out Edward Snowden — Wokeyleaks has a mole inside the British security establishment. It turns out that the people whose job it is to protect the UK are spending most of their time protecting employees from ‘harmful language’.

Isn’t it nice to think about someone else’s problems for a change?  I think this must be the experience of the millions of Americans who tuned into Oprah’s exclusive interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan, earlier tonight. Our politics are dysfunctional, sure, but have you heard about the British royal family, who in addition to a long history of presiding over murderous colonial regimes, are also not very nice?  Of course, there’s no reason that any American should care about the wife of a rich guy who’s sixth in line to an entirely symbolic office in a faraway country. Even if the British sovereign made meaningful policy decisions, Prince Harry is in no danger of becoming king.

An open letter signed by major Irish NGOs — including Amnesty International (AI) and the National Women’s Council (NWC) has called for the removal of media and political representation for women who won’t capitulate to the demands of extreme trans activists. ‘We call on media, and politicians to no longer provide legitimate representation for those that share bigoted beliefs, that are aligned with far right ideologies and seek nothing but harm and division,’ reads the letter. ‘These fringe internet accounts stand against affirmative medical care of transgender people, and they stand against the right to self-identification of transgender people in this country... they stand against trans, women’s and gay rights by aligning themselves with far-right tropes and stances.

The challenge of integrating immigrants from the non-western world is not new to Europe. But a large influx of new migrants over the last decade, and a significant increase in harassment and sexual assault against women across multiple European countries, make it one that Europe can no longer avoid addressing. This story has its origins in the decades of economic recovery after World War Two, when many European countries faced a growing worker shortage for industry work. ‘Guest worker’ programs were created, notably in Germany, on the assumption that such workers would return home. But many workers preferred to stay in Europe and pursued family reunification. Jobs and welfare entitlements made Germany preferable to Turkey, France preferable to Algeria.