Europe

We are all improvising now. In front of the supermarket, at 6.30 a.m., we stood at a cautious distance from one another. Then the doors opened, and men and women rushed forward as one, in a habitual desire to be first inside the shop.Normalcy ended last Wednesday. My office closed its doors, like many others, with the optimistic hope of opening them again in two weeks. I had a beer with a friend in a quiet bar as my phone buzzed with news of closures and infections. I doubted there would be another pub night soon.It is a beautiful spring in Tarnowskie Góry, in the Upper Silesia region of Poland. Of course, few of us are in a position to enjoy it. All the bars, cafés and restaurants have been closed. No mass gatherings are allowed.

‘OK, can do it, but I am ill (NOT the virus).’ With that, the interview is set: an hour on the phone with Slavoj Žižek. As I thanked Žižek for his time, he stresses, ‘Don’t expect too much. It’s not the virus, but...how do I put this, I have a lot of symptoms of the virus, but hopefully not the virus.’ ‘I've had these symptoms for years,’ he noted. ‘You know I’m sneezing all the time, and so on.’ We are meant to discuss Žižek’s upcoming book of essays, A Left That Dares to Speak Its Name, which the 70-year-old says is an easier read than the majority of the books he has written in the past five decades. But Žižek is far more eager to talk about the COVID-19 coronavirus.

For decades the United States has tried and failed to make peace in the Middle East. This week Donald Trump, succeeding where so many presidents have come unstuck, unfurled a brave vision capable of persuading enemies to turn their swords into plowshares and transforming the region. Finally, Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz are in agreement.As for the ‘deal of the century’ announced at the White House today, Trump and Netanyahu are expert practitioners of the kombina. This Israeli term describes the deal that’s really within the deal, and also the side deals within the deal that’s really within the deal. The kombina allows all parties to feel that they’ve profited. The parallels to complex real estate ventures are obvious.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Montpellier, France As the new year dawned, it was business as usual in France, with transportation paralyzed, hundreds of cars burning in the suburbs, violent demonstrations in the cities, a whiff of tear gas in the Métro, police beating protesters. Train drivers, air-traffic controllers, nurses, garbage collectors, ballet dancers, opera singers were all on strike — and so, even, were lawyers. If the country is not wholly immobilized, it’s because the French are pretty adaptable and, to be honest, some only pretend to strike. My garbage was picked up in the normal way. Making the French swallow bitter medicine is hard, even in a nation of hypochondriacs.

There’s money in misery, so the world’s corporate elite welcomes eco-catastrophist Greta Thunberg to its cult center at Davos. There’s also money in optimism, the fuel of markets and speculation — but Davos doesn’t like Donald Trump. Strange that a legendary capitalist turned deregulating politician is the odd man out on the magic mountain of money, but a socialist child who calls for overriding democracy and the forced transformation of national economies is a spiritual figurehead for the masters of moolah.The smart money at Davos is on Greta, because the risks are lower in the command economy that Greta and her drones want. The outcomes are pre-ordained, and all innovation is fixed between business and government.

Benjamin Netanyahu has made some of Israel's foreign enemies his friends, but he's finding it difficult to do the same domestically. India’s prime minister Narendra Modi visited Israel in July 2017, the first Indian representative to do so since the two countries first established a diplomatic relations in 1992. Netanyahu returned the gesture by visiting India in January 2018, when the two leaders spoke of a future together that would benefit both countries. In January 2019, Prime Minister Netanyahu re-established diplomatic relations with Chad as part of his effort to pursue diplomatic ties with African states.

After the Ukrainian crisis and the Iranian crisis, we now have the Ukrainian-Iranian crisis. For the second time in six months, Ukraine finds itself inexplicably — and inextricably — in the midst of a world-historical crisis that it had no part in crafting. As it was with Trump’s inquiries into Hunter Biden’s business activities, Kyiv is marooned politically and facing difficult and even unpalatable choices between warring opponents, neither of whom it wants to antagonize. The American airstrike that killed Qasem Soleimani had threatened to set off a conflagration which many observers — 99 percent of them never having heard of the most interesting man in the Middle East — histrionically predicted as ‘World War Three’. Blessedly, that did not happen.

One of the main reasons Labour lost the election in the UK was a well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination against Jeremy Corbyn, who was rated Top Anti-Semite of 2019 by the Wiesenthal Center (ahead of actual terrorists!). There is nothing new in this. It is a small part of the worldwide offensive whose victims include many Jews critical of Israeli politics — such as the 'propagandist for Hamas' Gideon Levy, who wrote in Haaretz on December 8: 'Laws labeling anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism and the anti-occupation movement as anti-Semitic, are passed with overwhelming majorities.

Will Boris Johnson get the majority he needs to 'get Brexit done'? Or has he followed in the footsteps of Theresa May?

Perhaps it truly will take place. Maybe it will happen.Imagine the scene. President Trump sits with his nose upturned as if a member of his entourage is suffering the effects of an enormous curry. Prime Minister Corbyn sits with a look of vague discomfort, as if he is meeting a friend's drunkenly abrasive wife. Their handshake is tense and their words are limited. (They have some common ground. As someone else — not me — suggested they are both unfriendly if not hostile towards the idea of Nato.)Afterwards, Trump says ‘Grandpa Jez’ is a ‘crazy guy’. ‘But we have to work together,’ he shrugs diplomatically. Corbyn tells the British press that he grilled the president on his sexism, racism and Islamophobia.

Prince Andrew has already lost his case in the court of public opinion. His floundering and implausible BBC interview about his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein saw to that. ‘Randy Andy’ also seems to have forfeited the confidence of his own family: after the interview was broadcast, he was summoned to Buckingham Palace and relieved of his public duties. After last night, and a second broadcast by the BBC’s investigative Panorama program, The Prince and the Epstein, it is impossible not to conclude that Andrew is an unreliable witness to his own life: on screen, Andrew’s already flimsy alibis dissolved in the acid of Panorama’s evidence and testimonies.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. What have Fidel Castro, Nicolás Maduro, Hamas and the Khomeinist regime in Iran got in common? That the US has not exactly seen eye to eye with them over past years and decades? Well, yes. But there is another thing too: Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party leader who could soon be the British prime minister, has warmly praised them all. Castro, according to Corbyn on the occasion of the former Cuban leader’s death in 2016, was a ‘champion of social justice’. Corbyn rang in to a Venezuelan TV program in 2014 to praise Maduro, who introduced him as a ‘friend of Venezuela’.

The former British chancellor of the exchequer – or finance minister – Nigel Lawson once described the National Health Service (NHS) as the closest thing the British have to a religion. For some, however, is a worse than that – less mainstream religion than messianic cult. Yesterday, Donald Trump reassured British radio listeners that in seeking to do a trade deal with Britain it is not attempting to interfere in the NHS.  Not that it made any difference. Activists for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, which will face Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in a general election on December 12, continued to make the accusation that there is some secret plot to break up the NHS and sell it off to US healthcare corporations.

For a president about to face ‘The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History’, Donald Trump sounded thoroughly unperturbed when, as presidents often do when the House votes to impeach, he turned his attention to that essential part of the top job: a long, relaxed and amiable phone interview with Nigel Farage, addressing such matters of central import to the American public as the electoral chances of Jeremy Corbyn. Trump was on comedic top form, bantering about ‘Boris’ and ‘Sleepy Joe’ and ‘Pocahontas’, and explaining to his out-of-town audience that impeachment proceedings weren’t going to proceed anywhere because the Republicans control the Senate.