Europe

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.

In December 2019, I arrived in Berlin by train. I was just married and on honeymoon. The most precious item in my luggage was my Interrail ticket. My husband and I hoped to visit as much of the Continent as we could in three weeks. We did not know that soon such a trip would be impossible, thanks to the infamous virus from China. We were keen to see what remained of the Berlin Wall. One of the longest still standing parts is on Niederkirchnerstrasse, next to the site of the former headquarters of the SS and the Gestapo, now home to the Topography of Terror, an indoor and outdoor museum dedicated to the Nazi era.

It’s been a beast of a year, hasn’t it? Yesterday morning my father-in-law died of COVID in Pristina, and it’s only when it comes right home to you that you’re reminded how real and immediate the threat from that spiteful little virus is.The reason I’m writing about this personal loss is that I worry that the whole COVID situation has been politicized, even while the vaccine is finally coming into play.As lots of people have already observed, it’s turned into a left-right issue, with many liberals wanting to close things down and many conservatives wanting to allow the economy to function relatively normally, on the basis that lost livelihoods matter as well as lost lives.Fair enough.

It has become a received wisdom in recent months that the US has failed where the EU had succeeded. On June 22, for example, CNN viewers were shown a graph of COVID cases in the US, which had seemed to flatten at around 25,000 cases a day, compared with those in the EU which had fallen away from an April peak to fewer than 5,000 cases a day. ‘Look at the EU,’ viewers were told. ‘That’s where we should be.’ Roll on four months, however, and it is looking a little different. While cases in the US fell away, then returned in what is beginning to look like a bit of a third wave, Europe has been consumed in a rapidly-growing second wave.

Middlesbrough, United Kingdom Gareth Southgate, the unctuous, horse-faced manager of the England soccer team, insisted that his players take the knee before their game against Denmark in the Nations League last month. They were at it before the match against Iceland, too, and the Icelanders joined in, bless them, despite the fact that there is only one black person in all of Iceland and he probably ended up there by mistake. It was important, Southgate ventured, to show support for Black Lives Matter. And so down they all went, as Portland burned and the looters, bullies, thugs and professional agitators ran amok across the US.

An obscure Mediterranean flashpoint may soon come to a crisis; that would be the minuscule and remote Greek island of Kastellorizo (or Megisti; Meis in Turkish). Like many other Greek islands, it lies much closer to the Turkish than the Greek mainland (1 mile vs. 357 miles). Unlike other small Greek islands, its location between Rhodes and Cyprus bestows outsized military and economic importance on it.Were Kastellorizo, with a population of under 500, to enjoy the full rights bestowed on it by the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Greece can claim a 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) that leaves Turkey with a cramped EEZ along its shores; take away Kastellorizo and the Turkish EEZ more than doubles in size.

Juan Carlos, ex-King of Spain, behaved foolishly in relation to money and sex, and so his decision to leave Spain is sad, but justified. That seems to be the view of most moderate people outside Spain who are not ill-disposed to the monarchy. But is it right? Certainly Juan Carlos’s foolishness was real, but his imposed exile (it is not really voluntary) to the Dominican Republic is not a punishment for a crime: there has never been any legal process. It is a partisan political act which is bad for the unity of Spain. Juan Carlos’s exile was forced on the current King, his son Felipe VI, by a weak prime minister, the Socialist Pedro Sanchez.