Europe

Dr Johnson, who was right about so many things, was certainly correct about London: when a man is tired of London, he said, he is tired of life. I have been in that great metropolis for the last few days and I am once again impressed by the truth of Johnson’s declaration. Not for the first time, however, I find myself asking myself why I am so impressed. Plenty of other cities have conspicuous charms. Paris, for example, is in many ways more beautiful and picturesque than London, more patently sensual, not to say sybaritic. New York is more virile and commanding. But London, for a Yankee like me, exercises a special fascination. One of these days I will sit down and try to plumb the lineaments of that fascination.

No one wants to hear a lecture on ‘liberty and democracy’ from a finance guy turned technocrat. Especially not at a service commemorating the dead of the D-Day landings. In the last 30 years, finance guys and technocrats have enriched themselves at the voters’ expense, abused the notion of economic liberty, and wrecked social contracts across the West. Thank you for your service, as the voters never say. The 75th anniversary of D-Day should be a time for remembering the true meaning of freedom and democracy — and for honoring the thousands of young men who died in foreign fields so that we might inherit those privileges. Instead, we got Emmanuel Macron’s side-eyed hectoring of Donald Trump at Thursday’s memorial service.

Perfectly nice man normally, Sadiq Khan, mayor of London. Ambitious as Lucifer, obviously, but unpompous and cheerful in his manner, which is always good. But on Trump, he’s lost it, hasn’t he? Yesterday he was complaining about Trump and other far-right leaders ‘using the same divisive tropes of fascists of the 20th century’. You don’t use the f-word lightly if you’re grown up. And you hesitate, if you’ve got any sense, before using it about a US president who’s here to commemorate the contribution of US forces to the D-Day landings. Trump was wholly unfazed by the observations. In a tweet, he replied: ‘He is a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me...

Polite British eurosceptics still insist that Brexit isn’t Trump and Trump isn’t Brexit — as if that meant anything at all. Many of us Britons like to think that our populist revolt is a more civilized affair than the one happening across the Atlantic. As London prepares to welcome President Trump next week, it may be time for the British to admit that we have been deluding ourselves. The truth is that Trump is the sun to the Brexit moon. Some mysterious cosmic magnetism always seems to pull them together. Nigel Farage might call it destiny. Look at recent history. On June 24, 2016, the day after the EU referendum, Donald Trump arrived by helicopter at Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland.

Since becoming leader six years ago Matteo Salvini — Il Capitano as they call him — has transformed the radical-right Lega from small regional separatist party into the largest party in Italy. After last week’s European elections, the Lega is now also the second largest national party in the European Parliament. Its 28 seats place it level with Angela Merkel’s CDU, and just behind the 29 seats of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. The European Parliament election results confirm Salvini as the undisputed leader of Europe’s populists. Their insurrection is determined to unseat the EU ancien régime. Its latest champion, French president Emmanuel Macron, is ever less convincing and popular in France and elsewhere in Europe.

The politics professor Matthew Goodwin made an interesting comment on Twitter earlier this week. He pointed out that many of the elements of the ‘paranoid style’ in politics – a phrase coined by Richard Hofstadter in a famous essay to describe right-wing populist movements – are now as common on the Left as they are on the Right. Goodwin mentioned ‘Remainia’ as being particularly susceptible to the paranoid style, which is characterized by ‘heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy’, according to Hofstadter. That struck me as an astute observation and I’ve tried to flesh out the idea in my Spectator column today.

Game of Thrones fans watched in horror on Sunday as Cersei Lannister invited the citizens of King’s Landing into the Red Keep, ostensibly to shelter from an impending attack. But Cersei’s invitation was not benign. It reflected a simple but horrifying strategy: to use her subjects, innocent civilians, as human shields. To get to Cersei, her enemies would first have to maim and kill thousands of innocents. How should rational, moral actors respond to this kind of terror? How should soldiers fight honorably against opponents who care little about the lives of their subjects? These questions may thrill GoT fans, but they are not solely the purview of fiction.

‘Who remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Hitler asked in August 1939. Raphael Lemkin did. In 1944, Lemkin, a Polish-born Jew, published the theory of ‘genocide’. Lemkin’s models were the ongoing genocide of Europe’s Jews, and the Meds Yeghern, the ‘Great Calamity’ of 1915-16: the systematic murder of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turkish state and its local helpers. Today, on the 104th anniversary of the beginning of the genocide, we should remember the Armenians — and not forget the disgraceful denial of the genocide by the modern Turkish state. In 1915, some two million Armenians lived in Ottoman Turkey, three-quarters of them in six provinces of eastern Anatolia, on the borders of Russia and Persia. By 1918, 90 percent were gone.

Times of crisis call for great leadership. Tragedy struck today in Paris when the 856-year-old Notre-Dame Cathedral caught fire. As Cockburn writes, the spire has just fallen. The premiers of France’s allies have been quick to offer words of condolence. ‘My thoughts are with the people of France tonight and with the emergency services who are fighting the terrible blaze at Notre-Dame cathedral,’ tweeted British Prime Minister Theresa May. ‘Shocking pictures from Paris. A landmark, World Heritage site and one of the most beautiful buildings in French history, Notre-Dame is on fire. We hope no one is hurt. Our thoughts are in Paris,’ wrote Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I genuinely believe we should forgive the poor and uneducated working-class who voted Leave, along with the rednecks who voted for Trump in the US. I have spoken to many Leave voters over the past few days and every single one of them regrets voting to Leave the EU. Most of them broke down in tears, telling me that they were lied to and that they did not understand what they were voting for. I felt such pity towards them.

Pavlos Eleftheriadis is as Anglophilic a Greek as they come. His wife and children are British, and he is a professor of public law at Oxford. But the prospect of Brexit has altered Eleftheriadis’s view of Britain. ‘Psychologically, it’s difficult to accept that half of the society you live in is against the presence of Europeans,’ he says. ‘This came out very strongly, including from the prime minister herself. She said we have to stop the free movement of workers from Europe. It’s her primary objective. This wounds you. You wonder why they say this and what led them to it.’ Eleftheriadis says that he’s never seen a hint of racism or prejudice in professional life. But he’s hedging against the attitudes of the next generation.

Why is the Christchurch far-right terrorist obsessed with the crazy-haired Serb that the UN just sentenced to life in prison? How Balkan war criminals became idols to Western extremists is a bizarre story that shouldn’t be real, but is. Twenty years ago this week, NATO decided to take Kosovo away from Serbia. The Rambouillet Agreement of March 18, 1999, named for the château outside Paris where negotiations failed to resolve that Balkan crisis without wider war, set the stage for an independent Kosovo under NATO administration and protection. Five days after US, British, and Albanian delegations signed the Rambouillet Agreement – Serbian and Russian delegations refused to sign – NATO bombs started to fall on Serbia, and they kept falling for 78 days.

As Americans will recall, escaping the arbitrary power of an empire can take years. Now imagine doing it with the French being actively obstructive, George Washington committed to paying the taxation and doing without the representation for a period to be determined by George III, and Washington, having lost the support of his closest advisors, now asking Lord North for help. This is pretty much where Theresa May’s government finds itself after this week’s double defeat in the House of Commons. These are only the latest in an apparently endless sequence of humiliations. There are more to come, but no one knows where they will come from, or when. Frankly, it’s humiliating to have to explain how we got here from the 2016 referendum. But here we are.

Today was supposed to be the big, final day in court for Paul John Manafort Jr., the once-flamboyant political maven and ostrich jacket-wearer turned convicted felon. For decades a controversial character in our nation’s capital, Manafort capped his career in politics as campaign manager for Donald J. Trump from March to August of 2016, the pivotal period when MAGA exploded and Trump seized the GOP’s nomination against the hopes and expectations of Republican elites. The rest, we know. That capstone would prove to be Manafort’s downfall. It’s not like there weren’t portents of a grim ending ahead. Nobody had recently considered Manafort to be any sort of Republican A-lister. His last major campaign before Trump’s was Sen.

Late last night, there was a sense of optimism among British government ministers that Theresa May’s revised deal might have a chance of passing. But those hopes were crushed this morning by Attorney General Geoffrey Cox’s blunt legal advice. With Cox declaring that the legal risk was unchanged, the Democratic Unionist Party were never going to back the deal. That in turn meant the bulk of the Brexiteers in the European Research Group wouldn’t either. In the end, the withdrawal agreement went down by 149 votes — at the worst end of expectations. ‘I profoundly regret the decision that this House has taken tonight,’ May said upon defeat.

Cockburn is back in the Old Country this week, feeling Meghan Markle’s bump, smoking heroin with top soccer players, and making preparations for Brexit, because Britain will leave the EU at the end of March, unless the dimwit government of Theresa May devises some futile means of extending negotiations that everyone knows will go nowhere. He knew what to expect in London. When Cockburn got on the plane he read America’s best newspaper, the only truthful paper in this time of universal deceit. He also read the New York Times. The Times usually supports democracy in backward and violent states, but it hates Brexit. No news is too fake for the Times to print when it comes to Brexit.