World

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.