Geneva

Sunday

Kim Ezra Shienbaum

Why Trump stopped calling on Iran to ‘surrender’

When Donald Trump called on Iran’s Ayatollah to “surrender” during Israel’s recent war the word struck many as jarring – almost antiquated. No major global leader has used that language publicly since the unconditional surrenders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945.But Trump’s invocation, intentional or not and soon abandoned by his call for a “ceasefire,” points to a deeper issue: Are the rules that governed mid-20th century warfare still relevant in the 21st century? Why has “surrender” disappeared from the language of modern warfare? And what, exactly, do today’s ever-growing humanitarian laws offer nation-states forced to operate under them, in a world that looks nothing like the one left smoldering in 1945?

Trump

Monday

Suzi Feay

The chameleonic life of Claire Clairmont

Commentary on the young Romantics can be curiously puritanical. Not on saintly John Keats, who died too young to cause any trouble. But Byron and Shelley? Beastly to women, negligent as parents, destructive as friends, oblivious to their own privilege. Feminist observers tend to resemble the English visitors to Geneva in 1816 who borrowed telescopes to spy on the renegade inhabitants of the Villa Diodati across the lake, hoping to be scandalized. A central character in the summer that saw the birth of Frankenstein was the only non-writer of the villa’s gathering, Byron’s young lover and Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont.

Clairmont

Monday

William Cook

In search of Sisi

From my plush bedroom in the Beau Rivage, Geneva’s most historic grand hotel, I look down on the lakeside promenade where one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century met her dark, dramatic end. On September 10, 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Austria (commonly known as Sisi) was stabbed in the chest by an Italian anarchist as she was about to board a paddle steamer to Montreux. She was carried back into the Beau Rivage and up to the suite where she’d spent the previous night. Within half an hour she was dead. Today, the hotel’s palatial Sisi Suite still looks much as she would have found it.

sisi

Thursday

Grace Curley

Do you truly believe Joe Biden is in his right mind?

Liberal journalists and politicos are obsessed with the truth. The truth, besides Donald J. Trump and Fox News, is their favorite topic. In October, former Clinton administration secretary of labor Robert Reich called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help name every person ‘whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe’. In February, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose suggested President Biden appoint a ‘reality czar’. Speaking of Biden, during a campaign stop in 2020, Joe told a crowd in Iowa that ‘we choose truth over facts’. After the speech, MSNBC informed their readers that Trump supporters were pouncing on Biden’s ‘harmless mistake’.

right mind biden

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

The Biden-Putin summit was a diplomatic nothingburger

There was a time when summit meetings between the presidents of Russia and the US were world-historical events on which the balance of world peace rested. Today — not so much. Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin didn’t even manage to fill the five hours allotted for their talks in Geneva today in large part because they simply didn’t have much to talk about. Russia today threatens no US vital interests, commands no alliances or strategic resources and remains a world power in only two areas, both inherited from the Cold War — its large nuclear arsenal and its UN Security Council veto.

biden putin