Clik here to view.
Confessions
Reading Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History, I was struck by her formulation of a question that I had wondered about myself, and never seen explicitly stated: Why the Soviet secret police were so...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Return of the Ampelmännchen
I’m in Berlin now, for the first time in ten years. I lived here for much of the 1990s, and much has changed since then. But the change that I found most striking is in the Ampelmännchen, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is it better if they spy accurately?
There’s a fascinating article in the Guardian about how Berlin has become a centre for “digital exiles”, people — mainly Americans — whose online activism has put them in the crosshairs of various...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What would they do with the data?
The Conservatives and the security services are ramping up the propaganda for the digital panopticon, now particularly pressuring US-based social network companies to give up their quaint ideas of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding
US Republican-libertarian senator and unofficial presidential candidate Rand Paul has been castigated by true-blue Zionists for insufficient vigour in applauding Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent address to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Correspondence bias and communism
Reading Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx was Right I was struck by this relatively banal observation: In its brief but bloody career, Marxism has involved a hideous amount of violence. Both Stalin and Mao...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Harrod’s massacre of the innocents
Herod the Great: Ancient Judaean tyrant and department store magnate From today’s Guardian: Harrods limits Christmas grotto to £2,000-plus spenders I think it’s fair to say that there is nothing that...
View ArticleCapitalist omelettes
Communists are routinely stigmatised by association with the adage “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs”, which is taken to summarise their willingness to excuse present cruelty in...
View ArticleStrained historical comparisons: Holodomor edition
EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen today condemned Russia, comparing its actions to Stalin’s brutal engineered famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, and promising to take action to… export...
View Article
