Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
This past July, Howard Chua-Eoan wrote on Bloomberg: In 1931, the Politburo ordered the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow; it was built by Czar Alexander I to commemorate Napoleon’s retreat from the city and the…
Robert Pinsky reviews a translation of Adam Zagajewski’s poetry in the NYT. Among other things, he says: The Polish pronunciation and spelling Lvov has been replaced by the Ukrainian Lviv, and behind it the linguistic and cultural echoes of Lwow…
A few years ago, I tried listening to Jordan Peterson debating Marxism with Slavoj Žižek. It soon became clear to me that Peterson was completely unprepared: he knew next to nothing about Marxism. Or, perhaps, he was deliberately playing the…
On February 12, 1942, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: If I were an Englishman I would tremble for the fate of the Empire. Taken out of context, it was a sensible call, although it didn’t take a genius to…
One of Hitler’s recurring tropes was the German empire’s and nation’s “remorseless struggle for existence.” Nazi officials beat that horse to death, and then some: There can be no compromise in Germany’s struggle for its existence, no turning back, no…
Tariq Aziz was Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister in 1983-91 and deputy prime minister in 1979-2003. In 1996, PBS interviewed Aziz for their Frontline series; the transcripts are available here and here. Speaking of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in August 1990,…
Orwell’s 1984 begins comically: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. “Oh the horror of the continental (Papist) 24-hour clock! Anything but that!” sneered John Dolan. Good enough, but there’s also the obvious…
The BBC’s Russian service reported on Monday (the translation is my own): The prosecution in the MH17 crash case has claimed that at least two Buk missile launchers were dispatched from Russia to Ukraine in 2014 but one of them…
Mateusz Mazzini argues in Foreign Policy: The revisionist politics of the current Polish government plays right into Moscow’s hands. A rejection of multilateralism, strife with the EU, and growing antagonism with neighbors, notably Germany and Ukraine—all these features of Polish…
In the previous post, I suggested that a criminal trial in the Netherlands, and by analogy in other inquisitorial systems, could be regarded as a critical discussion of key documents in the pre-trial dossier, with both the defense and, ideally,…
Jakob Hanke reports from Ukraine: Ukraine’s President-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy has rejected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to give passports to Ukrainians, instead saying Russians could gain Ukrainian passports. Last week, Putin made residents of the breakaway “republics” in the east…
In 2014 and 2016, I wrote several posts about Novorossiya (or Novorossia, or simply New Russia) as a historical term denoting certain areas to the north, northeast, and east of the Black Sea, as opposed to a latter-day political label. There…