Like Atlas, the U.S. must now either take the world upon its shoulders alone or drop the ball. I say let's drop the ball on most issues.

Anne Applebaum, who writes for Slate and The Washington Post, has just published an excellent column where she persuasively argues that “no one wants America to be the sole global superpower, but no one wants to share the load.”

She uses Obama’s recent trip to China and Europe’s election of a new president and foreign minister as her primary evidence that no one really wants to engage the major foreign policy issues the Obama administration cares about. In China’s case, Applebaum writes that Chinese officials claim they are still a “developing country” that needs time before partnering on foreign policy issues with the U.S such as the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and North Korea and Iran’s nuclear weapon ambitions.

Europe’s case is a little more puzzling from a psychological and practical standpoint. As far as I know it didn’t really make big news, but they finally ratified the Lisbon Treaty several weeks ago. This important treaty swiftly permitted countries in the European Union to elect a president and foreign minister to more effectively represent Europe’s unified interests on a global stage. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was under some consideration for the job, but it seems that the other countries felt he would overshadow their presence. Here’s Applebaum’s full explanation:

the leaders of Europe were locked into proverbial smoke-filled rooms (nowadays empty of smoke) arguing over who should be granted the new job of “president” of the European Union and who should become Europe’s new “high representative,” or foreign minister. These talks represented the culmination of a decade’s worth of diplomacy, debate, and national referendums, all designed to produce a more united European foreign policy and to give Europe a single phone number that Obama can call when he wants to chat. The result: The president of Europe will be Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, a politician unknown outside his own country. The foreign minister of Europe will be British official Catherine Ashton, a bureaucrat unknown even inside her own country. Candidates of far greater experience and influence—including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt—were rejected, apparently for fear they would have more experience and influence than the powers that be. Germany’s Der Spiegel heralded this news with the headline “Europe Chooses Nobodies.”

Translation: Europe might have a new phone number, but when Obama calls, the person on the other end of the line will still be unable to act. “Europe” will not be a unified entity capable of coordinating a unified policy in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East, or anywhere else anytime soon. Europe cannot, in short, become America’s full partner in foreign policy.

I agree with Applebaum that it was a stupid decision on Europe’s part to not choose a politician with more star power. As shallow as that sounds, I actually think it’s an important element to effective leadership.

Applebaum wrote her most recent column so clearly that it doesn’t make sense for me to try to paraphrase her concluding thoughts. So here’s whate she wrote:

And thus we are left with a curious situation: America no longer wants to be the sole superpower. The American president no longer wants to be the leader of a sole superpower. Nobody else wants America to be the sole superpower, and, in fact, America cannot even afford to be the sole superpower. Yet America has no obvious partner with which to share its superpowerdom, and if America were to cease being a superpower, nothing and no one would take its place…

This does mean that the Obama administration has a problem, however: Having come to office promising to work with allies, it may soon discover that there are no allies with which to work. Europe is still our best hope, because Europeans share most of our values. But organizing sanctions with a divided Europe—never mind a military operation—will continue to be a major chore. China, meanwhile, is acquiring vast foreign interests, trading in Africa and South America as well as Asia, and maintaining a vast army. But China appears uninterested in joining an international campaign against terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or anything else.

Global military and security thus look set to remain in the hands of the United States, whether the United States wants it or not. Halfway through his presidency, George W. Bush found he had to drop unilateralism in favor of diplomacy. Now one wonders: At some point in his presidency, will Obama find he has to drop diplomacy in favor of unilateralism?

I think Applebaum’s conclusion is right on– the choice falls squarely on the United States as to making any global actions. The question I think is whether or not we should.

I’m starting to think that with the exception of taking a much, much needed leadership role on global climate change, the U.S. and the Obama administration would be far better off taking a backseat on foreign policy for the time being.

People are tired of the U.S. and its ideas about what is best for the world, especially as we struggle to change the infrastructure of our own country. What to do about health care in the U.S. is not entirely clear to me, but the political realities suggest that whatever action the U.S. government takes to improve the system is going to be fairly minor. The Obama administration has also played softball with the banking industry, and they are truly the robber barons of modern day.

In other words, President Obama has really taken the backseat on most major domestic issues since becoming president, and I am starting to agree with Ariana Huffington when she recently wondered what candidate Obama would think of President of Obama. The audacity of hope has instead become “the timidity of governing” she argued. If only Obama would realize this and instead focus on the old saying of “let’s solve problems at home first, before policing the world.”

That being said, I do think the U.S. can engage the rest of the world in new ways that aren’t necessarily all related to military strength and economic might. Focusing on education, clean energy, and the environment can all be positive ways to engage the rest of the world while not being so demanding and forceful. Who knows, it might even help the U.S. to get the Olympics again (I say this partially joking as I think Brazil was an excellent choice for the Olympics).

What do you think? Are the days of world superpowers over for now?

Image courtesy of lightmatter on Flickr under a Creative Commons license

At a recent lunch with three CEOs, I asked them to tell what they thought about NATO. None of them could understand why NATO was still around. Only one of them knew NATO was deployed in Afghanistan. The CEOs ranged in age from the mid-thirties to the mid-fifties and were as well informed about current events as anyone in America. I’ve been asking my NATO question ad naseum at every opportunity I get. The results are very revealing of the gap between the “experts” and DC professionals on the one hand and the rest of the populace on the other.  I also believe there is a clear generational divide on NATO’s future. Witness these two opinions. One by Senator Lugar, a hugely respected voice in the foreign policy establishment, and the other by Anne Applebaum, Washington Post’s provocative columnist.

Sen. Lugar (from a speech at the Atlantic Council, Washington DC, September 28, 2009):

“The provision of security assurance within Europe has been a central challenge to American foreign policy since 1917. Our continued commitment to NATO does not come without costs, but remains the most promising vehicle for projecting stability throughout Europe and its political fault lines with Asia and the Middle East.  . .”         [Read Full Transcript]    Note: Emphasis in bold are in the original transcript.

Ms. Anne Applebaum: The Slowly vanishing NATO (Op-Ed , Washington Post, October 20, 2009)

“…NATO, though fighting its first war since its foundation, inspires nobody. The members of NATO feel no allegiance to the alliance, or to one another. On its home continent, NATO does precious little military contingency planning, preferring to hold summits…None of this might matter much in Afghanistan, since the outcome of current deliberations may well be some version of the status quo. But the next time NATO is needed, I doubt whether it will be there at all…]   [Read Full Column]

Journalist. Historian. Champion of human rights. But one with curiously little regard for professional ethics, facts or morals. Clearly the responsibility with which she has been charged is too much to ask of her. The humane thing would be to relieve her of this burden.

I did not exactly need another reason to dislike the journalistic hacktastrophe that is Ms. Applebaum’s Washington Post column. Oh, no. No, what I need – and I am being serious here – is for Anne to write something really insightful, responsible, constructive, for her to put me in my place, so that I could humbly bow to her wisdom and walk away. Inspired. Filled with grace and knowledge. Because appreciating people is much more rewarding than resenting them. And I sooo did not want to be the 10 millionth person to write about Roman Polanski. Or the millionth person to write about Ms. Applebaum’s latest stunt. Stunts. It was just one when I started this. Christ. Anyway, I am calling on the consumers of American media to institute an informal “3 strikes and you’re out” rule regarding the conduct of members of our Fourth Estate. Let’s start with Anne.

Strike 1.

From “The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski.” By Anne Applebaum, September 27, 2009:

“Of all nations, why was it Switzerland — the country that traditionally guarded the secret bank accounts of international criminals and corrupt dictators — that finally decided to arrest Roman Polanski? There must be some deeper story here, because by any reckoning the decision was bizarre — though not nearly as bizarre as the fact that a U.S. judge wants to keep pursuing this case after so many decades.”

While I like to engage in gratuitous Swiss-bashing myself, it is a joy not to be underestimated, I must question how arresting a man who plead guilty to raping a young girl qualifies as “bizarre” while drugging and sodomizing a young girl and then spending decades on the lam does not.

“Here are some of the facts: Polanski’s crime — statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl — was committed in 1977. The girl, now 45, has said more than once that she forgives him, that she can live with the memory, that she does not want him to be put back in court or in jail, and that a new trial will hurt her husband and children.”

Most rape victims don’t even want to report the crime, let alone go through the trauma and stress of a trial.

Huh. I can’t imagine why…

“He did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers’ fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.”

Having to avoid the Oscars because you are on the run from the law for raping a 13 yr old is not an appropriate sentence! And criminals don’t get to choose their sentences.

“He can be blamed, it is true, for his original, panicky decision to flee.”

But not for the rape? Ooooookay.

“Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto, and later emigrated from communist Poland. His pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by the followers of Charles Manson, though for a time Polanski himself was a suspect.”

I see why we should try to understand the motivation for his actions. I bet those people who did those terrible things to him and his family had fucked up childhoods and trauma in their lives too. That’s why people refer to the “cycle of violence.” But trauma never excuses harming a 3rd party. I have a heart. Perhaps a case for leniency can be made. But not a case for being above the law.

“To put him on trial or keep him in jail does not serve society in general or his victim in particular. Nor does it prove the doggedness and earnestness of the American legal system. If he weren’t famous, I bet no one would bother with him at all.”

Oh, Anne! Sit down and listen to what you are saying. He is a rapist by his own admission. Rape is a crime. He may be many other things, all of them admirable, but these are the facts. And allowing rapists to literally choose to opt out of the legal system does not serve society in general or his victim in particular. Nor does it prove the doggedness and earnestness of the American legal system. Moreover, it undermines the rule of law which, however faulty, is in place to protect the rights of citizens to not be raped and to ensure that those who do rape will understand that this is behavior unacceptable in any society which claims to recognize the inalienable rights of its citizens. What happened to Anne Applebaum the human rights defender? Is drugging and fucking a 13 year old and then skipping town a human right now?

Is the freedom from rape NOT a human right?

Many people have asked, in response the celebrity defense of Mr. Polanski, would they be defending him if he were a Catholic priest or Republican Senator? Since we’re talking about Anne, I wonder, would she think an arrest were “outrageous” if it were, oh, say, Vladimir Putin who had raped and drugged a 13 year old? I can already hear her response, “Well he probably has! He’s already stolen my wallet!” No, my question is, would you defend him? Right. That’s what I thought.

I wish this were all there were to the episode. Anne being crazy. Heck. On it’s own, it may even signal an evolution. She’s gone from pretending to care about innocent victims to just coming clean and admitting that, no, actually that’s bs, she doesn’t really care. Score one for authenticity. Plus, if you couldn’t use the newspapers to advocate for the subversion of the rule of law, hey, it wouldn’t be America. But don’t think I am blogging about it every time this woman gets something wrong. I have a life ya know.

It’s one thing to advocate for a rapist. Another to violate your professional ethics.

Strike 2.

Anne Applebaum is married to Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski who is lobbying for the charges against Polanski to be dropped.

Now, there is nothing unacceptable about this fact. It is understandable that she might share the same opinion as her spouse. What is unacceptable is her omission of his role in the story. It’s called full disclosure. And that someone of the professional stature Ms. Applebaum has acquired would forget to mention such an obvious potential conflict of interest is incredible.

When readers had the audacity to point out this oversight, she responded:

“For the record, I will note that I mentioned my husband’s job in a column as recently as last week, and that when he first entered the Polish government three years ago I wrote a column about that too. I have to assume that the bloggers who have leapt upon this as some kind of secret revelation are simply unfamiliar with my writing. However, I will also note that at the time I wrote the blog item, I had no idea that the Polish government would or could lobby for Polanski’s release, as I am in Budapest and my husband is in Africa.”

Having mentioned your marriage in previous columns is no substitute for disclosure. Blaming readers who are unfamiliar with your marriage is no substitute for disclosure. And frankly this is beside the point, which is not that Anne is married to Sikorski, but that her spouse is using his position as Foreign Minister to exonerate the someone whose legal case she is using her platform in the Washington Post to discredit. In her defense, she claims that she was not aware of this at the time.

The time stamp on the column in question is September 27, 2009; 3:13 PM ET.

The following is from a round up of Polanski news which appeared on Monsters and Critics at Sep 27, 2009, 16:55 GMT:

“In Polanski’s native Poland, President Lech Kaczynski and Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said they would appeal to US authorities to drop proceedings against Polanski.

The PAP news agency said Sikorski was considering a direct appeal to US President Barack Obama to end ‘once and for all’ the proceedings against the filmmaker.

Poland’s film directors’ institute had earlier issued an appeal to Kaczynski and Sikorski to intercede with Swiss authorities.

‘This is a scandalous situation and incomprehensible over- zealousness,’ institute head Jacek Bromski was quoted as saying by Poland’s PAP news agency.”

This doesn’t prove that she was in fact aware of the conflict of interest. It does prove that she should have been.

[Update]: This is what I get for trying to think the best of people… Obviously she knew about her husband’s involvement.

Strike 3.

Ok, so she might have just come forward and said, “You know what, you’re right. I misjudged x,y & z and submit the following corrections…” Had she done so, the first Google hit for Anne Applebaum today might not have been, Anne Applebaum, Child Rape Apologist?‎, which can’t be fun for her friends and family. Make mistakes, admit them, move on. Unless you are Anne Applebaum, in which case you just. keep. digging.

From “Reaction to Roman Polanski.” By Anne Applebaum, September 29, 2009:

(Actually I think these readers were reacting to her, not Polanski, but whatever…)

In response to someone who writes, “Ann Applebaum do you have a young daughter? How about I rape her???”

“He seems to believe that if you look for any nuances at all in this extremely weird, thirty-plus-year legal saga (and in my four paragraphs there was only space to mention a few of them) you are not only defending rape, you deserve to be raped. Or your daughter does.”

Anne wrote a column defending a rapist. Not because there is a shadow of a doubt that he is guilty. But because … well, she didn’t really make that part clear. It is hardly a leap to believe that a claiming the arrest of a rapist is outrageous amounts to a defense of rape. Of course, no one deserves to be raped. The commenter was rude and disgusting. But Anne decides what she writes about. She may have taken this opportunity to address the obvious question of whether she would call the arrest “outrageous” if the victim were her own daughter, or to reflect upon why she has inspired such anger. But, she didn’t. She used it to paint her detractors as the ones advocating for rape. It should be lost on no one that Applebaum finds a comment suggesting rape of her daughter outrageous (and it is) but not the arrest of the man who actually did rape someone’s daughter!

In response to someone who writes, “Applebaum’s husband is a Polish politician who is currently actively lobbying for Polanski’s freedom. Seems that Applebaum did not mention that.”

“The implication, in any case, that I am a spokesman for my husband — while not quite as offensive as the implication that my daughter should be raped — is offensive nevertheless.”

Ignoring the strawman about her daughter, how it is offensive to suggest that the her unwillingness to disclose a potential conflict of interest casts suspicion on her motives? It would be lovely to assume that all journalists are independent, but in the current media structure, we know this is untrue. When we do discover a conflict of interest, it is our responsibility to address it, to hold those with the privilege of influence accountable. And frankly, with her track record, on what grounds are we obligated to accept her assertion that she is not a spokesperson for her husband? Why should Anne Applebaum’s word carry more weight than any evidence against it?

In response to those who disagree with her:

“to all who imagine that the original incident at the heart of this story was a straightforward and simple criminal case, I recommend reading the transcript of the victim’s testimony (here in two parts) — including her descriptions of the telephone conversation she had with her mother from Polanski’s house, asking permission to be photographed in Jack Nicholson’s jacuzzi — and not just the salacious bits.”

First, this claim is not a fact, but some kind of historical interpretation produced by Anne’s imagination. The transcript does not say that. But let’s be generous. Let’s assume that instead of deliberate deception, Ms. Applebaum is just a crummy journalist and didn’t read the transcript carefully. Even if the girl had asked her mother’s permission, 44 year olds are still not allowed to drug and fuck 13 years olds. Under ANY circumstance. I don’t care if her mother was there in the room watching. By Anne’s logic, sex traffickers would not be criminals so long as they got a written note from parents. By my logic, the scenario Anne has invented absolves Polanski of nothing.

Oh fuck – There is MORE.

Ok, I have a life & can’t put it on hold to live-blog the meltdown of a WaPo columnist. I’ll stop here.

Out!

A 13 year old girl was raped, and the only one innocent, according to Anne, is the perpetrator. Anne has blamed the Swiss authorities for arresting a rapist. Anne has blamed her readers for questioning her defense of a rapist. Anne has blamed the mother for allowing the the rape to happen even though there is no transcript evidence to support the claim. And of course, Anne has blamed the girl for literally asking for it. What fucking century is this?

I like film as much as the next person and have a fancy degree to prove it. Rosemary’s Baby was a source of childhood joy for me, since my mother’s name was Rosemary and I have extraordinary eyes. When she was mad at me, I would say, “What do you expect? I’m Rosemary’s Baby. Look at my eyes. They’re… not… normal…” Good times, good times… But I don’t see what the hell it has to do with anything. And frankly it is not Polanski I am concerned about. It seems he will finally have to face the music. It’s Anne.

As a citizen of this sometimes great nation, I believe we deserve better. I’m sick of journalists who underestimate our intelligence, who defend rape or any kind of violence against other human beings, who are entrusted with the power set the public agenda but who eschew any accountability said public may ask of them, who are quick to invoke the freedom of the press and just ask quick to hide from the responsibility that freedom comes with.

If you are too, Anne Applebaum’s editor is Fred Hiatt and his e-mail is hiattf@washpost.com.

Stories about Putin stealing her wallet and Russian girls being ugly before capitalism were delusional, sure, but provided some harmless entertainment. It’s not harmless anymore. No one is entertained. This has nothing to do with freedom of the press or freedom of speech. She has the right to say whatever she likes. As do we. So I am exercising my right to say that I think her column is dangerously irresponsible.

Not to mention, terribly written.

Addendum.

Sublime Oblivion left a link to this eXile article in the comments. It is THE article I send to everyone who e-mails me Anne Applebaum columns asking for my take on whatever nonsense she’s up to that week. So I thought, well, this is as good as any time to post it here, since god willing I’ll never have to write another post about Anne again…

From “Where Is America’s Politkovskaya?” By Mark Ames:

Anne Applebaum, one of the Post’s resident neocons, went the extra sleazy mile when she got ahold of Politkovskaya’s corpse. In her October 9th column, “A Moscow Murder Story,” Applebaum simply lied about the circumstances of her murder, and quite consciously so, when she essentially blamed Klebnikov’s inconvenient death, as well as other provincial journalists killed for investigating local corruption, on Putin. Interestingly, in her article she openly narrows her focus on “journalists killed after 2000″ — gee, how convenient. Because that means she wouldn’t have to mention all the journalists killed during Yeltsin’s term, since that would muddy up the good/evil picture that her entire thesis rests on.

Applebaum is a special case, one of those moral crusaders, the American Anna Politkovskaya, who has made a living courageously exposing state crimes committed by…get this…not her own country, oh heck no! Because her own country only does good! Nope, Anne Applebaum makes her living by sitting in the safety of Washington DC, and exposing crimes committed by a country on the other side of the globe! That country being Russia of course. Hey, give that woman a Pulitzer, will ya?! Hence her book Gulag, packed with all the affected moral outrage that you’d expect. Indeed, one thing that has always filled Applebaum with rage is wondering why Russians don’t take her seriously (a question she poses as more abstract — ie, why don’t Russians care about the Gulags as much as Anne does?). Here’s why: Can you imagine how much moral authority a right-wing Russian journalist’s book about the American genocide of Indians would have in America? Answer: about as much as Anne’s book has in Russia. None.

Yes, it’s dangerous work to dedicate your life to exposing the horrors committed by a country that your husband hates. Applebaum’s husband is Poland’s right-wing Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who also serves in the neocon American Enterprise Institute, the same institute that essentially invented the current Iraq war. The current government that Sikorski serves in, by the way, includes the extreme right-wing party The League of Polish Families, leading to protests from Israel because of the party’s open anti-Semitism and xenophobia, and its notorious skinhead youth group. But that’s okay by Anne, because Poland likes America and is a member of the Coalition of the Willing. Meaning no hissy articles from Anne Applebaum about her husband’s pals or Poland’s repulsive history of Jewish slaughter. Nor will you read too many articles by Applebaum about her own country’s atrocious crimes committed in Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands her government has killed.

No person could be as far from Politkovskaya as Anne Applebaum. Given all of Applebaum’s influence and access, she only uses that power to demonize Russia and whitewash America’s fascism. Politkovskaya, on the other hand, speaking from extreme weakness and danger, used what little influence she had to risk all for the victims of her own goverment’s cruelty, fighting from within.

Look, I like Rosemary’s Baby  too.

But in the Washington Post yesterday, the acclaimed historian of Soviet era gulags (in other words, a serious person), Anne Applebaum, offers a bizarre and full throated defense of Roman Polanski’s giving a 13 year old girl alcohol and Quaaludes, and then, against her will, sodomizing her in Jack Nicholson’s Jacuzzi! Talk about being a “live and let live” kind of person! Applebaum, in her high-sophisticate generosity toward the boorish ways of this particular man (he is so gifted afterall!), thinks it’s an old crime, and water under the bridge, and so we should just leave the elderly director alone. Here’s part of her cloying defense (and with a dash of armchair psychoanalysis):

He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film. He can be blamed, it is true, for his original, panicky decision to flee. But for this decision I see mitigating circumstances, not least an understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto, and later emigrated from communist Poland. His pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by the followers of Charles Manson, though for a time Polanski himself was a suspect.

Irrational punishment? Using the Holocaust to arouse compassion for a child rapist? WTF?! I wonder if Applebaum would make a similar argument for John Demanjuk? You see, Demanjuk is an old man and the Holocaust was a long time ago. I mean, hell, you do stupid things when you’re young.

How could anybody make such cynical and nihilistic arguments against long overdue justice? Oh, Andrew Sullivan has the answer. It turns out that Anne Applebaum’s husband is lobbying for Polanski’s case to be dismissed! Apparently, it’s the “Cheney Daughter Syndrome.” Defend the man you love, and especially double-down on that defense when his behavior is at its most reprehensible:

Anne Applebaum created a firestorm over her passionate defense of Polanski and her failure to disclose that her husband, a Polish foreign minister, is lobbying for the dismissal of Polanski’s case.

In other words, stand by your man!:

Oh, and here’s a lovely quote by Polanski (from 1979 and offered to Martin Amis in an interview) bemoaning his persecution by hypocritical Puritan Americans:

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

Ah, yes. Polanski is the consumate Renaissance Man. Give us that old time Greco-Roman “man-child love” religion. Next, look for a vigorous aesthetic defense of his behavior forthcoming from Camille Paglia.

When the Washington Post began to run pro-torture editorials, I asked myself, what’s next, pro-child molest journalism? Yes.

I’m assuming she’d have a problem if it was her own kids, of course.  Ed Morrissey notes Applebaum’s wacky nonsense: 

Yesterday, I just considered Anne Applebaum to have a conflict of interest over Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland.  After her response to criticism for failing to disclose her husband’s efforts to get charges dropped against the director, it seems clear that Applebaum has lost whatever sense she formerly had — and that her readers are overwhelmingly repulsed by it.  In responding to Patterico, Applebaum scoffs at the notion that the 13-year-old girl had been victimized — because she called her mother before the attack.

In Applebaum’s universe, if her husband is trying to get a fugitive child rapist off the hook, it’s not really rape.  Maybe she’s going with the Whoopi Goldberg defense: “Well, Polanski’s crimes aren’t rape-rape.”

At this point, Applebaum’s conflict of interest isn’t really shocking or even that important.  What is important is that for Asanine Annie, she’s so bought into Polanski’s ‘innocence’ that she thinks a phone call from the girl to her mother before the sexxxy time (and before being drugged) with an underage girl makes it all good.

I guess we have to play it this way.  If Applebaum had a teenage daughter, would she want Roman Polanski to drug, rape and sodomize her underage kid?  If no, how come it’s okay for Polanski to brutalize somebody else’s daughter?  If yes, what makes Roman Polanski’s schlong so great that Anne Applebaum would be alright with this fugitive rapist to use it on her daughter?

One more thing.  I keep hearing how we should let Polanski skate because it’s an old crime and the victim has forgiven her attacker.  That simply doesn’t make any sense.  Sure, the rape occured in the 70’s.  Lot’s of things happened back then that we don’t ignore.  The statute of limitations exists for a reason.  Further, Polanski didn’t just drug and sexually molest a young girl.  He then ran from US law and hid from the reach of American justice for over thirty years.  I understand prosecutorial discretion, but in this case it would send a dangerous precedent to just let the dude skate. 

The fact that the girl forgave Polanski forgave Polanski means nothing.  The fact is, the guy committed a felony and ran away from justice.  Polanski has to be punished.  Enough of the moral retards covering for a fugitive kid rapist.

Anne Applebaum makes the case for a U.S. taxpayer-funded “human rights campaign that battles Iran from within”.

In today’s Washington Post (WaPo), Anne Applebaum—who is also a ‘realist‘ adjunct fellow at the neoconservative, State apologist think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute—makes the case for an overt non-military campaign against the Iranian government by using the stolen fruits of Americans’ labor to aggressively support “a sustained and well-funded human rights campaign” because (a) sanctions “probably won’t work”; (b) a bombing campaign “might not hit all of Iran’s nuclear facilities”; and (c) war would be a “catastrophe”, adding:

What do Iran’s rulers truly fear? I’ll wager that the answer is not sanctions and that it might not be a bombing raid, either. An economic boycott can be circumvented, after all, with the help of Venezuela or maybe the Russian mafia, and an attack on Iranian soil might help the regime once again consolidate power. By contrast, a sustained and well-funded human rights campaign must be a terrifying prospect. So what if we told the Iranian regime that its insistence on pursuing nuclear weapons leaves us with no choice but to increase funding for dissident exile groups, smuggle money into the country, bombard Iranian airwaves with anti-regime television and, above all, to publicize widely the myriad crimes of the Islamic Republic? [my emphasis]

Forget that Iran is not a threat. Ms. Applebaum asserts that Iran “leaves [the U.S.] with no choice” but to intervene by “[increasing] funding for dissident exile groups [et al.]” because “one can learn quite a lot about how these Iranian decision-makers will behave abroad by observing their behavior at home”.

Translation: If you don’t fear Iran’s non-operational facilities because there’s no reason to believe its intent is anything but a civilian nuclear energy program, you should fear governments that torture innocent people and militarize local thugs to abuse the domestic population and extend your resources to overthrow said governments. And to overthrow those governments way over there—who commit such atrocities toward mankind—you should fully consent to contracting the atrocious government here to carry out the task. You know, the government that:

• killed 1.3 million people right next door in Iraq during the prior regime and over a million—including 500,000 children—during the regime before that in the 90’s;
• created millions of refugees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan;
• unleashed a pseudo-genocidal terrorism campaign on Latin America;
• has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians by proxy; and
• tortured hundreds of kidnapped men to death in its War of Terror.

All of this is among a wealth of “human rights violations” committed by the U.S. since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran. I didn’t even get into crimes against Africans and the millions of petty so-called “criminals” kidnapped and held captive in the domestic Gulags, but Ms. Applebaum wants us to focus on the fact that “the people who make decisions about Iran’s nuclear program are the same people who order the arrests, tortures and murders of dissidents”. Never mind that “the same people who order the arrests, tortures and murders” on behalf of the U.S. government are the “people who make decisions” about its policy on Iran and are those called on by Ms. Applebaum to lead “dissident exile groups” in a “human rights campaign”.

Ms. Applebaum adds: “[T]he West has some foreign-policy tools in Iran that it has not yet seriously tried to use”—fully acknowledging that doing so “would allow [Iran] to cry ‘foreign meddling’ and attack its opponents as spies,” to which she says: “But so what? They do that already.”

As if the accusations by the Iranian government are fully fallacious.

Never mind that the U.S. government already conducts covert operations in Iran and supports militant Iranian “dissident exile groups” such as the Marxist Mujahideen-e-Khalq (M.E.K.) and Jundallah—once “allegedly” headed by the mainstream-accepted 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

U.S. officials were outwardly “not happy” with the Iraq government raiding M.E.K. camps in late July.

Abdolhamid Rigi, brother of Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Rigi and a high ranking member of the Balochi separatist movement which “has been launching high profile suicide bombings for years“, claimed, “that the U.S. was directing the group’s attacks, saying, ‘[the U.S.] told us whom to shoot and whom not to. All orders came from them,’ ” AntiWar News editor Jason Ditz wrote last month, adding: “Previously, U.S. officials had insisted the government was deliberately avoiding direct funding to avoid Congressional oversight, but the Bush Administration did funnel considerable money into ‘covert’ operations against the Iranian government.”

Days after the heavily-disputed Iran presidential election last June, Legislative Aide to Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) Daniel McAdams at The LRC Blog blogged an informative post titled, “Who Put the ‘Green’ in the Green Revolution?” My thoughts on how the Green Revolution was manufactured is more along the lines of AntiWar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo than Mr. McAdams or Former Assistant Treasury Secretary and Wall Street Journal editor Paul Craig Roberts. That said, Mr. McAdams brought to light—in the midst of media insanity—that Ms. Applebaum’s own WaPo reported in June 2007 that Congress “allowed up to $400 million in covert spending for activities ranging from spying on Iran’s nuclear program to supporting rebel groups opposed to the country’s ruling clerics” based on Seymour Hersh’s reporting at The New Yorker of U.S. support for Iranian “dissident exile groups”, adding admission of Beltway support for dissident groups within:

Arch neo-conservative Kenneth Timmerman spilled the beans on activities of the other arm of U.S. meddling overseas, the obscenely mis-named National Endowment for Democracy, in a piece written one day before the election, stating curiously that “there’s the talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran.” Interesting. I wonder where that “talk” was coming from. Timmerman did not appear to be writing from Iran.

Timmerman went on to write, with admirable candor and honesty, that:

“The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting ‘color’ revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques.

“Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.”

Yes, you say, but what does a blow-hard propagandist like Timmerman know about such things? Well, he should know! His very spooky Foundation for Democracy in Iran has its own snout deep in the trough of NED’s “open covert actions” against the Iranian government.

In a June 23 post, Sayyid and I wrote—citing Daniel Luban at AntiWar.com—that the powers that be would begin “playing up an intervention under a Democratic Party president to be some sort of ‘humanitarian intervention’, the M.O. of Democratic Party-backed warmongering, analyzed best by Prof. Noam Chomsky. The Neo-Con’s adopted this angle to sell the Iraq War after Plan A of selling weapons of mass destruction was an ex post facto fail in the face of empirical evidence. Plan 1A was: spreading democracy [sic]. What are the Neo-Con’s Plan 1A for selling intervention in Iran after Plan A of selling Iran as a nuclear threat has failed against empirical evidence? Spreading democracy [sic].” (For more read: “U.S. Funding Regime Change in Iran“)

With all due respect to Ms. Applebaum, I’m currently reading and heavily engaged by her Pulitzer-winning work on the Soviet labor system and the atrocities committed by its concentration camp administration, Gulag: A History (2003). It’s sucked me in for the last couple of weeks and I’ve found myself re-reading chapters to further bookmark excerpts and am somewhat encouraged to see an voice as important as hers clearly stating that “potential for disaster” is “lurking behind almost every other policy option” which involve high degrees of violence—civilian-crippling economic sanctions, self-defeating bombing campaigns and ‘catastrophic’ war. But, one of the lessons from her book is that short-term alliances in the name of short-term ‘interests’ sow the enabling seeds for de facto collabortion with long-term atrocity.

Conveniently ignored is Ken Ballen of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion. Mr. Ballen is one of the very few polling Iranians leading up to the June 12 election. On June 8, Mr. Ballen wrote a commentary at CNN that his polls [.pdf] revealed that incumbent President Mahmound Ahmadinejad was leading, but was not at the 50% to avoid a runoff—let alone the ~62% majority asserted by the Iranian government on June 13—but wrote with his partner, Patrick Doherty, at Ms. Applebaum’s WaPo on June 15: “[O]ur nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin—greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.”

The significance of this is that Ms. Applebaum’s claim—like those of so-called “liberals” like Huffington Post editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington—all go back to the assertion that Iran’s election was significantly less legitimate than the ones commonplace in the U.S (where a Rasmussen poll says today that 50% of Americans believe U.S. election rules are “rigged to benefit members of Congress”, only 23% of people believe Congresspeople get reelected because “they do a good job representing their constituents”, and only 15% “say that voters carry more sway” over “special interest lobbyists”). This assertion creates the illusion that the U.S. has the legitimacy as a government to participate in overthrowing the ‘unpopular’ regime in Iran—’democratically’, but aggressively.

I’m neither validating the Iran government’s authority nor am I contesting that hanky-panky by pro-incumbent factions existed to distort the data of the presidential election, but the assertion that an election in ‘good faith’ accordance with Iran’s election policy would’ve yielded different results is inconclusive, at best. Without proving that assertion as true, the Iran government possesses the political capital to brutally persecute dissidents catalyzed by “foreign meddling” and Ms. Applebaum’s version of an overtly U.S.-backed “human rights campaign” would become even more self-defeating than the logic is flawed from the start.

The suggestion of Ms. Applebaum today that the U.S. engage in “foreign meddling” because the U.S. is accused of it anyway, suggests that the status quo is unacceptable and that said status quo is devoid of current meddling by the U.S.

Ms. Applebaum assumes that the U.S. would be capable of intervening peacefully—but, disinterested—and ignores that meddling is the cause of the U.S. geopolitical nightmare in the Middle East. Fueling it ignites fires unimaginable by the darkest night terrors.

You won’t see me objecting to individuals funding the overthrow of brutal regimes—especially through peaceful means—or aggressive advocacy for civil liberties, but how the deteriorating wealth of everyday people is used should be the decision of those individuals. Not the murdering inflationist thieves of the State to cynically prop up those sold as ‘lesser evils’ and certainly not the assertions of Anne Applebaum.

So it should be the responsibility of a casual reader of Washington Post to conduct his/her own background investigation as to what the author may have disclosed in the past to be able to judge the article’s objectivity and lack of bias instead of having this information served explicitly with the publication?

Secondly, even a superficial Google search for “polanski” and “citizenship” reveals in the top 10 results a number of pages that state that he holds dual citizenship of France and Poland. How can an expert like Anne Applebaum not be aware of it?

via polonizacja Anne Applebaum.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/09/28/DI2009092801782.html

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23Polanski

Would Poland Chemically Castrate Polanski? — 7 comments

wmschreiber wrote 17 hours ago: A few days after the Polish parliament passed a bill to make it the first EU state to chemically cas … more →

Tags: castration, Poland

Despicable.

Anne Applebaum’s WaPo article is (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/09/the_outrageous_arrest_of_roman.html) is a perfect example of elitism and moral failure.  In her article, Applebaum states the only justification for the “outrageous” arrest of child molester Roman Polanski could be a conspiracy.  Nevermind the fact a then 44 year old Polanski statutorially raped a 13 year old American girl, pled guilty, and fled the United States before he could be sentenced.  Applebaum goes on to state, “…he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers’ fees, in professional stigma.  He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar.  He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.”

Apparently, Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf does not move in Mrs. Applebaum’s circles of Polish cultural elites.  Widmer-Schlumpf announced that Polanski could not be given special treatment because of his artistic talent, especially because the warrant was not for a trivial complaint.

Full post here.

Applebaum offers a defense of Polanski’s recent arrest in Switzerland:

“To put him on trial or keep him in jail does not serve society in general or his victim in particular. Nor does it prove the doggedness and earnestness of the American legal system.”

But it’s still morally reprehensible, and illegal, and he fled prosecution (despite the fact that he is a fine director and has already suffered).  

While the facts of the case are discussed, I’ll just offer a previous post I put up on Martha Nussbaum’s commentary on Eliot Spitzer’s indiscretions, because it mirrors this one is some important ways:  Martha Nussbaum On Eliot Spitzer At The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

“Spitzer’s offense was an offense against his family. It was not an offense against the public. If he broke any laws, these are laws that never should have existed and that have been repudiated by sensible nations.”

Quite different in many ways, of course, but Nussbaum used the Spitzer incident as a springboard to argue that the prostitution laws (which Spitzer previously helped prosecute) were Puritanistic and antiquated.   I’d simply offer that perhaps there is a kind of trans-atlantic liberalism on display here in both examples. There are deep arguments to be made of course, but there might be also be a little disingenuousness and distance from the people who make and uphold the laws here in America.

Perhaps if you live in Europe, and you’re American, European mores and attitudes affect your opinions quite deeply. 

Also On This Site:  Charles Murray argues we need to resist such Europeanization…though is he still bringing in politics?:  Charles Murray Lecture At AEI: The Happiness Of People…From Reason: Going Dutch?

Has musicianship gone the way of twitter, instant messaging, sound bites? In this day and age, is an audience’s attention held by a performance punctuated with exaggerated emotionalism? In a scathing review of pianist Lang Lang’s August 30 performance of Chopin’s F minor piano concerto with the Dresden Staatskapelle in Lucerne, Michael Kimmelman suggests Mr. Lang’s playing has everything to do with our high-speed information age mind-set.

It brought to mind what Anne Applebaum, the Washington Post columnist, wrote about interpreting history these days. Writing for The New Republic, she reviewed a book by Nicholson Baker, “Human Smoke,” about the lead-up to World War II, which stitched together, without comment, hundreds of nuggets culled from newspapers, memoirs and other (often secondary) sources to suggest a case for pacifism.

“A series of pretentious, Gawker-like vignettes,” Ms. Applebaum called these orchestrated tidbits. “Ripped from their respective contexts each item has the same weight as the next. There is no hierarchy, no sense that one enigmatic anecdote might be more important than the next equally enigmatic anecdote.”

That’s not a bad description of what Mr. Lang did with the Chopin concerto. What Ms. Applebaum added is also true about music: “There are many legitimate ways to write history, even many avant-garde, nonlinear, novelistic ways to write history, as the historiography of World War II itself well illustrates.” But history persuasively told, like music interpreted, comes down to cogent arguments. The pianist Glenn Gould was an eccentric interpreter, but his interpretations, whether you liked them or not, had their own internal, neurotic logic. They made an elaborate case for themselves. The same could be said about playing by Vladimir Horowitz or Sviatoslav Richter.

Flashy passages strung together don’t make an argument. They make an assortment of fetishes. “Perhaps,” Ms. Applebaum wondered at one point about “Human Smoke,” “the whole book is a gigantic practical joke, a stunt intended to provoke.” I wondered the same thing during the concerto.

Read the review in the New York Times here.

A full reading of the article is necessary to understand the context, but this is a great statement on Capitalism:

Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius. So, cheer up next time you see a Siberian blonde dominating male attention at the far end of the table: The same mechanisms that brought her to your dinner party might one day bring you the Ukrainian doctor who cures your cancer or the Polish stockbroker who makes your fortune.

HT: Club for Growth

Here’s an interesting article by Anne Applebaum from The Washington Post (appeared on their site yesterday).

Two quotes to give you the gist of what she’s saying:

1. No German chancellor wants any of Germany’s neighbors to doubt that Germany is still very sorry about 1939 (even if some are rather indifferent). And none wants Germany’s neighbors to fear German aggression today.

2. Last weekend, Russian state television ran a long documentary essentially arguing that Stalin was justified in ordering the 1939 invasion of Poland and the Baltic states — and in making a secret deal with Hitler — on the grounds that Poland itself was in a “secret alliance” with the Nazis.  [...]

But from the perspective of the Russian ruling elite, such interpretations make sense: By praising Stalin’s aggression toward the Soviet Union’s neighbors 70 years ago, they help justify Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors today, at least in the eyes of the Russian public. Certainly they serve to make Russia’s Central European neighbors anxious

Anyway: lots of sensitive issues, and certainly a thought-provoking read, whether one agrees with Applebaum’s stance or not. To many Western readers some of her interpretations may seem almost paranoid. After all, the Russian gestures she mentions are only slightly menacing. Isn’t she reading too much into them? I don’t know. I’d like to believe she is but, frankly, I don’t feel confident about it…

The Russian documentary Applebaum mentions (it has met with outrage over here but I’m not sure if it has been noticed anywhere else in the world) is just one example of an extremely worrying trend (and not a new one by any means). Another is this interview in Komsomolskaya Pravda (in Russian, from last week) with professor Natalia Narochnitskaya – a historian. The interview is an unsettling example of the sort of historical thinking that seems to be rather popular in modern-day Russia. It is filled to the brim with extremely disturbing statements.

Here’s one illustration: Narochnitskaya attempts to justify (not just explain) the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, saying, among other things, that the territories it guaranteed to Russia were rightfully hers because, for example, the parts of Ukraine and Belarus which were within Polish borders before the outbreak of WWII were in fact “territories of the Russian empire”. This little piece of muddled thinking (consider how small it is indeed!) is pernicious in many ways. I’ll name two. First of all, there’s the rather terrifying suggestion that Ukraine and Belarus (modern-day Ukraine and modern-day Belarus!) ought to be Russian territories. It may be what one might call “a fleeting suggestion” but it’s there. Then there’s the attempt to pit Ukraine, Belarus and Poland against each other. Divide et impera. Poland is an ardent supporter of the independence and political transformation towards democracy in both of those countries – what better way to weaken them than by alienating them from their supporter? There’s more one could say about Narochnitskaya’s statement (why would any country respect post-WWI borders?) but let’s stop here.

There are other strange and disturbing assertions in that interview. For example, the thought that Poland owes Russia an apology for… the Polish–Muscovite War! That’s the one that took place in the years 1605–1618 (in case you were wondering)…

And, yes, the slandering suggestion of a Polish “secret alliance” with the Nazis is here as well. Well, not really that. But Narochnitskaya claims that in 1939 the Polish government was trying to unite with Hitler against Ukraine. Note two things: Firstly, pure stipulation about an alliance that never came into being (if indeed there ever were any such attempts – after all, this may be fabrication or an intentional misreading of facts) is used to counterweight an alliance that not only existed but was acted upon (the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact). What is more, she is pitting Ukraine and Poland against each other again!

But the highlight of the interview is the mention of alleged Polish war atrocities during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920. These were first brought up rather late, in 1990, when Gorbachev admitted that the Katyn massacre was a Soviet crime. It’s quite easy to understand why it took so long for these alleged Polish atrocities to be “revealed”, as well as the reason it happened at that specific opportune moment. The “controversy” was settled in 2004 by a team of historians from Poland and Russia who established that the high death toll in Polish POW camps – actually, many times smaller than what the accusers claimed, 5 times less than the number Narochnitskaya gives – was due to poor sanitary conditions and not to the deliberate starving of prisoners (or even less so: mass executions). What is really amazing (in a rather morbid sense) is how Narochnitskaya brings up those accusations (in an eerie re-enactment of what has already happened) in the context of the Katyn massacre (incidentally, she seems to be thinking that Russia has already done everything it ought to about Katyn – how about rehabilitating the victims, eh?). Could it be that Katyn denial is morphing, before our very eyes, into… how shall I call it?… Katyn justification? Shudder.

Perhaps this sort of thing should be disregarded as warmed-up Soviet propaganda. Maybe one should treat it as odd rather than menacing. Komsomolskaya Pravda (‘The Komsomol Truth’) is, after all, considered a tabloid. Personally, I would not dare to classify it all as anything less than disturbing.

Matt Zeitlin doesn’t like Anne Applebaum’s argument against carbon treaties.

Also, the reason people who work on global warming want an international treaty that establishes caps for everyone’s carbon emissions is because many governments don’t see the point of taking a short-term economically negative, politically controversial stand on global warming without some assurances that there will be coordinated global so that their carbon policy won’t be for naught. Ultimately, the reason we have the treaties, the documentaries, and the PR campaigns is to convince policymakers to put caps on carbon, increase the price of carbon and invest in alternative energy — all of which Applebaum seems to support.

think the real question isn’t whether or not Applebaum’s column makes any sense — it doesn’t — but why she wrote it. After all, she agrees with the mainstream consensus among people conerned about global warming that we need to get the incentives right to spur alternative energy advancements. But because it’s de rigueur for columnists to make a big show of disagreeing with some aspect of any consensus, especially liberal ones, Applebaum ends up sounding very strange.

Well, actually, the column does make sense. She says that global coordination for climate change through international treaties will be very hard. And it will. It’s a massive coordination problem; every country has an incentive to free ride. (Here’s a paper on the game theory of climate change treaties, written by economists at Columbia and NYU. Notable results: the Kyoto treaty was not a self-enforcing treaty. Because there is no world government, countries cannot commit themselves to sign binding contracts. It is possible to have a self-enforcing treaty, but countries would have to credibly commit to increase their emissions in case any country defects on the treaty.) It’s also important to remember that not all countries are equally invested in prevented climate change. Russia would be better off if the world got warmer and it had maritime access to the Arctic as ice melted. The countries likely to be hardest hit are poor, equatorial countries that aren’t the main emitters. A fair, successful treaty is an enormous challenge.

But if treaties probably won’t work and the US alone can’t reduce carbon emissions, is all hope lost? No, for a reason Applebaum touched on but Matt seems to have missed. If we make carbon expensive here in the US, it will be profitable for engineers and entrepreneurs to come up with cheap alternative energy. We spend all the R&D money and pay more for energy — but once we come up with our new gadgets, other countries can copy them on the cheap. The real issue here is developing countries: China and India. They’re not likely to accept a treaty that means a drop in their standard of living just as they’re emerging into prosperity. But they do seem willing to mitigate climate change if they can afford it — China in particular has been quite active on that domestically — so exporting American clean-energy inventions might work better than treaties. Think of electronics: they used to be designed here and manufactured (or knocked off) in Asia. Now companies like Lenovo are making their own innovations. A similar pattern could work for clean energy.

Matt’s point about treaties is essentially that they’re good political theater, that they “convince policymakers to put caps on carbon, increase the price of carbon and invest in alternative energy.” But that’s always a shaky argument because theater can inspire politicians to equally theatrical gestures, like the weak Waxman-Markey bill. And anyhow, domestic carbon policy isn’t for naught globally, because we can be the world’s lab for green energy. Maybe we should keep trying for treaties, but we shouldn’t depend on them.

Written by author and film director Imbi Paju, Memories Denied is an impressionist work of art, which creates its images by abandoning the traditional rules and techniques of historical writing, instead using psychology, psychoanalysis, belletristics, philosophy, historical facts, personal memories of her countrymen, and the recollections of those close to her. It succeeds in creating an image of what a violent regime can do to people, showing the evil that man inflicts on man when the darkness lurking within his soul seizes power and when the political atmosphere fosters this kind of violence, and showing how a dictatorial regime manipulates remembering in order to hide its criminal actions.

The narrative emerges from Estonia’s experience, from the author’s own family story and personal childhood memories. In her work, Paju is not saying “never again!” On the contrary, the book tells us that events such as these might well happen again. If we make no attempt to keep remembering, we shall never escape the consequences. This book explains how violent regimes founded on totalitarian philosophies persuade people to follow them, thereby stripping them of all their humanity.

The early 1940s saw the immediate imposition of the Russian SSR Criminal Code, which defined the “objective enemy”– a bandit, an enemy of the people, a kulak, an undesirable element, a hostile nation. According to the renowned Gulag researcher Anne Applebaum, every memoir, every document on the history of the Gulag is but a fragment of the puzzle, a fraction of the explanation. Without these pieces, we might wake up one day not knowing who we are. And without these pieces, words such as “human rights”, “compassion” and “trust” will become mere clichés.

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia

Anti-Stalinism

Anne Applebaum on the KGB in America. Enty on John Saville. The secret life of Victor Serge.

The Hitch

Christopher Hitchens on Abraham Lincoln’s centenary. Hitchens on Hemingway’s libido. Hitchens on Edward Upward. Hitchens on Karl Marx.

Bloggery

This blog – The Fatal Paradox – is new to me. I found it via Phil and will be visiting again! (Phil: “one of those blogs that defy easy categorisation. Hailing from New Zealand, it offers commentary on history, art and theory with a slight Spanish tinge to proceedings. Well worth checking out.”) We have Moriscos, Un chien andalou, Juan Goytisolo on Genet, Pablo Neruda: what more could one want?

Another blog new to me is Workers Self Management, an blog. Includes a bit of english history to be proud of, and a link to a WSA article on solidarity unionism that talks about the landless movement in Brazil and Spain in the 1930s.

Awesome if somewhat cursory New York Times examination of the culture, rhythm and impact of online commenting.

The thing that amazes and worries me is that everyone knows the lion’s share of comments are generally stilted and that they come from a small and sometimes obsessive community, but they still are having a huge effect on how news and opinion is prepared and presented, and there’s a general resignation to the fact that for all the good this brings, the bad far outweighs it.

Feel free to comment and tell me how wrong I am.

Posted by Joe Paone