Time for Christmas shopping 2020! So many good books were published this year, despite everything. Everyone should read Putin's People by @CatherineBelton, on the deep roots of Russia's current ruling class. I reviewed it for @TheAtlantic here: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
I also loved The Fifth Sun, by Camilla Townsend, which won the Cundill Prize. You think you know who the Aztecs are... but you don't. You think you know about the Conquest of Mexico...but you don't. mcgill.ca/newsroom/chann…
Really unexpected pleasure for me was Roderick Beaton's Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation, the history of the contemporary *idea* of Greece. There are lots of parallels to the modern history of other countries, you will be surprised amazon.co.uk/Greece-Biograp…
On a different subject: we just watched Russia With Love, and as the credits rolled, I realized that the great Lotte Lenya played one of the bad guys. Weimar seems multiple eras away from James Bond/the 1960s, and yet one lifetime encompassed both.
Here she is singing Mack the Knife, the song Kurt Weill wrote for her
And here is Louis Armstrong singing Mack the Knife, with a shout-out to Lotte Lenya
Nobody wants to use the language needed to describe this kind of behavior, which belongs to the vocabulary of mental illness washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…
Also, there is something deeply wrong with many of the people who are attracted to the soon-to-be-ex-president. Look at Powell. washingtonpost.com/investigations….
Under cover of the pandemic, while the outside world as distracted, the Venezuelan government is carrying out an evil act: It is seeking to destroy a pair of charities. One of them, Alimenta La Solidaridad, feeds more than 25,000 children every day...
The other, Caracas Mi Convive, fights against violence. I wrote about them both earlier this year: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Both were founded by Roberto Patino, who tells me that his parents' home has been raided by one of the many Venezuelan police forces. The bank accounts of the organizations have been frozen.
Poland and Hungary are threatening to veto the EU budget because they don't want to be forced to adhere to the "rule of law." If the EU caves in to the blackmail, the results may be dramatic. In Poland, the consequences of a politicized legal system are already with us...
A few weeks ago, police detained (and handcuffed) a prominent Polish lawyer, Roman Giertych. They searched his house - looking, he has said, not for documents to do with his "case", but for evidence he had been gathering about government corruption. nytimes.com/2020/10/16/wor…
A few days later, however, a court refused to uphold the detention. The judge said he didn't see that a crime had been committed. An appeals court came to the same conclusion. Restrictions on Giertych - he had been suspended from the practice of law - and others were removed.
"Trump failed because he picked bad people" is an insufficient explanation. In truth, he failed because his so-called populist project was a lie. He never wanted to drain the swamp, he wanted to profit from it. ft.com/content/cc5636…
Like Orban, Kaczynski, Duterte, Erdogan, Putin and so many others, Trump created fake culture wars to hide his real agenda: Personal profit, personal power, personal narcissism. Le Pen et al would be no different.
Also Chavez. The politics of greed and cynicism can be either Left or Right.