Political Observer on Mount’s contining attempts to self-emacipate from his Thatcherism, by means of political prestidigitation wedded to a selective re-telling of American History!
Headline: Conservatives Have Lost Their Grip on the World — and Themselves
September 26, 2024
Editor: in a mere 3151 word essay this Thatcherite continue to self-present as a ‘voice of reason’ in the Age of Trump! The opening paragraphs of his political monster are instructive, in fact act as a diagnosis of a kind?
The British Conservative Party has long boasted of being the most successful political party on the planet. The unimaginable scale of its defeat on July 4, when it won the fewest seats in its history, looks like the downfallof moderate conservatism. It appears to be the final straw for the center-right parties offering pragmatism, prosperity and opportunity that have dominated Western politics since World War II. Almost everywhere conservatism’s brash rival, nationalist populism, is on the march: already in power with its colorful leaders in Hungary, Italy and Argentina; on the brink of it in the United States and France; and eroding the old-style conservatives in Germany, the Netherlands and now Britain. The rivalry on the right is in danger of becoming a rout, with the senior, steadier force swallowed by its insurgent challenger.
These shocks to our established ways of thinking are so violent that we immediately assume that this must be a unique apocalypse, the product of unprecedented social and economic forces. This, I think, is a temptation to be resisted. The reality is that something similar has often happened or nearly happened before, at different times and in different places. Nationalist populism, my umbrella term for the smorgasbord of hard-right forces, always sings the same song. The circumstances that gain it a sympathetic hearing are usually much the same, too: decline of old industries and loss of well-paid jobs for men, undercutting by rising nations and, of course, fresh waves of immigrants from new places. It’s when mainstream conservatism visibly flounders in dealing with the challenge — as it has so clearly done in recent years — that such movements can hope to surge.
The upshot is both concerning and consoling. Conservatism has been here before — and it can get through it again.
Editor: As interesting as the attempt at explication , Trump and Trumpism is the child of the Ameican Tea Party that devored itself in internacine political warfare that Trump exploited! Yet note that Mr. Mount’s ‘The New Few’ was a wan attempt to self-emancipate from his Thatcherite past, and note that on page 154 and 155 Mount uses the epithet ‘Loony Left’twice and the final chapter on ‘The Riots and after’ of August 6 and 10 of 2011: Recall that the collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, 2007-2008 that Mount acted as a co-conspipertor, advocate, even a True Believer took time to manifest itself in the lives of ordinary people. And the fact that The Neo-Liberal apologists like Mount re-wrote a History Made to Measure. And that he had the brass to lecture Americans, about their own History: Oxbrider Brass is Eternal !
Editor: Nothing quite prepares The Reader for these 509 words ofHistory that seeks to enlighten The American Reader?
Nationalist populism is not a weird deviation from the natural flow of history. Since the dawn of the nation-state, it has been an ever-present threat, sometimes lurking in the shadows, sometimes derided as a throwback, but never quite disappearing from view. The possibilities for its success are often visible well in advance to keen observers, at times when most people are thinking about something else. In 1922, when the rest of Europe was convulsed by the threat of Bolshevism and Adolf Hitler was still a nonentity, the German chancellor declared “There is no doubt about it: The enemy is on the right.” In 1994, when all of Europe was still celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of history, Edward Luttwak foresaw a “space that remains wide open for a product-improved fascist party.”
It’s in the United States where the most stunning example of something like that has taken place. But the Trump phenomenon did not come out of a calm blue sky. Donald Trump’s discarded guru Steve Bannon saw in his master echoes of earlier populist orators, such as William Jennings Bryan, who could rage against bankers to rural audiences for hours on end. Mr. Bannon prepped Mr. Trump for his inauguration by telling him tales of his predecessor Andrew Jackson, whose inauguration had drawn to Washington thousands of obstreperous supporters who drank the capital dry and outstayed their welcome — echoing what was to come four years later, on a more violent and terrifying scale.
Mr. Trump’s critics, and his fans too, preferred to think of him as a unique irruption into American history. But Mr. Bannon was right in thinking that most of his instincts and his policies have roots going way back. Before the aviator Charles Lindbergh helped lead the America First Committee to keep the United States out of World War II, Woodrow Wilson had used the slogan “America First” in his doomed 1916 pledge to keep America out of World War I. The press baron William Randolph Hearst used it in his campaigns almost as often as he played up the threat of Chinese immigration. (Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,”based on Mr. Hearst, is Mr. Trump’s favorite film.) In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan took up the slogan, and as recently as 2016, David Duke, a former leader of the Klan, ran for a Louisiana Senate seat as an “America First” candidate.
For Mr. Trump, “America First” meant withdrawing from pretty much every international organization. At one time or another as president, he demanded that the United States withdraw from NATO, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Health Organization, the Paris climate accords and the World Trade Organization. He was equally hostile to bilateral agreements, with nations such as South Korea and Iran. This isolationism also has plenty of precedents, going back to the failure of the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and join the League of Nations the year after, under the influence of such implacable America-aloners as Senator William Borah of Idaho.
Editor: Reader only 2333 more words ….
Political Observer
Reader how could I had forgotten Francis Mulhern ‘A Tory Tribune?’ from 105•May/June 2017 of The New Left Review?
A review of Ferdinand Mount’s ‘English Voices: Lives, Landscapes, Laments’ Simon and Schuster: London 2016
Reader note that I do not share inFrancis Mulhern’s generosity of spirit! I offer this revelatory excerpt:
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The great politico-ideological contests of the twentieth century ranged Mount on the side of the bold Western David, of course. The closing words of his appreciation of Hugh Trevor-Roper, from 2005, recall a once-mighty ideological adversary:
The causes for which he battled with such ferocious glee have come out on top, in the Cold War no less than in the English Civil War. In politics as in historiography, the Marxists and the marxisants have been routed. It is easy to forget how their premises and arguments were once taken for granted and how quirky and perverse seemed those who spoke out against them.
And indeed such moments are a reminder of the voices that go unheard in Mount’s whispering gallery. With just a few idiosyncratic exceptions (Greer, Alan Bennett, Le Carré, Arthur Ransome, author of the children’s classic Swallows and Amazons, and the philo-Soviet ecclesiastic Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury), here is a spectrum without a Left. Of course, what is not published cannot be reviewed. But even a very short list of eligible-but-absent voices—salient authors or subjects of the kinds of book Mount chooses to write about—is telling for what it says about the national imaginary as mediated by him: Richard Hoggart, Jack Jones, Eric Hobsbawm, C. L. R. James, Dorothy Thompson, Angela Carter, Tony Benn.
Mount’s local party loyalties are more ambiguously framed. No great admirer of politicians in general, Conservatives included, he is damning in his judgements of Harold Macmillan, whose premiership he thinks was an anachronism and a historic mistake, and Edward Heath, the technocrat; the mock-heroic Lord Hailsham he dismisses as an exhibitionist. Among his contemporaries, two of his three touchstones are legends of the Labour right, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins (the other, as always, is Margaret Thatcher); and the plainest statement of political inspiration in the whole collection comes aslant, in a sub-section nominally devoted to religion, in a portrait of a Liberal leader, Gladstone. For an uncomplicated Tory loyalist, Mount’s intellectual presence must be about as reassuring as Matthew Arnold’s higher journalism was for party Liberals in his own time. But Arnold’s free play of mind had a brake, which he applied in a motto from the French conservative thinker Joubert: ‘Force till right is ready.’ Mount’s equivalent statement of limits deserves the same notoriety. ‘There are times’, he wrote in Cold Cream, defending the domestic programme of the Thatcher governments—including the premeditated fight to the finish against the miners—‘when what is needed is not a beacon but a blowtorch.’
Mount did his bit to fuel the blowtorch, and would have done more had not the bearings of the Thatcher government shifted during her second term, now giving priority to the formulation of a new Östpolitik for the last days of the Cold War. As it was, he returned to full-time journalism and writing. If, more prosaically, the ratios of intellectual engagement in public affairs—the exercise of shadow authority—can be calculated from a scale ranging between the extremes of prophecy, or moral leadership, and policy, the formulation of practical goals for duly equipped institutions, Mount’s readings show a continuing pull towards the latter end. This practical bent, in the centre-right zone marked out by Thatcher and Blair, has been most obviously displayed in the book-length works he has written over the past twenty-five years: The British Constitution Now (1992), Mind the Gap (2004) and, most recently, The New Few (2012), an attack on the spread of oligarchy in British political and economic life. But it is present too even when, as often in English Voices, the occasion is not primarily political. Mount’s Gladstone is a working fusion of the two modes, a seer and an effective reforming politician in one. He is, moreover, a figure who defies the reductive polarizing terms of the given ‘political creeds’ and party shibboleths. He is ‘reverent’ among utilitarians, a communitarian in his own day, but tolerant—eventually—in the face of narrow confessional demands, and liberal in his sensitivity to popular conditions of life. There is something in him of Berlin’s philosophy and also Michael Oakeshott’s, two figures whose mutual hostility was unrelenting.
Editor: Should the Mount opening paragraph surprise any reader, who has experience of reading his mouldering prose, that pretends to wide learning and its collection of ‘bad political actors’ ?
It’s puzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions which seemed long defunct. Wasn’t the doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on the right: campaigners against immigration, Brexiters, the enemies of Woke, aka Anti Social Justice Warriors, or ‘Anti-SJW’, as they proclaim themselves on their black T-shirts, available online for £15. This switch-around isn’t entirely new. Thirty years ago, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, Stanley Fish wrote that ‘lately, many on the liberal and progressive left have been disconcerted to find that words, phrases and concepts thought to be their property … have been appropriated by the forces of neoconservatism. This is particularly true of the concept of free speech.’ Today, alleged infringements of free speech that would once have outraged Guardian readers are splashed all over the Daily Telegraph. As I write, the Telegraph front page leads on an apparent threat by the US State Department to scrap a trade deal with the UK, because it was ‘concerned about freedom of expression in the UK’, in relation to criminal charges against a Christian anti-abortion campaigner in Bournemouth. This concern echoed a statement made by Vice President Vance the previous month that he feared free speech ‘in Britain and across Europe’ was ‘in retreat’. The other stand-out feature of the debate today, and something it is hard not to see as ominous, is the growing gap, in law and practice, between the United States and the rest of the world which calls itself free.
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Editor: Mr. Mount’s final paragraph abounds in his collection of evocative/decorative Names, and various ‘bad actors’.
But the case for some laws regulating libel, slander, hate speech, incitement to violence and verbal harassment of all sorts remains as strong as ever, though just as difficult to define and to police with any sort of fairness. So too, does the case for codes of conduct in public institutions, Parliament and the universities being only the most conspicuous examples. The lines are never easy to draw. At what point does ‘political correctness’ cease to be common civility and degenerate into censorship? When does ‘woke’ move from its original meaning of ‘alert to racism’ and turn into self-righteous hectoring? When should an anti-abortion campaigner be entitled to carry a placard outside an abortion clinic, or, come to that, when should a women’s-right-to-chooser be allowed to stake out the home of an anti-abortion campaigner? There is a right to demonstrate, yes, but there is also a right to some degree of personal tranquillity. ‘Watching and besetting’ is an ancient crime under English law, and to this day the courts are still defining its reach. As Dabhoiwala continually reminds us, context is everything, or almost everything. To warble on in an unfocused way about ‘cancel culture’ cannot conceal either the difficulties of the balancing act or its necessity for a flourishing society. The fabric of civility is as thin as gossamer and just as precious. Even John Stuart Mill might have had second thoughts about the innocuousness of speech if he had been shopping at the supermarket in Buffalo or El Paso. And that is even before we tiptoe into the wider political effects. Would the present incumbent of the White House have been able to swim along so effortlessly on his stream of lies and insults without the protection of the First Amendment? Doesn’t Donald Trump ultimately owe quite a lot to John Stuart Mill?
Editor: Should the carefully constructed persona of J.D. Vance, co-authored by Peter Thiel and his genuflection to Leo Strauss, and the others who acted as co-authores of Vance’s , what to name it? Raymond Chandler, in another but revelent context, named this ‘Hollywood Vomit’!
Editor: Reader aquaint yourself with Mr.Cruddas opening paragraphs:
Who invented the “Big Society”? I suggest Ferdinand Mount. While our MPs couldn’t be seen for dust, his 2004 book Mind the Gap reintroduced class as a political category. Ahead of its time, it confronted the benign take on globalisation dominant in Westminster. The book was a shout out against the “cold indifference” of contemporary capitalism; the disrespect afforded to those who fall on the wrong side of the new class divide. Its focus was on the economically and culturally dis-invented – “the tribes who live in the dark”. A brilliant book, it signalled a new readiness from the right to confront the realities of social rupture, well before the music stopped and Bear Stearns went to Chapter 11 insolvency.
Within the text we can identify the building-blocks for the “Red Tory” Phillip Blond, and the rise of the Cameroons. Mount argued we must “rebuild the little platoons”. The faith communities would be critical in delivering welfare; we need to see greater reciprocity and employee share ownership, localism and community control of the state. We should, in later parlance, “recapitalise the poor” through asset transfers – land and housing, school and health vouchers, in order to help the victims in the new “downer” class.
Here the causes of inequality lie at the feet of the welfare state. It crowds out working-class respect, fraternity and civics; community cohesion, duty and obligation. Ceteris paribus, we confront these inequalities once we reduce the power of the state.
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The New Few then races through some corrosive examples. The still-shocking £9bn HSBC takeover of sub-prime vultures Household, culminating in £53bn set-aside to sweep up this folly; the “festering morass of bad debts” that was HBOS; vainglorious Fred the Shred, and many more. The central concern is the arbitrary power of the CEO and decline of the active shareholder, interlocked with the rise of the fund manager with their top-slice off every transaction: a “croupier’s take”. In short, there was systemic collusion between the two dominant groups. “One set of oligarchs- the fund managers – approve the size of salaries, bonuses and pension pots for another set of oligarchs – the CEOs, board members and senior managers”.
Why so little appetite to confront these excesses? Mount identifies three basic reasons- or excuses, or illusions – that sustain the system. “The market is always right”; “big is beautiful”, and “complexity equals progress”: they echo the dominance of neo-liberalism, of a system too big to fail, due to the sheer complexity of financial products with no appreciation of moral hazard. A brief history of oligarchy follows, and the forces that shape it: war, technology, bureaucracy, forms of ideology – the links between money and power.
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Mount’s book is a brilliant attempt to import rigour and coherence; indeed, the case is better made than by anyone in the current administration. Yet can he really be suggesting across the City, within our hollowed-out party structures, across Whitehall and Westminster, that the Coalition is embarked on a systematic assault on power elites and oligarchy in defence of the little guy? It doesn’t look like that from my advice centre in East London.
The man behind the Big Society has attempted to write the Bible for the Coalition. It demands respect and has to be read. I strongly agree that there is “a sense that society has lost its recognisable moral shape, and with it, its legitimacy”. But it is because of this that people will demand more, so much more, than what is currently on offer.
Editor: ‘The West’ is collapsing from within! The Genocide perpetrated against a captive population in Gaza, and its ever widenning toxic peramiters by The Zinonist Faschest State, and its American and European suppliers of the weapons of Mass Murder. Mr. Mount never mentions this on going Crime, any surprise?
Yes, universities have made genuine blunders that predictably led to a widespread loss of trust. And yes, some corners of just about every American campus, including Harvard, are now subsumed by ideological hogwash. But like other leading institutions that have come under massive attack, Harvard does also remain at the forefront of research in extremely important fields, from semiconductors to artificial intelligence. If Trump was serious about wanting America to outcompete rivals like China over the course of the next decades, he would recognize that it is a very bad deal for the country to turn its advanced capabilities in the industries of the future into collateral damage in a fight against woke professors in, say, the Department of American Studies.
Anybody who is actually interested in “Making America Great Again” should be able to keep two truths—that universities have in the last years betrayed their mission in key ways, and that they nevertheless remain hugely important national assets—in mind at the same time. But in a bitterly ironic echo of the postmodern theories that its leading members purport to hate, the administration appears only to be interested in one form of Veritas: that which serves the whims and the wishes, the personal predilections and the partisan interests of its leader.
Editor: Steven Spielberg is a phenominon of Pop Culture Entertainment! Not an arbiter of ‘History’ in any dimention except in its Movie House Iteration:
Steven Spielberg, guardian of Holocaust memory
By Annick Cojean(Los Angeles, special correspondent)
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It was on the plane back to Los Angeles after filming Schindler’s List in Poland, between March and May 1993, that filmmaker Steven Spielberg had the most audacious and ambitious idea of his life. He had just spent three months in Krakow telling the story of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist and Nazi Party member who managed to save nearly 1,300 Jews by employing them in his enamel and munitions factory during World War II. The filming had been intense, complicated and exhausting. Spielberg, who had waited a decade to make the movie – daunted by the enormity of the subject and its connection to his personal history and Jewish identity – was acutely aware of an immense responsibility. For the first time in his career, he was moved to tears while shooting certain scenes, leading his teams and thousands of extras into a highly realistic vision of the Holocaust’s hell.
Yet, the most overwhelming aspect was his encounters with survivors, especially the “Schindler Jews,” as those saved at the last minute by working for the industrialist were called. One by one, they arrived on set, intrigued and astonished that a filmmaker dared to tackle a story many of them had never spoken about. And very quickly, they expressed their desire to confide in Spielberg. “Listen to me,” they said. “I have a story too, me too!”
The director, focused on his film but touched by this trust, listened, took notes and captured ideas here and there, which he later incorporated into the movie. Of course, all these stories were interesting and immensely valuable, he replied. Of course, they deserved to be heard, preserved and passed on. No survivor should disappear without having shared their personal experience of the Holocaust. It was, in itself, a warning and a message to future generations. In essence, each survivor should become a “teacher.”
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Editor: What is it about about the danger that proximity to power, that leads reporters of various levels of intelligence, to abandon their reportorial skepticism, about their subjects? @AnnickCojean meets and exceedes the promise of that ensorcellment!
Editor: Begin your your acqaitenship with the ‘autuer theory’ via two books:
Newspaper Reader offers – Reader never forget that Brooks became the protege of William F. Buckley Jr.: In sum Brooks whole career was the product of that singular advantage!
Editor: It can’t really be a surprise that Mr. Brooks focus in on ‘elite intitutions’ ?
Two examples of Mr. Brooks’ sources: According to a 2023 article by Rachel Shin in The Atlantic, The Atlantic, Rogé Karma and Derek Thompson
Editor: Brook’s attempts to diagnose this vexing problem:
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Maybe the core problem is the overproduction of elites — that we’re churning out more knowledge worker graduates than there are knowledge worker jobs. Or maybe it’s just a feature of online life. It’s easier to apply to stuff, and with more applicants, the competition grows ferocious. According to an article in Business Insider, the average knowledge worker job opening now receives 244 applications, compared with just 93 as recently as 2019. One young woman lamented to me that she wished she’d been young in the 1990s; it would have been easier. I told her I was relatively young in the ’90s, and it was.
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Editor: Look to the storied careed of Walter Lippmann, the student of William James and George Santayana who deified the Technocrat, as a check against Too Much Democracy!
Editor: Mr.Brooks closes his essay/intervention on those ‘golden children’ : Mr. Brooks is a benefactor of the largess of William F. Buckley Jr. …
I should close by reiterating the fact that the people I’m writing about here are the meritocracy’s alleged winners. The valedictorian class. The golden children. Are they just whining through their privilege? Maybe a little. Young Americans who came of age in 1860 or 1916 or 1932 or 1941 weren’t exactly living on Easy Street.
Nonetheless, these conversations — and all the research I’ve read on everything from smartphones to the psychic effects of the meritocracy to the rising mental health crisis among the young — point to one conclusion: It’s just phenomenally hard to be young right now. There must be an easier way to grow up.
Editor: Mr. Colvile’s intervetion, with the help of his staff of underlings is filled with doubt and apprehension!
Ed Miliband might not look like a revolutionary. But he has embarked upon the most radical, ambitious and — to its critics — foolhardy project that this government is pursuing. Namely, to transform the entire basis of the UK energy network, at historic speed.
For decades, the UK powered itself by coal, and then by gas. Miliband wants to move us, as rapidly as possible, to a system dominated by wind — and, in particular, offshore wind, which will become by far our largest source of power.
This is far more ambitious than the coal-to-gas transition, for three reasons. First, we can’t use as much of the existing infrastructure. So we need a huge amount of new cabling, not least off the coasts.
Second, we also need to hugely increase the amount of power, because we are simultaneously trying to electrify both transport and home heating. Third, we need back-up provision for when the wind doesn’t blow.
In short, for Miliband’s plan to work, an awful lot of things need to go right. But last week something went badly wrong. The Danish energy company Orsted announced that it would not be building a 2.4GW wind farm off the coast of Hornsea in Yorkshire, despite having planning permission in place and a price agreed.
To understand why this is such a problem, it helps to understand how the renewables revolution has been funded.
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Editor: Yet what caught my eye: ( Colevial pales with time, and the reader’s patience longs for a change of pace, from his usual ‘Techo-Chatter’: note too that those ‘Ubiquitous Gamers’ have now commedeared the notion of ‘Palate Cleanser’ from the world of Connoisseurship!
Headline: Should we blame the US for the Cold War?
Sub-headline: The Russian-born historian Vladislav Zubok makes the provocative case that western leaders exaggerated the threat from cautious and conservative Soviet leaders
Editor: I should have read this whole review. Yet Mr. Sandbrook’ quotes extensively from General John Hackett’s book of 1978: ‘The Third World War’. Mr. Sandbrook knows his Times readership!
The Third World War broke like a storm over the fields of central Europe. Moving with ruthless speed, the communist forces smashed through West Germany’s defences and advanced on the Rhine, while Soviet commandos landed in Norway and Turkey. Then the pendulum swung as Nato troops mounted a heroic stand near the German town of Krefeld, while American sailors and pilots began to wrest back control of the seas and the skies.
As the Warsaw Pact’s armies stalled and began to retreat, the hard men in the Kremlin faced an awful decision. With a conventional victory out of reach, perhaps only the ultimate weapon would stave off the spectre of defeat and force their opponents to come to terms. So it was that on August 20, 1985, the masters of the Soviet Union realised the dream of a generation of British town planners. They dropped a nuclear bomb on Birmingham.
An illutration of book ‘The World of the Cold War, 1945-1991’ by Vladislav Zubok iterupts the narrative flow. Excerpts of General John Hackett’s ‘The Third World War’ provides the two opening paragraphs of Sandbrook’s maladriot essay.
Editor: Mr. Sandbrook on Vladislav Zubok:
Yes, the Russian historian Vladislav Zubok says in his readable short account of the Cold War. In crises like the Cuban missile standoff of 1962, he writes, “humanity was extraordinarily lucky”. With different leadership the world might have faced nuclear Armageddon. Thank goodness, then, that we have such impressive leaders today.
Why are there are so few gripping histories of the Cold War? One explanation is the subject is just so vast, but the fact remains that many standard accounts, such as the one by the American historian John Lewis Gaddis, are sensationally boring. This book is much better: brisk, spiky and unafraid to make provocative judgments.
Born and educated in Moscow with a close knowledge of Soviet sources, Zubok doesn’t blame Stalin for the Cold War. Although he is clear-eyed about the dictator’s atrocities, he thinks he was more cautious and pragmatic than we appreciate and he places the lion’s share of responsibility for the ideological conflict with the US.
Editor: Sandbrook begins his anaysis of Vladislav Zubok’s History: selectice quotaton is the only viable defence against Mr. Sandbrook proferred self-asaurance.
With different leadership the world might have faced nuclear Armageddon. Thank goodness, then, that we have such impressive leaders today.
…that many standard accounts, such as the one by the American historian John Lewis Gaddis, are sensationally boring. This book is much better: brisk, spiky and unafraid to make provocative judgments.
Although he is clear-eyed about the dictator’s atrocities, he thinks he was more cautious and pragmatic than we appreciate and he places the lion’s share of responsibility for the ideological conflict with the US.
Editor: With just 804 words left in this essay, in self-defence, The Reader need only consult Sandbrook’s in his final tortured paragraph, that presents Putin as ‘smoulders with so much resentment’
The Reader need only listen to Putin address, his Victory Day Speech see that Sandbrook is a ‘Cold Warrior’!
We know how that story played out, and for anybody trying to understand why Vladimir Putin smoulders with so much resentment — and why, sad to say, tens of millions of Russians support him — this book is an excellent place to start.
Headline: The art of dealing with Donald Trump? Don’t fight him alone.
Sub-headline: This week’s trade deal is a boost for Keir Starmer. But a lasting win will only come by joining forces with other nations to resist the US president’s entire destructive agenda
These, then, are the two strategies available when the Trump juggernaut comes for you. You can seek to cut a separate deal, to protect yourself, as Columbia tried to do. Or you can stand together with all those similarly under attack, seeking to repel the entire Trump offensive, which is what happened after Harvard made its move. So far it is collective action that has got the best results.
Applied to world trade, that would mean a shift away from the every-man-for-himself approach that led to Thursday’s handshakes in the Oval Office, and towards a combined endeavour in which the UK joins forces with, say, Canada and Australia and, obviously, its nearest and biggest trading partner, the EU, to oppose Trump and his prosperity-destroying, self-harming tariffs. More Harvard, less Columbia.
Now, clearly, Starmer’s duty is to protect Britain from a US currently wrecking the global trading system. He took a step in that direction this week. But the greater, more lasting protection will surely come only when the free nations of the world don’t merely try to save their own skins, but instead come together to resist an American president bent on destroying so much that we all value – and not only on trade. Who knows, there may even be another American leader anointed this very week who would give such an effort his blessing.
Headline: Flattery gets Starmer somewhere as The Donald stays awake to toot tariff deal
Sub-hedline: Flattery gets Starmer somewhere as The Donald stays awake to toot tariff deal
Editor: Mr Crace has both literary and political talent, and a gift for story telling that evades Mr. Friedland! In the most telling way both Starmer and Freedland are locked in a toxic symbiosis, that resembles black & white television of a long-gone era!
Three days ago, Donald Trump promised an announcement that would be very possibly the greatest announcement in the whole history of announcements. Come Thursday morning, he said the US and the UK had reached a full and comprehensive trade deal.
I guess a lot depends on what you mean by the words “greatest announcement” and “full and comprehensive”. As details of the deal began to emerge, it rather looked as if the UK had managed to negotiate a worse deal with the US than we had even two months ago. One that was hardly transformative. Just reversing some of the damage that had been done to the UK by the US starting a global trade war. Tariffs as a protection racket.
Still, a deal is a deal. These days, Keir Starmer has learned you get what you can get. And it’s more than any other country has got so far. It remains to be seen if others come out of the White House with anything better. But Keir wasn’t the only one who needed a quick result. Trump did, too. He had a reputation to maintain as a deal-maker and Americans were beginning to get twitchy that none had been reached. It wasn’t clear if this was a victory for crack negotiating teams, or a sign that both the US and the UK had been a bit desperate. So both sides were keen to chalk the deal up as a win for themselves.
Editor: Mr Crace literary/political talent continues to bloom, as Mr. Freedland’s looks like and reads like, the precarious chatter of an Economist essay’s of the Micklethwait & Wooldridge era!
Trump’s powers of concentration aren’t all they might be and he finds it difficult when he’s not the centre of attention. Keir did his best to stop the president from flatlining by showering him with flattery. The Donald had been the best. Everyone and everything would be nothing without him.
At this, Trump began to perk up. The US and the UK had been working for years on a trade deal. People had said it couldn’t be done, he boasted. And yet he had done it in a matter of weeks. Truly, he was incredible. He didn’t seem to realise that he hadn’t negotiated a full trade agreement. Just a small side hustle encompassing a few sectors. There was a ripple of applause from the sycophants in the Oval Office when Trump managed to press the right switch to disconnect the call.
The Donald then invited his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnik, to expand a little on the deal. Howie is reportedly a billionaire but he also delivers a pitch-perfect impersonation of a halfwit. It’s hard to imagine him in a room negotiating the sale of a secondhand car. “This was the president’s deal,” he cooed. “If it had been left to me, it would have taken at least three years. He did everything. He is the closer.” Imagine. Howie had just told the entire world he had been out of his depth in a puddle. Truly, the world is fucked if he is one of its masters.
Next up was the British ambassador, Peter Mandelson. Bowing deeply. Full of reverence. Mandy was born for days like these. When all that is required is oleaginous smooth-talking masquerading as sincerity. Truly, The Donald was nothing short of a genius. He wasn’t fit to wipe the president’s shoes. Trump had achieved more than anyone else in the history of the world. Thank you, thank you. We have reached the end of the beginning, he sobbed. Everyone was getting in on the Churchill act this VE Day. Trump nodded. Mandy was right about him.
Back in the UK, Starmer was just starting his own press conference at the Jaguar Land Rover factory. Britain was open for business, he said. No less than the whole future of the UK had been saved. Keir, alone, had altered the course of history. Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. Keir had managed all three. This was bigger than VE Day. Bring out the bunting. Drink the pubs dry. We were entering a new era of prosperity.
This wasn’t just a victory for the UK. It was a victory for Starmer personally. Some people had said he should stand up to Agent Orange. Put the phone down. Don’t give in to bullies. But Keir had emerged triumphant. His brown-nosing had achieved the impossible. Which was, er … not quite as good as the deal we had not so long ago. It was time for the king to get out his silk pyjamas, line up the Diet Cokes and the Haribos and prepare for his sleepover with the president. If Keir had to suck it up, then so could Charles.
Editor: Its always important when reading the troka of Friedman/Brooks/Stephens that each of these writers is a committed Zionist. So Mr. Friedman’s latest 1465 word ‘essay’ follows in that self-alpogelic tradition! In the body of Friedman’s imagined letter to Trump, there are these paragraphs!
I have zero sympathy for Hamas. I think it is a sick organization that has done enormous damage to the Palestinian cause. It is hugely responsible for the human tragedy that is Gaza today. Hamas’s leadership should have released its hostages and left Gaza a long time ago, removing any excuse for Israel to resume the fighting. But Netanyahu’s plan to reinvade Gaza is not to stand up a moderate alternative to Hamas, led by the Palestinian Authority. It is for a permanent Israeli military occupation, whose unstated goal will be to pressure all Palestinians to leave. That is a prescription for a permanent insurgency — Vietnam on the Mediterranean.
Addressing a conference on May 5 sponsored by the religious Zionist newspaper B’Sheva, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far right finance minister, spoke like a man who couldn’t care less what you think: “We’re occupying Gaza to stay,” he said. “There will be no more entering and leaving.” The local population will be squeezed into a less than a quarter of the Gaza Strip.
As the Haaretz military expert Amos Harel noted: “Since the army will try to minimize casualties, analysts expect it to use particularly aggressive force that will lead to extensive damage to Gaza’s remaining civilian infrastructure. The displacement of the population to the areas of the humanitarian camps, combined with the ongoing shortage of food and medicine, could lead to further mass deaths of civilians. … More Israeli leaders and officers could face personal legal proceedings against them.”
Indeed, this strategy, if executed, may not only trigger more war crime accusations against Israel, but will also inevitably threaten the stability of Jordan and the stability of Egypt. Those two pillars of America’s Middle East alliance structure both fear that Netanyahu aims to drive Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank into their countries, which would surely foment instability that would spill over their borders even if Palestinians themselves did not.
…
Editor: In this context where does Friedman stand ?
…
On the Middle East, you have some good independent instincts, Mr. President. Follow them. Otherwise you need to prepare yourself for this looming reality: Your Jewish grandchildren will be the first generation of Jewish children who will grow up in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state.
“On Tuesday, the Israel Air Force killed nine children, between the ages of 3 and 14. …The Israeli military said that the target was a ‘Hamas command and control center’ and that ‘steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming uninvolved civilians.’… We can continue to ignore the number of Palestinians in the Strip who have been killed — more than 52,000, including around 18,000 children; to question the credibility of the figures, to use all of the mechanisms of repression, denial, apathy, distancing, normalization and justification. None of this will change the bitter fact: Israel killed them. Our hands did this. We must not avert our eyes. We must wake up and cry out loudly: Stop the war.”
Political Cynic.
Further thoughts/considerations:
May 10, 2025
Mr. Friedman’s final comment lacks honesty and veracity, yet the Haaretz editorial displayes what Mr. Friedman cannot muster! What does that demonstraight about @NYT and Mr. Friedman?
Published today at 10:29 am (Paris), updated at 11:45 am
ProfileThe American Robert Francis Prevost’s affiliation with the mendicant order of the Augustinians, known for their commitment to tradition and charity, and his understanding of the Curia contribute to a reassuring image. Grounded in modernity and mindful of the marginalized, his pontificate promises ‘unity’ and collegiality.
When his name was announced, there was a murmur of confusion among the crowd gathered in Saint Peter’s Square, Rome. “Prevost? Who is he?” In the election for the Throne of St. Peter, observers saw him as a serious candidate due to his ability to unite and bring peace to the Church. However, to the general public, Robert Francis Prevost, the 267th pope of the Catholic Church and the first to come from the United States, is unknown.
When white smoke appeared from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel on Thursday, May 8, shortly after 6 pm, onlookers were still betting on the victory of Pietro Parolin, former second in command to Francis and the anticipated favorite for the papacy. “It will be him, Parolin, with the papal name Paul VII,” predicted two French priests. The speed with which the election was concluded – four rounds of voting, totaling 24 hours of conclave – seemed to support this hypothesis.
But it was Robert Prevost, from the Order of Saint Augustine, who was elected. He took the papal name Leo XIV. This choice places the new pontiff in the continuity of Leo XIII, the pope who forged the Church’s social doctrine, notably through the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), published in 1891. In short, the promise of a pontificate rooted in modernity and concerned for the poor, the marginalized, the excluded – the “peripheries,” as Francis would have said, to whom Leo XIV paid a heartfelt tribute in his first speech.
Interview: The Russian journalist, in an interview with Le Monde, analyzes the militaristic propaganda created by the Kremlin around the end of World War II, celebrated in Russia on May 9, which led to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Sergey Parkhomenko, 61, founder of the Russian news magazine Itogi – created in 1996 in cooperation with the American weekly Newsweek – has not only had a rich career as a journalist He is also behind several civic initiatives, such as Dissernet, a platform that tracks plagiarism in Russian science, and Last Address, which places hundreds of commemorative plaques for victims of Stalinism on buildings in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Yekaterinburg.
Close to the non-governmental organization Memorial, Parkhomenko has lived in exile since 2021, the year when the renowned human rights group, dedicated to the preservation of the memory of victims of Soviet power, was dissolved. Today, he leads the project Redkollegia (“editorial board”), funded by philanthropist businessman Boris Zimin, which rewards Russian journalists unaffiliated with the government for the quality of their work.
What do the 1945 victory commemorations represent in today’s Russia, currently involved in a war it initiated?
Since Vladimir Putin, the change has been dramatic. I remember that before, at my grandparents’ house, there was a set table and friends were invited, but it was above all a celebration of pain, of remembrance. And then, the celebrations of the Great Patriotic War [as World War II is called in Russia] became an instrument of militaristic propaganda, a celebration of aggression against everyone under the theme of “We can do it again.”
