Greece: the explosion of a revolution
MY NEXT scheduled visit to Athens is only four months away, and I guess the city will still look pretty much the way it did last time I was there, its skyline dominated as ever by the Parthenon and the Acropolis. But in social and political terms, Greece is going to feel very different. Such [...]
Syria: when confusion trumps solidarity
ON AT least a few issues, political clarity should come easily to the left. To paraphrase George Orwell only slightly, when we see a government murdering thousands of its own citizens, we shouldn’t have to ask whose side we are on. Yet as Syria crosses the undefined threshold between mass unrest and de facto civil [...]
North Korea: once and future Kim
THE Democratic People’s Republic of Korea certainly isn’t democratic. It doesn’t give a hang about the wellbeing of the bulk of its people, and it is a hereditary monarchy in all but name. Still, it is on the Korean peninsula, and by the standards of accuracy that prevail in the state media, one out of [...]
Iraq and the Arab Spring: a thought experiment
VERY few things about the political state of Iraq can accurately be described as clear. But now that the flag has been cased and the last 4,000 US troops are on the way home, some sort of preliminary balance sheet is finally possible. As president Obama told the troops at the military base in Fort [...]
European Union: gamechanger for the left
I’M sure Milton Friedman would have appreciated the irony. The neoclassical economic prescriptions developed by him and others in the name of competition and freedom of choice is about to be awarded a continent-wide ideological monopoly, by force of state decree. If Merkel and Sarkozy get the new treaty they need to save the euro, [...]
Europe: the last touchstone issue in British politics
OPPOSITION to the European Union resonates with the Conservative right to a degree that no issue seems to excite any section of the Labour Party anymore, in ways that are essentially unfathomable to those that stand outside the tribe. For that reason alone, David Cameron’s decision to veto treaty changes designed to prop up the [...]
Cambodia: the trial of Brother Number Two
YOU have to wonder whether Nuon Chea believes his own defence. But the man they called Brother Number Two in 1970s Cambodia now insists that it was the Vietnamese and unspecified ‘rogue elements’ that did the killing in the country’s now world famous killing fields. ‘I don’t want the next generations to misunderstand the history,’ [...]
Marxism in China: it’s a museum piece
SOMEHOW the most vibrant capitalist economy on the planet still lends itself ideological legitimation by claiming adherence to Marxism. What is happening in China plays havoc with key theoretical assumptions of the socialist left and the free market right alike. How does the obvious disjunction between base and superstructure, at least at the level of [...]
Greece, Italy: now markets choose prime ministers
I AM not entitled to vote in either Greece or Italy; even if I were, I would not support either George Papandreou or Silvio Berlusconi, anyway. In the normal run of events, I would greet their departure from office with Zen-like equanimity. But what we have seen in the last week or so is not the [...]
UK Border Agency: let’s sign up to Schengen
ONE of the few political positions that sections of the far left and the free market right alike hold dear is opposition to immigration controls. So I am still not quite sure whether it was the Socialist Workers’ Party or the Adam Smith Institute that sneakily managed to take over the UK Border Agency while [...]
