By Victor Davis Hanson

There’s two things that ring true about Europeans and their relationship to us Americans.

No. 1, they never feel or they never admit that they’re emulated. They admit they’re affected by the ill effects they think of America, but they’re not influenced by us.

And No. 2, they’re the stalwarts of democracy. We have these pathologies of swinging hard to the right, or we’re yokels, or we’re anti-democratic, or we’re MAGA fanatics. But the Europeans are pristine Democrats, we’re told. And they’re independent of America.

But something’s happened that belies those two allegations or assumptions.

No. 1, suddenly, Europe is copying the lawfare of the United States. Remember that Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Jack Smith, and E. Jean Carroll, in civil and criminal suits, for four years tried to destroy President Donald Trump. And they had over $400 million in fines that were leveled at one point. And there were 91 felony indictments. I think Alvin Bragg actually convicted him of 32. This was in addition to trying to remove him off the ballot in 20 states and raiding his home.

So, the Europeans wouldn’t do that, would they?

The second thing is that this was a destruction or an attempt to warp democracy, not to let Donald Trump be on the ballot, to put him behind jail bars.

So, let me just tell you what’s going on in Europe. In February, this conservative, which is usually in the media termed a hard-right, far-right group, in Germany, the Alternative for Deutschland, the Alternative for Germany—it won 21% of the vote. It skyrocketed. In some areas of East Germany it won 40%.

Whether you like it or not, it represents democracy. A lot of people are fed up with German energy policy, German immigration policy, German social policy, radical environmentalism. And what did the Germans do? They immediately said, even though they have 152 seats in their parliament, the second-largest, no party—no left-wing, right-wing, centrist party—will make an alliance with them to get a majority of seats under parliamentarian democracy to run the government.

In other words, even though they had the greatest increase in their popularity, they were ostracized because somebody declared them unfit, even though they had a mandate of the people to be the second-most representative party of Germany.

In March, in Romania, a kind of an obscure conservative, right-wing candidate came out of nowhere, Calin Georgescu. And he, in the first round, he came in at the top. And he was predicted, this May, that he might be the elected prime minister of Romania.

And what happened? They declared him unfit. They said that he was—does this sound familiar—colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin’s puppet. And therefore, they removed him from further consideration. They took him off the ballot.

There was no supreme court above that court, as there was in the United States, that said, “You can’t do that.” So, he’s off the ballot. He can’t be even considered, even though he was the largest vote-getter.

And then we come to this week’s news that Marine Le Pen, the head of the most conservative party in France, who has got enormous momentum—enormous momentum because of the violence of radical Islamic groups inside France, the open borders, the dissatisfaction with the blank check given Ukraine, etc. I could go on and on. Many of the same problems that we’re dealing with here—the far-left agenda.

It was probably scheduled to get more votes than anybody. And she had a pretty good chance, in three or four years, to replace French President Emmanuel Macron. And the high court did what? They said that she had expropriated funds, campaign funds. In other words, that she was blending—does this sound familiar—blending her own campaign with funds allotted from the European Union for other purposes. In other words, there was a distinction without a difference.

In other words, they only applied this law to her because they were terrified she was going to win in the next presidential election.

First published in the Daily Signal

By Bruce Bawer

n March 31, Norway’s biggest TV channel, state-owned NRK1, broadcast a special half-hour program, beginning at 9:15 PM — prime time, mind you! — entitled Festen etter fasten, or “The Party after the Fast.” The occasion was the end of Ramadan, the holy month of dawn-to-dusk fasting on the Islamic calendar, and the beginning of Eid al-Fitr, during which Muslims celebrate the end of the fast.

“Be a part of the year’s Eid celebration!” read the cheery program note on NRK’s website. “NRK invites you to a party with exciting guests, delicious food, and great music!” Who could resist?

Under Islam, eating and fasting are, like everything else, a big deal. In many (if not most) Muslim countries, eating in public during Ramadan can lead to arrest — and worse. In Western Europe, this isn’t the case. Yet. But hey, it’s only a matter of time. You can see it coming. In recent years, imams in Western Europe have increasingly thundered that non-Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to eat in public during the holy month — it’s simply, they say, a matter of respect (as is every other attempt to control the lives of infidels). And every time Ramadan rolls around, there seem to be even more videos than there were last time in which you can see Muslims badgering fellow passengers on public transport for daring to sip a soda in their presence.

Meanwhile, more and more leaders across Western Europe are taking part in Ramadan-related activities. That sound you heard on March 2 was Queen Elizabeth rolling over in her grave while King Charles welcomed 360 guests to Buckingham Palace’s first Iftar meal. Iftar, of course, is the meal that’s eaten after sundown during Ramadan. (Yes, I hate knowing these things too.) On March 31, Charles issued a statement in which he wished British Muslims a happy Eid.

No word yet on whether he issued a statement congratulating British Muslims for breathing.

Anyway, back to NRK’s big Eid show. It was hosted by NRK news anchor Rima Iraki (42), born in East Berlin to parents from the Levant who brought her to Norway when she was five. She had four guests, three of them men. Hkeem (27), born in Oslo to immigrants from Ghana and Niger, is a famous pop singer. Tarik Elyounoussi (37), born in Morocco, came to Norway at eleven and was a successful athlete, playing for soccer teams all over Europe. Arman Surizehi (32), born in Lillehammer to Iranian parents, is a well-known actor on Norwegian TV.

There was also one woman: Ayesha Wolasmal (38), who was born in Oslo to Afghan refugees and who studied terrorism and radicalization at King’s College London. She’s been a diplomat and foreign-aid worker, and in 2021 was among those who were evacuated in Biden’s brilliant Kabul airlift; last year she published a book about the Taliban.

Let it be said that none of the men were bearded. Nor, unlike many of the Muslim men whom one sees in the streets of Oslo, did any of them wear a djellaba (robe) or taqiya (skullcap). Both of the women, for their part, were expertly made up and wore tasteful jewelry. Both had long, luxuriant auburb hair, which was not covered by a hijab. And everyone was dressed elegantly.

The premise of the show was simple. Sitting in a pleasant room that was decorated with candles, around a beautifully set table that was covered with heaping plates of food, Iraki and her guests talked about their lives, about how they’d found their way to their vocations, and, at least briefly, about the role that Islam has played in their lives.

The conversation was charming, amusing, and honest. And, above all, civilized. A couple of the men bonded over being told by their parents that their career choices were bringing shame to their families. Several of the participants discussed the ways in which they’d had to break with their family traditions in order to have the lives they have now. None of them seemed to be terribly religious; perhaps one or more of them aren’t really believing Muslims at all. (Apostate Muslims, to be sure, tend not to announce such things to the world, given that the Islamic punishment for apostasy is death.)

It was interesting to observe the way in which Iraki and her guests conducted themselves. Often, when Muslim women in Norway are obliged to socialize with men who aren’t in their families, they’re accompanied by male relatives serving as chaperones. That didn’t happen here. On the contrary, the women interacted with the men in an easy way and on an equal footing; and the men, in turn, treated them with respect. There was a good deal of laughter. When it was time for dessert, the group moved into the adjoining room, which contained a wall of shelves filled with books, and was served cakes by a handsome young man who gave off very non-heterosexual vibes.

In short, aside from the menu and some of the clothing choices, these were five highly Westernized people sharing an entirely Westernized experience. In no way was it representative of the social lives of most Muslims in Norway.

Whom, I wondered, did NRK think it was kidding? Maybe a few unworldly Norwegians in remote parts of the frozen far north, where Muslims are still relatively thin on the ground, might be persuaded that this half-hour was presenting a realistic image of Muslims in Norway. But any Norwegian who lives in a reasonably large town or city knows better. And Norwegian Muslims themselves certainly weren’t fooled.

Watching this show, I imagined Muslim husbands all over east Oslo furiously turning off the TV lest their wives get fancy ideas about what their lives might be like without Islamic social control. And I pictured their imams beginning to write splenetic sermons about the show.

For my part, toward the end of Festen etter Fasten, I surprised myself by breaking into tears. Why? Because I was thinking about all the Muslim women in Norway who’ve never had and never will have the opportunity — an opportunity taken for granted by non-Muslim Norwegians — to sit comfortably at a table like that and speak their minds freely with a group of decent, intelligent, and accomplished people. And I was thinking something else, too; good God, if only this were the reality of European Islam!

But it wasn’t. It was fantasy. It was propaganda.

Every Christmas Eve, NRK broadcasts hours of live programming, complete with cooking and baking and holiday music, that reflects the way in which most Norwegians actually celebrate Christmas. This Eid show was apparently supposed to be a Muslim version of that. But it presented a thoroughly phony picture of Islam — a picture founded in the naive European illusions of half a century ago, when European politicians opened up their borders to armies of Muslim immigrants in the foolish belief that the only significant differences between Islam and Christianity were culinary, sartorial, and ceremonial.

Patently, the aim of this show was to make us all feel that everything’s just plain dandy — that the Muslims among us are no different from us. Instead, it served as one more reminder that NRK isn’t only a TV channel whose hefty budget is covered by the extortionate taxes that are squeezed out of us every year; it’s Norway’s largest and best-financed deliverer of what laughingly goes by the name of news. Alas, much if not most of what NRK presents as news, day in and day out, is hard-core, reality-challenged propaganda of the first order. Which is most assuredly what they were serving up in Festen etter Fasten.

First published in the American Spectator

By Gary Fouse

 There have been polls recently that indicate that a growing percentage of the younger generation of Americans believes that the Holocaust was a myth or was greatly exaggerated.  Given the state of education in America and the resurgence of anti-Semitism, largely inspired by the pro-Palestinian movement, this might not seem surprising.

Even though it makes no sense whatsoever.

Aside from the photographic and film evidence gathered at concentration camp sites and the obvious question of where those 6 million people disappeared to, there are other points, which, all too often, are forgotten.

First of all, Germany has acknowledged it.

In the aftermath of the war, it is true that Germany was late in coming to terms with the Holocaust. In West Germany, the standard response was: “I was never a Nazi”, or “We knew nothing about it”. In the former East Germany, the standard position was that only West Germans were Nazis, which was ridiculous on its face. In the late 1960s, however, with youthful unrest that was sweeping the W young Germans started asking hard questions to their parents’ generation as to the Holocaust and other atrocities committed in the war. Added to the evidence that had previously been presented in the numerous war crimes trials, there was no option but for Germany to face it head-on. Since then, several generations of German youth have been fully taught in schools about what happened during the Nazi period. In addition, there was the much-publicized 1970 visit of then-Chancellor Willy Brandt to Warsaw, where he knelt before the Warsaw Ghetto monument.

So, if the Holocaust was a myth or greatly exaggerated, why would Germany fully acknowledge its guilt? Why would Germany pay reparations to Jewish survivors?

Secondly, and more specifically, there were many major perpetrators who confessed to their participation in the mass murders of Jews. None other than Rudolph Hoess, who was the commandant of Auschwitz during a period of its maximum activity, confessed after being captured. He was brought to Nuremberg, where he testified in the first (and most famous-there were 13 in all) war crimes trial against the major defendants (Hermann Goering, etc). He fully described the process of gassing arriving Jews at the Birkenau extermination camp. In addition, during his captivity, Hoess put his confession into writing, which has become a book. The English edition is entitled: “Death dealer-The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant of Auschwitz, by Rudolph Hoess, Da Capo Press, 1996. Hoess was eventually transferred to Poland, where he stood trial, was convicted, and hanged at Auschwitz itself.

He was not the only one.

Paul Blobel was the commander of a unit that was part of Einsatzgruppe C, one of 4 such units that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Their task was to round up civilians, Jews, and partisans in occupied areas and murder them. Einsatzgruppe C  was active in Ukraine, and it was in Kiev that Blobel oversaw the infamous Babi Yar massacre of some 33,000 Jews in September 1941. Blobel was also active in disinterring murdered civilians and burning their bodies to erase all evidence of the mass massacres as the Wehrmacht was retreating before advancing Soviet forces.

In 1947-48, Blobel and others stood trial in Nuremberg as part of the Einsatzgruppen trial. Without remorse, he described his actions, but only admitted to 10-15,000 deaths. The court found he was guilty of many more, possibly 60,000. In 1951, he was hanged at Landsberg Prison in Bavaria.   Here is a post-war deposition by Blobel from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel.

Another defendant in that trial was Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of Einsatzgruppen D, which was mostly active in southern Ukraine, Romania, and Moldavia (Moldova). Prior to his own trial, Ohlendorf testified at the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals on January 3, 1946. He described the orders his unit was operating under and his own role in the murder of 90,000 Jews and other civilians. His testimony can be read here.  He was later convicted in the Einsatzgruppen trial and was hanged at Landsberg Prison in 1951.

Then there was Adolf Eichmann, who stood trial in Israel for his crimes in 1961, was convicted, and hanged the following year. He did not deny the Holocaust or his role. He was merely following orders. Here is his final plea to the court.

The Einsatzgruppen, like other units and death camps, were required to send detailed reports to their superiors in Berlin as to the numbers of Jews and other civilians killed. Many of these documents were recovered and used as evidence in the trials.

Aside from the names above, there were others who admitted to their roles in the Holocaust, and there were other trials aside from the Nuremberg trials. Trials were held against war criminals in Dachau, and the British conducted their own trials in their zone of occupation, including the trial of female guards in various death camps (several of whom were hanged). However, I think the point has been made. In their book, Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust, Michael J. Bazyler and Frank M. Tuerkheimer (New York University Press 2014), make the point that in virtually all of the above trials conducted against Nazi war criminals after World War 2, virtually none of the defendants denied the Holocaust. Their various defenses were that they were following orders, were innocent, or had no knowledge of the events, let alone participation. But none of them tried to make the case that the Holocaust was a lie or did not happen.

Yet today, there are people who deny the Holocaust. How can they be so ignorant? There are several reasons; hatred of Jews, Israel, or both, being indoctrinated, and the lamentable fact that this history is no longer receiving the attention it deserves in our schools and universities, especially at a time when it is more relevant than ever. With the passage of time and the passing of the people who were either victims, perpetrators, or witnesses, the first-hand accounts are silenced. The field is increasingly left open to the propagandists, the conspiracy theorists, and the simple lunatics and idiots.

The documentation is still there, however. It is incontrovertible and must be used to counter the lies. It is incomprehensible that what people from Hermann Goering to Rudolph Hoess to Adolf Eichmann did not deny, what the nation of Germany does not deny, is denied by people today, either out of sheer ignorance or sheer malice.

By Phyllis Chesler

The elite “woke” faculty and administration at Columbia and, for that matter, at all the Ivy-League universities in America, are insisting that violence, harassment, bullying, blocking access to traffic, to classrooms, and buildings, as well as destroying property, are protected by civil, free speech, and academic freedom rights.

They are dead wrong, but it’s almost impossible to reason with cult members. Is the increasing violence that characterizes “peaceful” protests funded by secular left-wing and religious Islamist money? And is such violence considered permissible because it is seen as righteously revolutionary? How much are our campus encampments influenced by Jihadi spectaculars in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa?

I began writing about this back in 2004, and over the years, a myriad of other universities, human rights organizations, and major media outlets have followed the Ivy League and Democratic Party’s yellow brick road.

Torch a city–but if you do it in the name of Black Lives Matter–and to “protest” alleged police violence–it is considered a “peaceful protest.”

Curse, terrify, threaten, and beat up a visibly Jewish male or female student and that, too, is “free speech” expressing itself peacefully.

Are the anti-Zionist/pro-Palestine free-speechers totally unaware that their demonstrations in America are fueling Hamas’s, Hezbollah’s, Qatar’s, and Iran’s prolonged, multi-pronged, and deadly assaults on Israel? Is this exactly what they’re after as they play-act being the most virtuous of victims?

Have those Israelis who have been hotly protesting Netanyahu’s war-time rule ever considered raging against and actually blocking Hamas and Iran rather than trying to bring down a democratically elected government with which they happen to disagree? (They lost. They refuse to accept it. If they can’t win–they’d rather have the entire government fail.)

Ahem. Whom does this resemble?

I am totally in favor of cleaning out the Augean Stables that American universities have become–an almost impossible task–but I appreciate the concerns of those who fear the consequences of a chain-saw approach. I understand the fears about deportation without due process, evidence, a trial, and a decision–but do we really want pro-Hamas Jihadists on our campuses, violent criminals on our streets? For how long are we willing to fund their lawyers, trials, and appeals, and pay for their food and housing?

An American judge told me that this is precisely why America is exceptional; this is why we are levels above most of the world. Do we want illegal child rapists, pimps, human traffickers, drug lords, and Jihadists living among us? Don’t we already have enough of their home-grown counterparts?

An Israeli protestor said that they will not descend to the level of barbarians, that in their view, it is quintessentially “Jewish” to stand for peace and for a two-state solution, even if both are very dangerous illusions in the Middle East. Are these Israelis willing to commit suicide for the sake of their ethical principles rather than fight back to survive the genocidal war being waged against them?

Please allow me to recommend two very enlightening articles: First, Gadi Taub’s current piece up at Tablet, “Netanyahu Takes on Israel’s Deep State,” and Irina Velitskaya’s article in Commentary titled “The Coalition for the Sentimental and the Homicidal. There’s a word for it in Russian: poshlost.”

Finally, last night I again chanced upon the film Operation Finale, directed by Chris Weitz and starring Ben Kingsley, Oscar Issac, Lior Raz, and others. The film portrays how the Shin Bet captured Adolph Eichmann, who was leading a safe and quiet life in Argentina, and brought him back to stand trial in Jerusalem. It was a daring exploit, perhaps a bit on the shady side, but when faced with monsters, it is a better choice than what? Just shooting him down dead in South America, versus using him, but in a fair trial, to show the world what the Nazis had done? I did not mind, not one bit, that the judges sentenced him to hang.

Did you? Thus, parenthetically, how long does Israel have to pay to feed, shelter, educate, and provide medical services to Jihadists with blood on their hands?

First published in Phyllis’ Newsletter

By Victor Davis Hanson

I don’t want to go back and look at the 2020 elections, especially, but there’s some developments in the news this week that suggest that we might.

Remember, the Left said that anybody who had doubts about the balloting or the procedures or the change in laws of voting in 2020 was an election denialist. And they always cited Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, kind of conspiracy theorists that were saying computers were communicating with China or Venezuela.

We’re not talking about any of that. We’re talking about the fact that in 2020, 158 million people voted. Four years later, only 155 million. That’s only happened, I think, two or three times in American history, where four years later, fewer people voted. But the country grew by 11 million people. So, that was kind of odd that we went from an 11 million increase in population but we decreased by 3 million voters.

The other thing that was very odd was that traditionally we only had about 40% of people voting before Election Day, either through mail-in balloting or early balloting. And that was very apparent in 2018, when a traditional 35% to 40%, depending on the state, did not vote on Election Day. But given the changes that were democratically inspired, on Election Day, in 2020, 70% of the people had already voted. And about 55% to 60% of those, even higher in some states, were Democrats.

So, there were changes that we really didn’t ponder at the time and we haven’t fully absorbed yet. But here’s what I’m getting at, this week, a former Pfizer executive, who now works for a British pharmaceutical company, GSK, was accused by former employees that had worked for him when he was CEO, or, I shouldn’t say CEO, in charge of the vaccine program at Pfizer.

And their accusation—they took notes during meetings, so it’s documented. And even the Justice Department under President Donald Trump now is looking at it. But here was their narrative, that Pfizer, for months, had said the results of their early testing of the efficacy and the safety of the Pfizer spike protein anti-COVID-19 vaccine was known. And they were going to announce it sometime between early October and late October. And I remember this. I wrote a column about it.

And then something magical happened. There were people on the Pfizer board, allegedly, that put pressure to delay the announcement. And delay the announcement they did.

In other words, Donald Trump was saying that we have done something no one else has done. We have given certain concessions, in retrospect, wisely or unwisely, to Moderna and Pfizer. And they, under Operation Warp Speed, we have a vaccine that they claim is 100%—it was not—guarantee about either being infected or infectious. And they delayed it.

Why did they delay it? Because they did not want Donald Trump to be able to say, on Election Day, “I got the vaccine.” They wanted Joe Biden to say, “After the Trump, after the election, only then did it come.” In fact, so profound was that about-face that Joe Biden actually said that no one had been vaccinated when he became president.

That was a complete lie. Because after the election, when Pfizer thought that Donald Trump was safely defeated, they announced it. And then, in November, December, and January, 17 million people were vaccinated.

First published in the Daily Signal

By Patrick Keeney

It’s curious how the places we love—even briefly—leave their mark. When they suffer, something in us stirs.

When I heard about the earthquake that struck Burma, it felt less like a news event and more like a terrible tremor through memory itself. For me, it was not merely a natural disaster, but a kind of metaphor. Burma has been trembling for years, since the military coup of February 2021, when generals seized power from a fragile, imperfect democracy and plunged the country into terror and silence. Thousands have been imprisoned, tortured, or killed. Entire villages have been torched; over two million people have been displaced. And yet the generals continue to speak of “order” and “unity,” as if their rule were not written in blood.

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

So begins Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s ghostly novel, and one of the most haunting opening lines in English literature. That sentence has always lingered with me. I, too, have dreamt of a Manderley—not the crumbling, haunted Cornish estate, but a very real place: the storied Burmese city of Mandalay.

There is no connection between the two, save for a phonetic echo. But Mandalay—the word itself—is a kind of incantation. For Canadians raised in the twilight of the British Empire, it conjures romance and reverie, owing no small debt to Kipling’s famous lines:

“On the road to Mandalay, / Where the old Flotilla lay…”

Kipling never visited the city, but his verse embedded it deep in the imaginations of schoolboys like me. I memorized those lines without understanding them. Years later, I would find myself standing on the banks of the Irrawaddy River, and suddenly they returned—clear, familiar, ghostlike.

I came to Mandalay not as a tourist, but as a guest. My Burmese host is a poet, journalist, and filmmaker. She opened the city to me, not as a series of guidebook entries, but as something more intimate: a place of quiet endurance, beating beneath the layers of history, hardship, and human resilience.

In Mandalay, as across Burma, teashops abound. These are not mere cafés, but informal forums—spaces where conversation unfolds. We sat with monks in saffron robes, drank tea, and swapped stories. A petite teenager, with a face like and angela and a voice like a foghorn, announced orders to the kitchen behind her.

Just around the corner from the teashop stood a modest café, where my friend hosted film festivals, using cinema as a tool to nurture democratic ideals and stir the public conscience. At the time, electricity was unreliable, so screenings were powered by generators—at least until the military arrived and shut them down, as they always did. But even that was part of the pattern: light, briefly cast, before the darkness returned.

The selections were modest—short documentaries, smuggled footage, the occasional feature with subversive undertones—but the impact was real. These gatherings were part salon, part classroom, and part act of defiance.

Today, many of those same filmmakers and curators have found their way across the border, into exile. In Chiang Mai, Thailand, the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) hosts an annual film festival—a gathering place for exiled artists and dissidents who continue to tell the truth with their cameras.

We wandered markets pungent with spice and sweat. We visited the humble restaurant once favoured by Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD)—the party that stood, however tenuously, for democratic reform.

Even then, Burma—officially Myanmar—lived under the long shadow of military rule. The people did not speak openly about politics. They had learned, through bitter experience, that words could be dangerous. Informers were everywhere. Even a careless remark in a teashop could lead to a knock on the door at midnight. And yet, they carried themselves with quiet dignity, with a kind of moral poise born of long endurance.

I recall an old bookseller near Zegyo Market. His shop was little more than a plank balanced between crates, shaded by a fraying tarp. Like most booksellers in Burma, he kept a dog-eared copy of Orwell’s Burmese Days, tucked between faded schoolbooks and mildewed novels. Orwell remains a revered figure among the Burmese, not because he was British, but because he understood something essential about the psychology of oppression. In that moment, as I handed him a few crumpled kyat, we shared a silent understanding. The book, like the man, had survived.

Mandalay, like Burma itself, felt suspended between past and present, between memory and erasure. Once a royal capital, it was home to Burma’s last king before the British exiled him. The palace, now rebuilt, stands as a poignant reminder of vanished grandeur. The monks still chant before dawn; temple bells still ring through the haze. But the city has changed. So have we all.

I hadn’t thought of Mandalay in some time. Life carries us forward with such haste that we seldom pause to look back. But then came the news: an earthquake had shaken the region. Buildings collapsed. Lives were lost. A city already bowed under poverty and repression had been struck again—this time by nature.

The earthquake became a metaphor for me. Burma has been quaking for years now, under boots and bullets. The fault lines are political, not geological. And yet, amid the rubble, the people endure. Monks march in protest, unarmed and unafraid. Teachers run underground schools for children barred from the classroom. Artists and writers—many now exiled in border towns like Mae Sot—persist with quiet defiance. Their resistance is not with guns, but with truth and beauty.

I think of the old bookseller again. George Orwell, who served as a colonial policeman in Burma, came to loathe the British Empire, writing that it “corrupts both the colonizer and the colonized.” He would later speak with prophetic clarity about tyranny and truth: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” he warned. “Lies will pass into history.”

The people of Mandalay, and of Burma more broadly, have learned to resist that erasure. Their witness reminds us that freedom is not merely a Western luxury—it is a human necessity.

Last night, I dreamt I went to Mandalay again. My friend, the poet, was beside me.  We walked the dusty streets at twilight. The bells of the Mahamuni Pagoda rang through smoke and stillness. We did not speak of despair. We spoke of hope.

Because hope—fragile, flickering, yet resilient-is the one thing the generals cannot crush. It lives in the hearts of the Burmese people, as it lives in Mandalay.

An earlier version of this article was first published in the Epoch Times

By William Corden

By Conrad Black

This, like the robust European response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine—which has largely gone unnoticed due to the Trump administration’s complaints that the United States has been paying an inordinate share of the cost of the war—demonstrates that the European ambition to retain its independence and be a substantial force in the world is greater than was readily appreciated, both in Russia and North America.

The European Union on balance has been a disappointment. Twenty years ago, its collective GDP was approximately equal to that of the United States, and today it is only about half of U.S. GDP. Part of this uncompetitive result is the defection of the United Kingdom from the EU, but the great majority of European underperformance is due to overregulation, excessive taxation, and the compulsive massaging about income in Danegeld to the working class and the small farmer.

The reasons for this expensive placebo for the masses of Europe can be easily understood by anyone with even a cursory knowledge of European history. But as the recent German elections indicate—and even the hesitant efforts of the Macron regime in France confirm—and as Italian prime minister Giorgio Meloni has proclaimed, a course correction is necessary to assure European economic growth and a rising standard of living. Europe is also in desperate need of a higher birth rate among the majority nationalities, or at least the ability to attract assimilable immigration, to ensure that the old continent does not succumb to either geriatric perils or the agitation of immigrant communities actively hostile to the societies into which they have moved.

The shift in U.S. foreign policy being enacted by the Trump administration—though it could have been better enunciated, particularly in respect to Canada—is a logical response to the evolution of strategic events in the world since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago.

The United States has no natural ambition to be involved in other parts of the world; its only concern is not to be threatened. Unlike empires built on steady expansion like Rome or colonial projection like Britain and France, the United States populated and developed the great center of North America, but beyond that has never remained long in any place where its presence was not desired, as it demonstrated in Cuba and the Philippines. It has absolutely no desire to maintain a large military presence in Europe, and only did so to keep potential threats far away from its own shores. That was a strategic policy that commended itself in days when Germany was, as far as the Anglo-French democracies were concerned, an unreliable and potentially dangerous country. It was long a truism to say that Germany was too late unified, had never determined if it was an Eastern or Western-facing country, and could not assure its own security without frightening or violating its neighbors.

President Eisenhower overcame the resistance of Mr. Churchill and of the French government in bringing West Germany into NATO and approving its partial rearmament in 1954–55. President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush were essential to the reunification of Germany, which Prime Minister Thatcher, President Mitterand, and President Gorbachev favored; only the United States had no fear of a united Germany. Now that Germany is comfortable in the cocoon of economic and military allies, and all the states that were its mortal enemies to the West are its allies now, Western Europe has four or five times the economic strength of a Russia that only contains half of the population of the old Soviet Union. And Western Europe can easily match and surpass Russia in military capacity.

The United States is now responding to the threat from China, as it did to the threat from the Soviet Union, by assembling a containment strategy. To be maximally effective, this will include Russia as well as India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, and, depending on events, Taiwan. Europe and America, though their relations should always be cordial, do not need each other as they did when the USSR was threatening all of them. Europe is not a serious force in the Pacific, and its military role should now be to ensure the security of Western and Central Europe and maintain a general alliance with the advanced countries of the Commonwealth, the United States, and its Pacific allies. Ideally, NATO would be reconfigured as a worldwide defensive alliance of democratic countries.

But in the meantime, Europe is absolutely correct to assure its own defense—which it has the means and the technical ability to do—and those European countries that wish political integration should achieve it while those that wish to retain their sovereignty should do so in alliance with federal Europe, the UK, as well as Canada and the United States.

Beneath all the bluster and posturing, international relations are devolving sensibly.

First published in the Epoch Times

I know this because

1. I can see the bl**dy crescent moon with my own eyes over the roof of my neighbour’s bungalow.
2. The BBC said so and showed Eid Service live from Bradford Mosque at 10.50 this morning. I was at work.
3. For those who were at work this morning Celebrity Eid is on BBC1 in an hour. I’m going to bed.
4. Somebody over the back is letting off fireworks.
5. Also from Bradford, more lights tell me so.

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