Category: Articles
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Talk is Cheap
It’s Saturday morning in Luxembourg City and I’m readying for another session of keyboard bashing. The ritual includes the thick espresso lungo and a quick read through of the grapevine to see whether I’ve missed any last minute oddities coming from the island. Sure enough, even though it’s barely nine of the clock, some eager…
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J’accuse: Conscientious objectors and objectionable consciences
Last Thursday’s UN Resolution 1973/11 did more than just belatedly clear the Libyan air of the one-sided aerial assaults by Gaddafi’s troops. The resolution also cleared the air of a lingering suspicion that the scheming Colonel had managed to get away with hypnotising the international community into an inert bubble of passive gobsmackedness. He had…
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J'accuse : Unbearable Lightness
There is a German expression “Einmal ist keinmal” which translates to “once does not count” or “once is nothing”. If something happens only once then it might as well not have happened at all. Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is an examination of human existence from the point of view of the idea…
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J'accuse : They love me all
“To men fighting for their lives day by day in the foulest of physical conditions it was nauseating to read, day after day, the lying official communiqués in the Press.” I came across this quote in a book by BBC journalist John Simpson (Unreliable Sources, Macmillan 2010) that is turning out to be an excellent…
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J'accuse : Revolting
“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” The…
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J'accuse : Fight for Your Right (to Party)
So the Rais is definitely out and has rushed off to a caravanserai off Sharm el-Sheikh. Thirty years have passed since Sadat’s assassination (and Mubarak’s rise to power), 59 since Nasser’s 1952 revolution and 92 since the first Egyptian revolution (of the modern era) of 1919. Symbolically, each revolution had centred around Tahrir Square (Liberation…