Enjoying the view from Limbo
Sleep tight.– All this, so that seventy million frightened children may dream unto their graves, and finally unto their own private parcel of hell, in the warm cocoon of the most shameful mass delusion in world history. If their idol dies first, what will they do? I almost typed “frightened American children,” but decided not to sully the memory of a great country...
Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published March 20, 2025 · Last modified March 27, 2025
Since my website has essentially become a repository of judgments and reflections that almost no one currently alive on this planet will ever read, let alone care about, why not open it up today for the words of another man in a similar situation, though one whose voice speaks with considerably more practical urgency than mine? His pleas will fall on ears at...
I see a headline informing me that Donald Trump is giving a speech to Congress this evening (U.S. time), which I am told I can watch “live.” I am not even remotely tempted. First of all, I have a habit of not listening to Vladimir Putin’s official spokesmen, regardless of which language they happen to be butchering. Second, if you have endlessly mounting...
Answers to a few of the near-universal talking points apropos the deliberate Vance-Trump ambush of Volodymyr Zelensky: This was not, not for one second, “a shouting match.” A shouting match is an argument in which both sides are shouting. Zelensky never shouted, never lost his cool, but merely expressed his points with a certain amount of exasperation and animation which were clearly and...
Since there is nothing to say about this White House mafia act that cannot be seen and judged by the whole world now, thanks to Trump insisting that the meeting ought to be held on live television for the sake of entertainment, I will restrain myself from too much overarching condemnation of what the Trump administration is doing at this moment. God and...
The Czech Republic, a country with peculiar historical authority to speak of the moral crime of major nations negotiating away another nation’s sovereign territory for their own falsely perceived, cowardice-motivated advantage, has issued an official statement declaring support for Volodymyr Zelensky’s legitimacy as Ukrainian president, and the inviolability of Ukraine’s territorial integrity at the hands of tyrannical aggression. On the first point, they...
From Raymond Aron’s Peace and War (1966): In 1938 France tried to deter Hitler from attacking Czechoslovakia: Hitler was not impressed, and Frenchmen and Englishmen preferred Czech capitulation to the risk of having to carry out their commitments, i.e., their threat. In 1939 Great Britian took the initiative of signing a mutual assistance treaty with Poland in the hope of deterring Hitler by...
The problem with Donald Trump’s political rise, as I have said many times, is not so much Trump himself, but rather the tens of millions of Americans who are sanguine — nay, enthusiastic — about this buffoonish Putin agent and anti-American demagogue running roughshod over their country’s traditions, decimating its alliances, disrespecting its constitution and its institutions, befouling its public discourse, turning her...
The most cowardly president in U.S. history, in one of his new administration’s ceremonial first lies, ordered one of his most prominent and tongue-weary bootlickers, Marco “Yes Master” Rubio (aka Marco the Martian-Hunter), to “pause” all foreign aid, excluding military aid to Israel and Egypt, which is to say including military aid to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Insult-in-Chief himself, in part of his feverish...
Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 9, 2025 · Last modified January 31, 2025
Of war and worms.– I have taught a Russian girl whose serious beau, whom she hoped to marry, was a Ukrainian fighting on the front lines to defend his homeland against Vladimir Putin’s — not “Russia’s,” so let us please put that lie away for good, but Putin’s — brutal and unprovoked assault on her boyfriend’s country. He had already been wounded and...
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