Status Updates From The New Old World

The Cyprus piece reads like a political thriller. Patriarch-turned-sovereignist-hero, betrayal by the NATO-dominated motherland to the advantage of the NATO-favoured enemy juggernaut, assassination attempts, pogroms, communists and resuscitated fascists ... Had me hooked in a way the pieces on Germany and France are existentially unable to.

Gives me urge to write something comparative on cyprus malta left politics.

Ok it was good already but the Italy pieces are stellar.

Feels slightly dated (written right before the banking crisis, concerning Le Pen Sr, Oskar Lafontaine as an SPD cadre,...) but enlightening wrt Euro integration 1945-2005. Anderson buffets you with party-political, cultural, social and economic concatenations, but his elegant argumentation functions as a sturdy guiderope.

Very disappointing. Rather bitty, focuses on EU personalities with out relating to the real EU project-strengthening EU capital in relation to US.

In 2007 there was a resolution in US congress to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, but it was quashed after a lobbying campaign by the Turkish embassy - 'Meanwhile, major Jewish organizations - AIPAC, ADL, and others, far from expressing any solidarity with victims of another genocide,were closeted with [Turkey] in Washington discussing how to deny it.'

RIP Armenia.

(Was genocide then something unprecedented? Pogroms were nothing new, neither in the Russian nor the Ottoman Empire, but by xxth century standards their fatalities were fairly low. Mass deportations occurred, but not mass exterminations. The crucial context of the Armenian genocide was war.)

Possibly Trump is really more like Berlusconi than Mussolini (much less Hitler) - a clown and corrupt businessman, but without any serious ideological commitments. According to Anderson, B really was not a radically right-wing ruler. His only serious program in power was to pass legislation to protect himself from being prosecuted for corruption.

"Neither Wilhelmine Imperialism, nor Nazism, nor Stalinism, are serious threats today. A constant preoccupation with them can easily become a screen for more pressing issues, as in Freudian terms an obsession with imaginary dangers typically functions as a displacement - that is, repression- of quite other, real problems."

After a discussion of the broad European complicity in the war on terror, 'Not a single European government has conceded any guilt, while all continue imperturbably holding forth on human rights. We are in the world of Ibsen - updated for postmoderns: pillars of society, pimping for torture.'