37 Articles
AMSTERDAM: Whatever happened to the good Europeans, those nice folks in small northern countries who liked to think of themselves as the world champions of liberty and tolerance? Of course, many liberal Europeans are still alive and well. But first in Denmark, then in the Netherlands, and now in Sweden, illiberal, populist parties stirring up …
NEW YORK: Who were those flag-waving, cheering, hollering, singing, and praying Americans who gathered in Washington DC on the last Saturday in August at a rally to “restore the honor” of the United States? This tax-free jamboree of patriotism was ostensibly non-partisan (otherwise it could not have been tax-free). The main organizer and speaker was …
TOKYO: Revolutions, it is often claimed, do not happen when people are desperate. They occur in times of rising expectations. Perhaps this is why they so often end in disappointment. Expectations, usually set too high to begin with, fail to be met, resulting in anger, disillusion, and often in acts of terrifying violence. Japan’s change …
NEW YORK: The flags are already flying, from Holland to Argentina, from Cameroon to Japan. Soon the drums will be beating, the trumpets blowing. Colors will be unfurled, and battle cries will sound. It’s that time again: the World Cup is upon us. The late Rinus Michels, also known as “the General,” coach of the …
NEW YORK: Elites are under siege in every corner of the world. “Tea Party” activists in exurban America rant and rage against the so-called liberal elites of New York, Washington, and Hollywood. In Europe, populist demagogues, such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, rant and rage against the elitist “appeasers” of Islam. In Thailand, red-shirted …
NEW YORK: In his remarkable apology to the Catholics of Ireland (most of that country’s population), Pope Benedict XVI explained why he thought sinful priests were tempted to commit sexual acts with children. It was because of “new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society. Fast-paced …
AMSTERDAM: The Dutch army has been operating as part of NATO in a remote and unruly part of Afghanistan since 2006. Fighting against the Taliban has been heavy at times. Twenty-one Dutch lives have been lost, out of about 1,800 men and women. The Dutch were supposed to have been relieved by troops from a …
NEW YORK: First the Swiss ban minarets. Now the French parliament wants to ban Muslim women from wearing the burqa – the full, face-covering garment worn in orthodox Arab countries, and now adopted by some orthodox non-Arabs – in public places. The hijab, the headscarf that some Muslim women wear, is already banned in French …
TOKYO: 2009 was a good year for China. The Chinese economy still roared ahead in the midst of a worldwide recession. American President Barack Obama visited China, more in the spirit of a supplicant to an imperial court than the leader of the world’s greatest superpower. Even the Copenhagen summit on climate change ended just …
NEW YORK: Switzerland has four mosques with minarets and a population of 350,000 nominal Muslims, mostly Europeans from Bosnia and Kosovo, of which about 13 percent regularly go to prayer. Not a huge problem, one might have thought. Yet 57.5 percent of Swiss voters opted in a referendum for a constitutional ban on minarets, allegedly …
NEW YORK: Twenty years ago, when the Berlin Wall was breached and the Soviet empire was collapsing, only die-hard believers in a communist utopia felt unhappy. A few people, of course, clung to the possibility of what was once called “actually existing socialism. Others criticized the triumphalism of the “new world order promised by George …
NEW YORK: What purpose is Switzerland serving by jailing the renowned Franco-Polish film director Roman Polanski on a 30-year-old warrant? Arrested in 1977 for allegedly raping a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles, Polanski pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of having unlawful sex with a minor. In the belief that his judge, the late Laurence …
NEW YORK: Moods and fashions in Japan often arrive like tsunamis, typhoons, or landslides. After more than 50 years of almost uninterrupted power, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been buried in a general election. Once before, in 1993, change came when a coalition of opposition parties briefly took power, but the LDP still …
NEW YORK: In the afternoon of July 16 two men appeared to be breaking into a fine house in an expensive area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Alerted by a telephone call, a policeman arrived smartly on the scene. He saw one black male standing inside the house and asked him to come out. The man refused. …
NEW YORK: Even before the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, decided to throttle what little legitimacy was left of Iran’s “managed democracy, it was a peculiar system, indeed. Although Iranian citizens had the right to elect their president, the candidates had to be vetted by the Council of Guardians, half of whom were picked by …
NEW YORK: It is a chilling thought that exactly twenty years after the “Tiananmen Massacre few young citizens of the People’s Republic of China have much idea of what happened on that occasion. Many unarmed Chinese citizens were killed by People’s Liberation Army troops on June 4, 1989, not only in the vicinity of Tiananmen …
NEW YORK: Asked in September 2006 whether there was anything wrong with the way American interrogators were handling “high-value prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere, President George W. Bush famously responded: “We don’t torture. The definition of torture is notoriously slippery, but we have known for some time now that the former president was being, …
CHENGDU: Last month saw the 50th anniversary of what Tibetan activists like to call Tibetan National Uprising Day, the day in 1959 when Tibetans in Lhasa revolted against Chinese Communist Party rule. The rebellion was crushed. The Dalai Lama fled to India, and for at least a decade things became a lot worse: many Tibetans …
NEW YORK: Bishop Richard Williamson has some very peculiar, and frankly odious, views: that no Jews were murdered in gas chambers during World War II; that the Twin Towers were brought down by American explosives, not by airplanes, on September 11, 2001; and that Jews are fighting to dominate the world “to prepare the anti-Christ’s …
TOKYO: A Chinese bestseller, entitled The Currency War, describes how Jews are planning to rule the world by manipulating the international financial system. The book is reportedly read in the highest government circles. If so, this does not bode well for the international financial system, which relies on well-informed Chinese to help it recover from …
NEW YORK: With George W. Bush’s presidency about to end, what will happen to the neo-conservatives? Rarely in the history of American politics has a small number of bookish intellectuals had so much influence on foreign policy as the neo-cons had under Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, neither of whom are noted for …
Two far-right parties, the Austrian Freedom Party and the Movement for Austria’s Future, won 29 percent of the vote in the latest Austrian general election, double their total in the 2006 election. Both parties share the same attitudes toward immigrants, especially Muslims, and the European Union: a mixture of fear and loathing. Since the two …
NEW YORK: Why do Europeans adore America’s president-elect, Barack Obama? Stupid question, you might say. He is young, handsome, smart, inspiring, educated, cosmopolitan, and above all, he promises a radical change from the most unpopular American administration in history. Compare that to his rival John McCain, who talked about change, but to most Europeans represented …
NEW YORK: Seventy years ago this month in Munich, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, signed a document that allowed Germany to grab a large chunk of Czechoslovakia. The so-called “Munich Agreement would come to be seen as an abject betrayal of what Chamberlain termed “a far away country of which we know little. But …
The late Arthur Koestler, born in Budapest, resident of many countries, and writer in several languages, once said that there is nationalism, and there is football nationalism. The feelings inspired by the latter are by far the stronger. Koestler himself, a proud and loyal British citizen, remained a lifelong Hungarian soccer nationalist. It is hard …
Why are French, British, and American warships, but not Chinese or Malaysian warships, sitting near the Burmese coast loaded with food and other necessities for the victims of Cyclone Nargis? Why has the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) been so slow and weak in its response to a natural calamity that ravaged one …
Beppo Grillo is one of Italy’s most famous comics. He is also one of Italy’s most influential political commentators. His blog attracts 160,000 hits daily, and if he could run for prime minister (he can’t, because of a criminal record), more than half of Italy’s voters, according to a poll last year, would have considered …
Are the Tibetans doomed to go the way of the American Indians? Will they be reduced to nothing more than a tourist attraction, peddling cheap mementos of what a once-great culture? That sad fate is looking more and more likely, and the Olympic year already has been soured by the Chinese government’s efforts to suppress …
Ian Buruma s most recent book is Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. He is a professor of democracy, human rights and journalism at Bard College. NEW YORK – North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is one of the world’s most oppressive, …
When “tolerance becomes a term of abuse in a place like the Netherlands, you know that something has gone seriously wrong. The Dutch always took pride in being the most tolerant people on earth. In less feverish times than these, no one could possibly have taken exception to Queen Beatrix’s speech last Christmas, when she …