Frail men in their late nineties gazed into the Normandy sky at what may have been. A grateful president saluted them with the respect that underscores the grandeur of their courage. Fifteen thousand people listened to the wise words of a world leader who is too young to have known the calamities of war and […]
European History
Auschwitz – Des Gens Ordinaires, Des Vies Extraordinaires
Un sentiment étrange, ma première visite en Pologne. C’est le pays de mon père, mais une terre où il a perdu sa famille et ses racines. Mon père a quitté la Pologne au début des années 30, sentant le danger provenant de l’Allemagne et, voulant faire des études de médecine, a décidé que la France […]
Auschwitz – Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives
No one wanted to know. No one wanted to listen to what I had to say. But I made a commitment that people don’t want to hear but I’m going to make sure that they will. Not in the history of mankind has there been industrial killing on this scale. If something happened once, there […]
The Living Dead (1): Victor Hugo – “The Last Day Of A Condemned Man”
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Even the best and worst days of your life have one thing in common: they are 24-hours-long. – Anthony Graves (prisoner, death row) [/perfectpullquote] Anthony Charles Graves (born August 29, 1965) is the 138th exonerated death row inmate in America. With no record of violence, he was arrested at 26 […]
Guy Verhofstadt – Lost In The Mist Over Antwerp
In his latest rant, Guy Verhofstadt – my favourite federalist Euroslicker – has, once again, added to the market value of the F-word, F for federalism. On the French crisis, he writes, What started as a decent, middle-class protest against a new tax on diesel fuel has been hijacked by professional thugs and extremists railing against migrants, […]
May 1968 – I Love Paris In The Springtime
It may not have escaped your notice that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the riots that took Paris by the scruff of the neck. The widespread violence, of May 1968, resulted in… well not much, apart from transforming Parisian little brats, dependent on their parents’ money into… liberated Parisian little brats, dependent on […]
Brexit Musings (12) – “Fool Britannia”
I thought that I could peacefully finish the day, away from Brexit and Facebook, when I accidentally came across the following tweet from a leader of a Western democracy whose shoulders are probably hurting from the weight of responsibility that they carry. The tweet is so full of self-contemplation, disregard for others (bordering on contempt), […]
Tolerance In The Attic
If ever a ranking of ordinary-looking houses that possess a universal value were made, the building situated at 38 Oudezijds Voorburgwal, in the centre of Amsterdam, would probably be near the top of the list. Whereas the Anne Frank House, situated on the nearby Prinsengracht, symbolises all that is bad about human nature, this house epitomises […]
Charles de Gaulle: Why the EU and UK Will Never Understand Each Other
Divorce can be a messy and expensive business. In the same way that people don’t get married with the intention of filing a divorce, I’m convinced that the UK didn’t initially join the EU (or European Economic Community, as it then was), in order to cause chaos and leave it. However, at least one notable […]