Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

Emmanuel Macron, a win for Western democracy Vive la démocratie française! Liberal democrats throughout Europe and around the world breathed a collective sigh of relief this past weekend after French voters overwhelmingly chose against the far-right, anti-European Union project of extreme right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen. But while initial numbers demonstrated her opponent, Emmanuel Macron, to have won a decisive landslide victory, deeper analysis leaves room for grave concern about where the tides of French democracy will go from here and about the trends among French voters that may well reflect those emerging in the rest of Europe and, indeed, the West as well. First of all, it’s important to note not only who voted for Macron and Le Pen, but also who didn’t.  About nine percent of those who voted in Sunday’s presidential election cast either blank or spoiled ballots. For the most part, these were probably not erroneous votes, but purposely adulterated or uncompl...

Hitler said what beleaguered Germans wanted to hear. Ever since World War II, people in the Western world have been asking rhetorically how a nation of the education and cultural excellence of Germany could have believed in and rallied around such a sinister, bigoted, megalomaniacal and xenophobic leader as Adolf Hitler. Perhaps there is no single, clear-cut response to that question. But part of the answer is that such an autocratic, über -nationalist leader,  whose stilted them-and-us world vision led to the most tragic global conflict in the history of the human race, was a product of his era, a supremely-driven opportunist who saw clearly how to take advantage of the widespread sense of discontent, disenfranchisement, humiliation and despair bred in his nation as of the end of World War I, in order to build a witheringly powerful and highly militarized movement “to make Germany great again.” Hitler’s so-called Nazi movement evolved by challenging the democratic syste...