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...

In 2012, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the European Union what is, perhaps, its most coveted honor: the Nobel Peace Prize. The committee’s choice drew some scathing attacks from critics within the EU itself. Mostly from those with axes to grind, politicians whose constituencies had been affected by the worst financial/economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the usual harbingers of doom who are always predicting the disintegration and demise of that multinational compact. But seen within the context of the seven decades of the post-war era, it seems at least disingenuous to express disdain, let alone condemnation, for the Nobel Committee’s pick, since the EU’s role in maintaining peace in Europe following two devastating world wars simply cannot be overstated. The EU won the Nobel for what it has undeniably provided: “the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.” Even more importantly, it won the world’s top peace prize...

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...

It’s fairly easy to underestimate the gratingly flamboyant US presidential candidate Donald Trump. “The Donald”, as his apologists have dubbed him, is, after all, a perennial poser with a bad comb-over, a kind of cardboard cut-out of the ogre boss man, a comic-book ugly American who holds diversity in utmost contempt and answers the truth with lies, personal insults, unsubstantiated hearsay and vulgar innuendo. As a presidential hopeful, he is a candidate who substitutes megalomaniacal fantasies for concrete projects and blatant prejudice and jingoism for a policy platform. Seldom has a presidential candidate been more often referred to as “a clown”. Among reasonable people it is common to hear the opinion that Trump is “a buffoon”, a “flash in the pan”, “a joke”, and that he will never seriously be the 2016 Republican candidate for president of the United States. Nor, they say, will he ever have the wherewithal to win as an independent. “Nobody will even remember he was running,”...