5 Likes
Let’s just do some quiet imperialism while nobody’s watching:
11 Likes
8 Likes
Same as it ever was.
2 Likes
Must be nice for Mookie, just deciding to quit politics after decades of helping fan sectarian violence in his country.
2 Likes
7 Likes
8 Likes
Meanwhile in the East… Sabre rustling?
ETA video:
6 Likes
8 Likes
5 Likes
What’s the point he asked?
6 Likes
6 Likes
10 Likes
9 Likes
6 Likes
NATO “ally” or not, Erdogan is an authoritarian strongman dictator who needs an enemy to maintain power, and there is enough historical bad blood between Greece and Turkey to fuel it. Cannot say this surprises me.
9 Likes
I know… I think he sees himself as both the second coming of Ataturk and a champion of Sunni Islam, but YOU CAN’T BE BOTH, Recep!!!
9 Likes
A lot of those around these days, who are either in power or grasping at it. The industrialised nations have had a relatively good (though far from perfect) run since 1945, but now when I read stories like this I can only think of Orwell’s 1940 review of Mein Kampf, especially its depressing conclusion.
Also [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
9 Likes
8 Likes
